Unto the Sons (60 page)

The explosions, which had been heard forty miles from the factory,
and which had destroyed hundreds of doors and windows, roofs and telegraph poles within a one-mile radius of the target area, had killed or wounded more than six hundred people.

Although the Allied commanders were not yet aware of it, the destruction of the munitions factory, early on that Saturday afternoon, March 14, was the opening salvo of the Kaiser’s big spring offensive aimed at winning the war during the late summer of 1918.

Now equipped with long-range guns that could fire projectiles more than seventy miles, the Germans pounded Paris at will; and a massive German breakthrough northeast of Paris later in March forced the Allies to transfer troops from all parts of the country to block the roads, rail lines, and river crossings leading toward the French capital. No longer could the United States’ commander in chief in France, General Pershing, insist in good conscience that his divisions fight as a unit only under American supervision. As thousands of newly arrived Americans began their training in France, thousands of combat-ready Americans were released by Pershing to be used as Marshal Foch saw fit. Soon Americans were serving under British generals in Picardy and Flanders, and under French generals along the Marne River near Paris, and seventy miles northeast near Reims, and farther east in the Argonne Forest and at Verdun, where Antonio was stationed.

During this time at Verdun, Antonio became acquainted with several Americans, one of them a French-speaking infantry captain from Niagara Falls, New York, who, after touring the elaborate underground retreat of the French colonel, hailed it as a
“bon secteur.” But he didn’t stay long
, Antonio wrote in his diary in early May 1918.
He and the U.S. Second Division were pulled out of Verdun one night and rushed toward Gisors, thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. The Germans are expected to attack there very soon. Every day we hear rumors of a new German attack
.

By mid-June, Antonio himself was transferred out of Verdun, temporarily relieved from his headquarters role as an interpreter and reassigned once more to an Italian fighting unit linked to the French Fifth Army.
Ever since I went on that courier mission with Graziani, I suspected that my pleasant job as an interpreter would soon come to an end, Antonio wrote. Whenever I think things are going well I know bad things are ahead of me. Graziani was sent out with an infantry battalion two days after he’d delivered that little parcel to General Albricci’s adjutant. Then a week later General Albricci and his entire staff left here for Reims to be under the French command of Gouraud. That was a month ago. Lots of other Italian officers and men were shifted recently near Épernay. Lots of shifting going on. Convoys of trucks packed with troops leave Verdun and head east, toward Paris, or they veer off into the Argonne Forest, where I’m headed
.…

A month later he wrote:
I’m still in the forest, and it gets hotter by the hour. My unit is an infantry brigade in zone 115 assigned to road-building jobs at night, and fortifying the defenses during the day. The Germans are to the north and east of us, blasting the roads that our convoys use, and every night we’re out there patching things up in the moonlight. Yesterday our trucks brought in a few thousand American infantrymen, and the hot July weather doesn’t agree with them—they’re still outfitted in heavy woolen uniforms with choker collars, and as they march past us we can see them sweating right through the heavy material. They wave at us but few of them smile. They must envy the lighter uniforms we and the French wear. They probably didn’t think they’d be called into action until the winter
.…

More than a million Americans were serving in France by midsummer of 1918, and their battered allies were soon resuscitated by the transfusion of fresh blood; indeed, before the end of July—partly because of the errors of the German high command, and partly because of the American presence—there was a definite shift in the momentum of the war. The serious mistake made by the German commanders was in procrastinating after their spring breakthrough, and then pushing ahead in places that overextended their fighting forces beyond their supply and counterdefensive capabilities. Meanwhile the Allies—the French, British, Italian, Belgians, Canadians, Australians, and others—began to fight with more vigor and more conviction that they could win. This uplift in morale did not go unnoticed by the German officers in the field, but it was perhaps articulated best by the German chancellor, Count Georg von Hertling, who noted after the armistice: “At the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced, I confess, that [by] the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals.… We expected grave events in Paris for the end of July. That was on the 15th [of July]. On the 18th, even the most optimistic among us understood that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”

During these days, Marshal Foch changed to an offensive strategy. At last he had enough manpower to act more aggressively, and he also benefitted from the deterioration of German morale. In early July a number of German POWs who had been captured very recently, and who were very weary of the long war and wanted it to end at any cost, revealed the location where, on July 15, at precisely twelve ten a.m., more than sixteen hundred German batteries would attack French troops in the Champagne region east of Paris. As a result, the French were able to key in on the
enemy stations and obliterate them before the Germans could begin their bombardments; the French shelled German gunners, munitions supplies, communications systems, and the German storm troopers standing ready for the scheduled dawn raid.

In addition to the declining German spirit, it was apparent to the Allies that the prisoners they were now taking were much younger than those captured in previous months; the German army—whose years of aggression on two fronts had killed off a high percentage of its most committed soldiers—was now forced to fill its ranks with servicemen who were unwilling or unworthy to serve its objectives. And before summer’s end in 1918, the Allies had won back nearly all the land they had lost in the spring.

Most German units were now outnumbered, outgunned, and often adrift in fields and forests searching for food and shelter while being pursued on all sides by men of hostile nations. A Moroccan division, flanked by American regiments, attacked the Germans south of Reims. A Scottish division joined American and French forces east of Paris to help thwart a last-ditch German attempt at counterattacking along the southern bank of the Marne. And Italian units from Verdun who had been shifted in late summer from the Argonne to the Marne also fought effectively against the Germans. Antonio was among the Italians dispatched here, and his assignment—to help coordinate the delivery of munitions to rows of machine-gunners positioned along the river—afforded him a view of enemy transport boats, each carrying twenty soldiers, being riddled and capsized. The German soldiers who survived the flying bullets swam through the water, along with several horses that had jumped from punctured pontoon bridges now sinking under the weight of German motor vehicles and other equipment. With the German opposition nullified, the Allies continued their drive to the northeast, led by advanced guards of Americans who crossed the Marne on footbridges kept afloat by large empty gasoline tins.

The journey from the Marne across France toward the German border would be costly for the Allies—the United States alone would suffer forty thousand fatalities; but the autumn shadows were much darker on the German side of the battle lines. Their renowned Hindenburg defense, near the French–Belgian border, was broken through by contingents of British, French, and Australians during the first week of October. The German chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, was soon dismissed by the Kaiser—while he himself contemplated abdication and escape to neutral Holland. Germany’s ally Bulgaria had collapsed at the end
of September 1918; and by the end of October, the Turks would also quit fighting in the Near East. Another ally, Austria, persisted throughout October in the war south of the Alps, but was fighting now against optimistic Allied divisions commanded by Italy’s General Diaz.

Diaz initiated a counteroffensive against the Austrians along the Piave River on October 24—the first anniversary of the Italian collapse at Caporetto. Now the situation was reversed—the Austrians were driven back inexorably and swiftly at the battle of Vittorio Veneto, and by November it was all over. This month would mark the collapse of the Austrian army and bring to a close the rulership of the ancient Hapsburg kingdom. A clause in the armistice terms gave the Allies the right to use the Austrian railroads, and as a consequence the Germans could now be invaded from Austrian soil.

General Diaz was a national hero, but the triumph was shared as well by foreign Allied soldiers who had accompanied Diaz’s men throughout the months of retreat that preceded the glorious retaliation. Among the many Americans who had identified themselves with the Italian struggle was an Italo-American airman who had participated in raids on Austrian installations and who would be awarded a Flying Cross by the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III. The airman had also served as an intermediary between Diaz in Italy and General Pershing in France during the final year of the war. He ended the war with the rank of major, and had been a freshman member of Congress before his enlistment, but he would be remembered best for his achievements later in life as the mayor of New York City—this was Fiorello H. La Guardia.

29.

W
orld War I ended on November 11, 1918, but Antonio Cristiani—and many thousands of other able-bodied Allied soldiers—were kept on active duty for an additional year or more to help remove the debris and the body parts that had been strewn throughout Europe during the four and a quarter years of turmoil that had brought death to ten million people.

In January and February 1919, Antonio worked with a Franco-Italian road gang clearing barbed wire and mines from the southern bank of the
Marne River; in March and April he served as a supply sergeant in a field hospital at Bar-le-Duc, near Verdun; and in May he was assigned to Paris as a French interpreter for an Italian colonel who was part of General Diaz’s military group attending the peace conference.

Although the commanders of the victorious armies were now taking a backseat to the statesmen representing Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and the other Allied nations, the officers were consulted regularly by their civilian leaders in an effort to clarify the many disputes that arose at the victors’ bargaining table. The shooting had stopped, but the Allied negotiators were now fighting among themselves over the spoils, and Italy was in the middle of the bickering. Italy’s prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, had walked out of the conference, and remained away for two weeks. He was displeased with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, who wanted to withhold from Italy (and yield to the newly created nation of Yugoslavia) much of the territory held by the Austrians before the war that the French and British had secretly promised Italy in 1915 as an incentive to join the Allies. The Italian nation, having sacrificed the lives of more than 530,000 soldiers, was in no mood for bargaining; and many of its citizens were indeed pleased when Gabriele D’Annunzio, aided by thousands of invading insurgents, had gained control of some of these lands by force.

With this issue unresolved, the peace conference confronted other disturbances—such as the arguments between the French and British prime ministers over Belgian claims to Dutch territory, and the ways and means of extracting Germany’s reparations payments. At one point in a debate, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, grabbed the collar of his French colleague, Georges Clemenceau, and demanded an apology for the allegedly false and insulting statements uttered by the Frenchman. President Wilson stepped between them to halt further physical abuse, but Clemenceau refused to apologize; he suggested instead that Lloyd George might seek satisfaction “with either pistols or swords.”

Antonio was pleased to be back in Paris that spring and summer as a linguistic aide to the Italian colonel, particularly because it allowed him the chance to begin negotiating for his own return to civilian life. When he arrived one day at Damien’s tailor shop, Antonio’s former employer embraced him warmly and offered him a large raise if he came back to work after his discharge; Monsieur Damien also made available at low rent an apartment on the sixth floor of the building he owned that housed his shop on the Rue Royale. After Damien’s suggestion that Antonio lease it immediately, even though he was required to remain billeted near the
site of the peace conference, Antonio borrowed Damien’s driver to help with the moving, and in a few hours he had cleared out of his old apartment in the Latin Quarter—where he had to collect only a single suitcase containing two suits and a tuxedo, and to gather up the musty blankets, pillows, and sheets from the bed that he had not made in five years.

His new apartment, although it consisted of only one room with an alcove, would be large enough to include Joseph, at least temporarily; and there were other apartments on the sixth floor that Antonio thought he might obtain in the future. One was currently used for storing the firm’s old business records and furniture. Another was leased to an Algerian woman who had not been seen in several months, even though her rent arrived regularly through the mail. Another apartment was occupied by the building’s superintendent, an elderly, heavy-drinking Basque.

Antonio’s apartment, in the front of the building, had two windows that offered a fine view of the skyline and the street below. The forthcoming Bastille Day parade would pass along this route; it would be a huge spectacle, a triumphant procession of Allied marching bands from every part of the world, and Antonio planned to watch it from one of his windows. But on the morning of July 14, when he got to the sixth floor and entered his apartment, he saw a dozen strangers leaning out of his windows. The superintendent, who was also in the room, smiled sheepishly. Then he reached into his pocket, walked over to Antonio, and handed him some francs, claiming that this was half the amount the people had paid for their viewing space. Antonio accepted the sum without thanks, and sat out the parade on the staircase.