Let's Write about World War One: Cantigny after the battle

Hello From a French Village Recalls the U.S. as a Staunch Ally: An Echo history report published in the New York Times by Graham Bowley.

A faded American flag with 48 stars thought to have been left behind in Cantigny after the battle.Credit...Mathieu Richer Mamousse for The New York Times

French visitors are coming to Washington with an old U.S. battle flag and a plan to rekindle memories of the American soldiers who rescued their region during World War I. (Merci❗ )

"Louis Teyssedou, a history teacher from Amiens, half an hour’s drive from Cantigny, :as hatched a plan to try to keep the communal memory alive. He has led his high school students through a study of the battle, and this month he is leading a group of them to Washington, D.C., to honor its significance."

Hello (Bonjour❗) From a French Village That Recalls the U.S. as a Staunch Ally:  French visitors from France are coming to Washington with an old U.S. battle flag and a plan to rekindle memories of the American soldiers who rescued their region during World War I. More than a century after the fighting stopped, the U.S. Army’s First Division has not fully faded from memory in Cantigny, the tiny hilltop village in northern France that it helped to save in World War I. In the woods, there is the trench that was once the unit’s muddy forward position. In a cellar, graffiti scrawled on stone by young, green doughboys, among the first Americans to see action in that war. In patches of farmland, the live shells that for years have turned up during plowing. And in an otherwise unremarkable back room, grenades and shell casings found in the fields, along with a faded flag with 48 stars, thought left behind as the unit marched east to fight more.

In the history books, the battle at Cantigny in May 1918, is recalled as a crisis point in the war. The Allied forces, replenished by the arrival of newly minted American soldiers, beat back a spring offensive by German units looking to aim their booming guns at Paris.

In the village, the remembrances have always been more personal: More than 300 Americans died there. Cantigny, population about 110, has but a single church but it has four monuments, a few hundred yards apart, that honor the men who fought alongside the French under Gen. John J. Pershing. Maj. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was among them. Pershing’s French military liaison was a descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who had been America’s military patron.

The American Monument in Cantigny, France, commemorates a battle there in 1918 when American forces fought their first major offensive in World War I.Credit...Mathieu Richer Mamousse for The New York Times

But Cantigny, like many places, has changed. The older villagers whose grandparents may have fought in the war are fewer. Many of the simple redbrick homes are still farms, though some newer residents are commuters who work in outlying towns. The young are consumed by their own evolving lives.
“Enthusiasts and history buffs have a sense of pride and a duty to remember and revive this entire military past,” said Gilles Levert, 73, a retired factory worker. “For the vast majority of others, parents don’t feel concerned. How can you expect their children to be able to take ownership of the history of their region?”
Louis Teyssedou, a history teacher from Amiens, half an hour’s drive from Cantigny, has hatched a plan to try to keep the communal memory alive. 

He has led his high school students through a study of the battle, and this month he is leading a group of them to Washington, D.C., to honor its significance.

They will be carrying the old battle flag and a hope to rekindle the warmth of Franco-American relations that stretches back to 1781, when the United States and France came together at Yorktown, brothers in war.

The group has a full schedule that includes efforts to meet descendants of those who fought at Cantigny and a plan to lay a wreath and unfurl the flag at Pershing’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It’s a project to show how Americans helped France,” Mr. Teyssedou said.

Although the trip was planned long before the American elections, Mr. Teyssedou said he recognized that he arrives in Washington at a time when U.S. relations with Europe are severely strained. So strained that for some Europeans the memories of American heroism in past conflicts have begun to curdle.

“Coming in this context justifies … coming,” he wrote in an email, noting that his is not a diplomatic mission but an educational one. Still, he said, the historic archives that the students have been working in are “transmitters of memory.”

“They remind us,” he said, “that our two countries share a shared history.”

World War I was nearly three years old when President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917, that the United States would join the fighting. The first American units were withdrawn from the Mexican border and shipped off from Hoboken, N.J., for Europe.

Their arrival bolstered Allied morale, and the U.S. troops, aware of the symbolism, paraded through Paris to the grave of Lafayette, who 150 years earlier had rallied France to the American cause. Col. Charles E. Stanton, a senior officer, stood before the tomb to announce that the United States honors its debts.

“Lafayette,” he declared, “we are here!”

From there it was on to war. At the time, Cantigny had been taken by the Germans, the foremost tip of an offensive that threatened to drive a wedge between British and French forces. From the elevated ground, German commanders could overlook the Allied lines and launch a devastating thrust deeper into France.

The military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, depicted the circumstances for readers at the time.

“On the one hand,” the dispatch read, “was a German army on the Western Front, reinforced to nearly twice its former proportions by the collapse of Russia, armed and trained to the last degree of perfection and animated by a hope of success, which, because it was based upon such almost immeasurable strength, amounted to conviction.”

“On the other hand,” it continued, “were the armies of France and England, doggedly determined still, but sorely-tried through nearly four years of ceaseless battle and cruelly battered by the gigantic plunges of the enemy in his spring offensive.” “What factor,” it asked, “could furnish to one side or the other the balance of weight which might turn the scale?”

The answer would be the charge of 2,000 American soldiers who initially stormed from their trenches at 6:45 a.m. on May 28, 1918, behind a barrage of artillery fire laid down by French and American guns. They were accompanied by 12 French Schneider tanks, French flamethrowers and French observation balloons and air support.
The combined forces captured Cantigny within an hour and pushed past it into fields to the east. For three days, they then held off German counterattacks.

Many of the American dead were buried on the battlefield, though they were later exhumed and moved to the Somme American Cemetery in Bony. Cantigny was left a lifeless, smoking ruin.

Much of the fighting was at night and combat tactics had evolved so that the artillery fire moved along with the infantry, the guns firing ahead of the troops as they advanced, according to Mike MacDonald, president of the 28th Infantry Regiment Association.

“It was a horrific battle,” he said. For all its horror, the battle made clear to skeptical Allied commanders that the untried American forces were dependable.

“It was just taking a little village on top of a hill, but it was a big statement that the American expeditionary forces could fight,” said Matthew J. Davenport, author of a book about Cantigny, “First Over There.”

Soldiers from the 28th Infantry Regiment going over the top of trenches during the Battle of Cantigny on May 28, 1918.Credit...Associated Press

“Bravo the young Americans!” crowed The London Evening News. “It was clean-cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen’s short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism.”

Experts say the battle helped establish modern American military doctrine with its focus on combining and synchronizing the various elements of combat power — tanks, infantry, engineers, artillery and air support. After Cantigny, the number of American soldiers grew from about 300,000 at the time of the U.S. entry into the war to 4.5 million by the end, 2.5 million of them stationed in France.
For historians, the battle was also significant because of the remarkable constellation of personalities that were involved or associated with it.

Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean Hugo, an artist, acted as a translator for the Americans and sketched the ruins of the battlefield. A cousin of Willa Cather died leading American troops,.there, his death becoming a central part of her novel “One of Ours,” which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Many men, like Roosevelt, gained experience at Cantigny that would be called upon decades later in the next world war. Capt. Clarence R. Huebner, who commanded a battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment, led the First Infantry Division a quarter-century later at Omaha Beach. The officer who planned the Cantigny attack, Lt. Col. George C. Marshall, then 37, would become the U.S. Army chief of staff in World War II and later Secretary of Defense and State.

“This was the future leadership of the American army learning how to fight the German army,” Mr. Davenport said.

In his memoir, Marshall wrote in freighted terms about the importance of Cantigny to him and to the global democratic values at stake.

“Quitting the soil of Europe to escape oppression and the loss of personal liberties, the early settlers in America laid the foundations of a government based on equality, personal liberty, and justice,” he wrote. “Three hundred years later their descendants returned to Europe and on May 28, 1918, launched their first attack on the remaining force of autocracy to secure the same principles for the peoples of the Old World.”

In the century since the battle, the landing at Normandy and the liberation of Paris in 1944 have become more powerful reminders of the bonds between the Americans and the French. But in Cantigny there are always signs of the earlier struggle — not just the monuments, but street names like Rue de la 1ère Division Usa and the uniform buttons, rifle cleaners, belt buckles and horse buckles found in the wheat fields. 

The walls in the cellar of a farmhouse where American soldiers recuperated from their wounds still bear their idle inscriptions: “U S A,” “U.S. Forever.”