If you want to find the spot where World War I became a truly somber affair for millions of Americans, you’re going to need some help. It lies about 90 miles northeast of Paris, somewhere between Chamery and Coulonges-Cohan, two farming villages. Just where, exactly, and how best to get there is a matter of dispute; but if you ask enough people in Chamery, eventually one will decide it’s easier to just show you.
He’ll walk you up an overgrown tractor path for about 10 minutes; at the top of the ridge, take a sharp left, walk another two or three minutes on an even more overgrown path, and you’ll see, on your left, a clearing maybe 80 yards long and 20 wide. At the far end you’ll spot a stone marker surrounded by a crimson bush. The inscription is simple:
1st LT QUENTIN ROOSEVELT
95th SQ 1st PURSUIT GP
AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
JULY 14 1918
Theodore Roosevelt, who left the White House in 1909, tried in vain to get its current occupant, Woodrow Wilson, to enter the war against Germany in 1914, and 1915, and 1916; when America did enter the fray, in 1917, Roosevelt, now 58 years old, tried to get Wilson to commission him an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces and send him to France. Wilson declined, and T.R. had to remain at home on Long Island. Five of his children, though, did make it Over There: Theodore Jr., Kermit and Archie served in the infantry. Ethel was a nurse. And Quentin, the baby and everyone’s favorite, dropped out of Harvard and became a flier. His poor eyesight should have disqualified him, but he was T.R.'s son; no one was going to tell him no. On Bastille Day 1918 a German flier used Quentin’s myopia against him, putting two bullets in his head. He was dead before his plane hit the ground. America was stunned; Quentin, whose White House shenanigans often made the papers, had been their little boy, too.
The Germans, as was customary at the time, buried Quentin with full honors at the crash site. His body was removed to a cemetery after the armistice, but the family later built a large memorial fountain nearby, in the center of Chamery. Its inscription, “Those Are Fit To Live Who Are Not Afraid To Die,” is a quote from Quentin’s father, who was long gone by the time it was chiseled; he’d died less than six months after Quentin. The family blamed a broken heart.
Everyone in this area knows the name Quentin Roosevelt; sometimes it can seem everyone in France does. There are legends of places he stopped to eat or rest, or merely passed through. A banged-up engine and propeller that greets all visitors to Château-Thierry’s city hall is said to be from his plane, and though people who work there readily admit that isn’t true, you can see why they’d wish it were. To many French, he symbolizes America’s great sacrifice on their behalf. And though his death had little if any bearing on the outcome of the war, it occurred almost precisely at the point many historians now regard as the conflict’s great watershed, a summer of terrible battles in which the American Expeditionary Forces played a critical role.
Less than 24 hours after Quentin Roosevelt was killed, the Germans launched a major offensive in the area, 40 divisions attacking with a ferocity unusual even for that war. West of Reims, for the first time since 1914, they crossed the Marne everywhere — everywhere, that is, except the western end of the line, in Château-Thierry, where they were stopped at the river’s edge by the American Third Division, which has been known ever since as the Rock of the Marne. Held up at the end of the line, the offensive stalled; it would prove to be the Germans’ last one of the war. Three days later, the French and Americans launched a counteroffensive that would mark the beginning of the end for the Imperial German Army.
No one, though, recognized as much at the time; they just knew they were in the midst of terrible fighting day after day. Thousands of doughboys would die in this area that summer, including the poet Joyce Kilmer, who eschewed an officer’s commission because he believed enlisted men saw more of the “real” war. He saw enough to inspire several poems, and had even contracted to write a memoir of his service before a German sniper shot him in the head on July 30, 1918, not far from where he is now buried, along with 6,011 others, in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles.
Like the other large American World War I cemeteries in France, Oise-Aisne is beautiful and majestic and, considering why it was necessary, surprisingly tranquil. And in that regard, it is no different from the surrounding area, where so many died. Other regions of France, like Lorraine, are scarred to this day with the war’s residue; but the fighting there lasted four years. Here it blazed through previously quiet terrain in the summer of 1918, then moved east to Lorraine, where the last act of the war dramatically played out that fall. Not enough time, perhaps, for the land to sustain the kind of permanent wounds you’ll find elsewhere. The most prominent mementos of the fighting here are the cemetery and the little monuments scattered about the countryside. The only spot in this area where you can still see trenches and shell holes is a stretch of forest outside Château-Thierry called Belleau Wood.
In a way, what one division of American soldiers and marines did there in June of 1918 is responsible for the carnage that took place to the east throughout the summer and fall that followed: Had they not attacked and taken those woods from the Germans, many historians believe, Germany would have won the war that month.
Plenty of others believe it, too. “If the Americans don’t stop the Germans at Belleau Wood, the Germans take Paris — the war is finished,” Jacques Krabal told me. Mr. Krabal is the mayor of Château-Thierry; every day, as he walks about the city, he can see, looming over it from the heights above town, the massive American monument built a decade later to commemorate Belleau Wood and the battles that followed it that summer. Walk into a kebab shop or a bakery in town and, if it’s discovered you’re American, be prepared for the proprietor or a patron to tell you all about it — not because they think you might want to visit it, but because they want you to know that they have. Like the mayor, they don’t take 1918’s victory for granted; like him, they believe it hinged on what the United States Second Division did at Belleau Wood.
In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched a series of offensives in France designed to win the war before too many more American troops could get there. The first two were exceedingly successful; the third was, too, until a fledgling American force pushed back at Château-Thierry. The Germans instead took up positions behind formidable defenses in nearby Belleau Wood — only about 40 miles from Paris, the closest they’d gotten since 1914. The French were panicked: As their roads clogged with terrified refugees, Allied commanders confided to one another that the war was lost, and drew up plans to abandon the French capital. Their only hope was to drive the Germans out of Belleau Wood somehow, but French commanders dreaded the prospect of such an assault. So they asked General John J. Pershing to do it.
Some historians say Pershing didn’t really understand what he was getting his troops into when he agreed to send the Second Division in that if he had he never would have done so. As they marched up toward the forest, they encountered ragged French soldiers running the other way, imploring them to retreat. “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” a marine captain named Lloyd Williams famously responded.
Instead, on the morning of June 6, 1918, they went on the attack, crossing an open wheat field into withering German machine gun fire. “They started us in waves toward the Belleau Woods,” Private Eugene Lee of the Fifth Marine Regiment — the battle’s last living survivor — told me 85 years later. (Mr. Lee died in 2004 at the age of 105.) “In four waves … you’d go so far, and you’d keep firing along there into the woods until the next wave come along … and then you’d lie down, and the next wave would come in back of them, jump each one until they got to the edge of the woods. And then they got in the woods, fighting.”
A great many of them never got past that wheat field, though. It was the deadliest day the Marine Corps had seen since its formation in 1775.
And it was just the beginning. That forest would trade hands many times over the next three weeks, until finally, on June 26, a telegram to the American Expeditionary Forces headquarters reported: “Woods now US Marine Corps entirely.” But America’s first great victory in the war was a costly one. The Marines alone took more casualties in those three weeks than they had in the entirety of their existence. Private Lee was shot through the wrist on June 12; Captain Williams was killed that same day. There are 2,288 men buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, just behind the woods. Almost four times as many are buried in the much smaller German cemetery nearby. In the guest registers at both I found recent inscriptions from Americans who had come to see the graves of kin.
If you visit, there’s a good chance you’ll spot some Marines; one told me a pilgrimage is practically mandatory for any Marine who finds himself in France. Belleau Wood is tremendously important to the United States Marine Corps, but the French are truly wild about the place. Local collectors have been picking over the battlefield for decades, hunting for relics; some have turned their homes and barns into makeshift museums. It got so bad that at some point the French government banned the use of metal detectors for such a purpose. They also banned logging in Belleau Wood — not because the trees were deemed sacred, but because they were so full of bullets and shrapnel that cutting them would be dangerous for the lumberjacks.
And so Belleau Wood looks today much as it did in 1918, and presents visitors to this part of the country with their best opportunity to get a sense of what it was like during the war. It is filled with trenches, shell holes and fox holes, so many that no one ever bothered to put up signs pointing them out. The cemetery staff has in recent years blazed a walking trail through the forest and has printed a self-guided tour. It starts at a visitors’ area with a statue and lots of retired big guns, then moves into the woods. Trenches meander right alongside the path; it’s easy to envision it all — the shooting, the shelling, the hunkering and praying and dying. They all, Americans and Germans, knew what was at stake here, for the war and for themselves. They knew it because of what they’d heard, and seen, and what they’d witnessed at stop No. 5 on the trail: the wheat field.
It’s right there; you can walk right up to the edge of it. Actually, you can walk right on into it if you wish. If you go there alone, you will still be all alone; you will have that place to yourself, unless you believe in ghosts. Surely, they would linger here if anywhere, in this deceptively lovely spot that looks exactly the same as it did that morning 96 years ago, when the course of the greatest war the world had ever seen was determined by a charge of men on foot, the oldest maneuver there is.