San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Europe prepares to mark war’s end
PARIS — U.S. troops fighting in France in World War I found a landscape ravaged by trench warfare and chemical weapons, villages turned into military prisons and churches gutted by bombs and used as makeshift hospitals.
A century later, those same verdant fields, rebuilt churches and quaint villages greet U.S. tourists and other world travelers, showing barely a trace of what they endured.
The Americans arrived late in the war, in 1917, and gave crucial help to Britain, France and other allies fighting Germany.
The wartime gloom lifted briefly when U.S. troops marched in a Fourth of July parade in the summer of 1918, through a Paris whose historic buildings and cobblestone streets stand little changed 100 years later.
To the north and the east, allied troops were struggling to push back the front line, which had nearly reached the French capital.
Near Verdun, U.S. soldiers ran through the main street of Exermont trying to escape German fire, as a comrade-in-arms lay motionless nearby. Today, children ride a toy tractor past the same spot.
In a war that claimed some 14 million lives — 5 million civilians and 9 million soldiers, sailors and airmen from 28 countries over four years — and left 21 million wounded, the town church in nearby Neuvillyen-Argonne became a field hospital for U.S. troops.
Bombed out and full of rubble, it was still the sturdiest building in town. Patients lay on the floor in rows, exactly as the reconstructed pews now stand today.
Just a week before the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice that ended the war, hundreds of U.S. supply trucks rumbled through a muddy street in Beauclair. Today cars ride along its asphalt, past a monument to villagers lost in what’s known in France as the “Guerre du 14-18,” or “the War of 1914-1918.”
Every village here has such a monument, the names of the dead etched in memoriam.
U.S. military engineers crisscrossed northern France to rebuild bridges, roads and other essential infrastructure, some of which still stands.
Some details are gone, however. The well where German prisoners drew water in Pierrefitte-sur-Aire, watched over by a U.S. soldier, is now covered in pavement.
On the day of the armistice, U.S. soldiers celebrated victory with war-weary villagers in Stenay. Today, children run cheerfully up the church steps where the revelers stood.
Of the 2 million Americans who took part in World War I, 116,516 died and about 200,000 were injured.
Many of the dead rest at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. It is the largest U.S. cemetery in Europe to this day.