■ A look at those who died in the final hours of World War I
For hundreds slain before peace set in on 11/11/1918, war’s futility now history
VRIGNE-MEUSE, France — Augustin Trebuchon is buried beneath a white lie.
His tiny plot is almost on the front line where the guns finally fell silent at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, after a four-year war that had already killed millions.
A simple white cross says: “Died for France on Nov. 10, 1918.”
Not so.
Like hundreds of others along the Western Front, Trebuchon was killed in combat on the morning of Nov. 11 — after the pre-dawn agreement between the Allies and Germany but before the armistice took effect six hours later.
His death at almost literally the eleventh hour only highlighted the folly of a war that had become ever more incomprehensible to many in nations drawn into the first global conflict.
Before Nov. 11, the war had killed 14 million people, including 9 million soldiers, sailors and airmen from 28 countries. Germany came close to a quick, early victory before the war settled into hellish trench fighting. One battle, like the Somme in France, could have up to 1 million casualties. The use of poison gas came to epitomize the ruthlessness of warfare that the world had never seen.
For the French, who lost up to 1.4 million troops, it was perhaps too poignant — or too shameful — to denote that Trebuchon had been killed on the last morning, just as victory finally prevailed.
“Indeed, on the tombs it said ‘Nov. 10, 1918,’ to somewhat ease the mourning of families,” said French military historian Nicolas Czubak.
There were many reasons why men kept falling until the call of the bugler at 11 a.m.: fear that the enemy would not abide by the armistice, a sheer hatred after four years of unprecedented slaughter, the ambition of commanders craving a last victory, bad communications, the inane joy of killing.
On the final morning of World War I, U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing was not eager to stop fighting. After all, if one nation had momentum after the first global war’s four years of unprecedented slaughter, it was the United States.
U.S. troops would push forward on several fronts in France until the moment the cease-fire took effect. With more time, the Americans might even have entered Germany soon after, establishing themselves as the world’s ascendant military power.
When Pvt. Jose De La Luz Saenz awoke along the front lines of the Meuse-Argonne offensive in northeastern France on Nov. 11, 1918, the pre-dawn instructions were not only about sealing the imminent ceasefire.
“The orders called for continuing the artillery fire with the same intensity until eleven in the morning,” Saenz noted in his published diary.
And despite the promise of the armistice, “the day seemed like all others because the artillery duel appeared to be continuing with even greater intensity,” he wrote.
In addition to military reasons, there was also a political point to be made, Czubak said.
“For the Americans, it really is to show that they have played as important a role in victory as the other armies,” he said.
After the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, its standing army of 127,500 became an armed force of 2 million within 11⁄2 years.
On Nov. 11, 1918, allies like Britain and France were exhausted, Germany was as good as defeated and Pershing had another 2 million troops ready to come over.
“If war had continued into 1919, the No. 1 army in the world fighting at the front would have been the U.S. Army — without a doubt,” Czubak said. “It is also why he wanted to continue even after Nov. 11.”
Near the place where Saenz heard bombshells explode a century ago now stands the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery at the French town of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. American soldiers who died on that armistice day — 100 of them — are buried there along with 14,146 fellow U.S. troops. The cemetery holds the largest number of U.S. military dead in Europe.
By the time World War I ended, Americans had been in enough battles that they were interred in a half-dozen cemeteries dotted across northern France. In a war where the dead would be counted in millions — 1.4 million for France, 1.1 million for British imperial forces — the United States had 126,000 dead to mourn.
If the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery symbolizes America’s coming-of-age in the war, the AisneMarne cemetery at the Belleau Wood battleground marks its beginning.
When the war started in 1914,
most Americans considered it “Europe’s war.”
A hit song in 1915 was titled “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier” and President Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 with the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.”
German belligerence soon had Americans rethinking the wisdom of isolation, said Bruce Malone, a historian and superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.
“Unrestricted warfare, sinking ships with Americans on them or American ships” and the infamous Zimmermann telegram in which Germany promised to give Mexico some American territory if it kept the U.S. engaged shifted the momentum, he said.
“Even President Wilson, who did not want to be in the war, had no choice,” Malone said.
On April 6, 1917, the U.S. declared war, much to the relief of its European allies.
“It wasn’t going well in Europe at the time, and the Germans were actually gaining some momentum. The Allies were essentially running out of men to fight the war,” Malone said.
There was one problem though, he added.
“We join the war. We’ve made promises, but we don’t have an army. Certainly not of the European standard,” he said.
Speed was of the essence. Russia left the war in March 1918 and Germany had sent its troops to the Western front for a final full onslaught. Just in time, U.S. soldiers started arriving en masse.
Pershing, disregarding British and French pleas to use U.S. troops to beef up depleted lines under British and French command, always wanted his men to fight as an independent American force.
A major breakthrough came at Belleau Wood, when U.S. forces stopped a German advance on Paris against heavy odds. It proved their mettle to the enemy and allies alike.
The Americans kept building on their newly acknowledged grit through the end of the war. Saenz was there to record it.
“The bloody fighting and our victory was the decisive blow that finished the Teutonic pride and dispelled forever the Germans’ false dream of global conquest,” he wrote after a Nov. 2 victory.
Yet nine days later, villages were still being taken, attacks were still being thwarted with heavy losses and rivers were still being crossed under enemy fire. Questions remain whether the gains were worth all the human losses.
Historian Joseph Persico estimated the total dead, wounded and missing on all sides on the final day was 10,900.
Pershing even had to explain to Congress the high number of lastday losses.
With two minutes to go, Canadian Pvt. George Lawrence Price, 25, was killed in Belgium by a German sniper.
About 150 miles away in France, a 23-year-old American, Henry Gunther, was killed by German machinegun fire one minute before the armistice.
Trebuchon, 40, also was shot minutes before the cease-fire. He was running to tell his comrades where and when they would have a meal after the armistice.
All three are considered their nations’ last men to fall in combat.
Anti-German sentiment ran high after the U.S. declared war in April 1917, and Gunther and his family in Baltimore were subjected to the kind of prejudice and suspicion that many of German descent faced at the time.
“It was not a good time to be German in the United States,” said historian Alec Bennett.
Gunther had little choice when he got drafted. He was given the rank of sergeant, but he later was demoted when he wrote a letter home critical of the conditions in the war.
Soon after, he was thrown into the biggest U.S. battle of the war, the Meuse-Argonne offensive in northeastern France.
There were reports he was still brooding over his demotion right on Nov. 11. When he emerged from a thick fog in the valley around Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, he and his comrades faced a German machine gun nest on the hillside.
Indications are the Germans fired one salvo over his head as a warning, knowing the war was almost over. But he still charged.
“His time of death was 10:59 a.m., which is just so haunting,” Bennett said. Gunther was recognized by Pershing as the last American to die on the battlefield.
Questions remain whether it was a suicide run, an attempt at redemption or an act of devotion.
“Gunther’s act is seen as almost a symbol of the futility of the larger war,” Bennett said.
But there was one more cruel twist for his family: They were unaware he had been killed.
Upon his expected return “they went to the train station to meet Henry — not there!” Malone said.
But there was no mystery surrounding the death of Price, the Canadian. It was an utterly senseless loss of life.
He was a farm laborer in Saskatchewan when the swirl of history plucked him off the land in October 1917 as the Allies sought ever more manpower for the Western Front.
The summer after he was drafted, he was part of the surge of victories that seized villages and cities right up to Nov. 11. By that time, Canadians were retaking Mons in southern Belgium, where soldiers from the British Commonwealth had their very first battle with the Germans in August 1914.
It was especially sweet for the Commonwealth commanders to retake the city, bringing the war full circle where they lost their first soldier, English Pvt. John Parr, on Aug. 21, 1914.
Price decided to check out homes along the canals while civilians in the center of Mons had already broken out the wine and whiskey they had hidden for years from the Germans to celebrate with the Canadians.
Suddenly, a shot rang out and Price collapsed.
“It really was one man, here and there, who was driven by vengeance, by a need to kill one last time,” said Belgian historian Corentin Rousman.
The final minutes counted not just for the casualties but also for the killers.
“There are rules in war,” Rousman said. “There is always the possibility to kill two minutes before a cease-fire. Two minutes after, the German would have had to stand before a judge. That’s the difference.”
At the St. Symphorien cemetery just outside Mons, Price, the last Commonwealth soldier killed in the war, lies a stone’s throw from Parr, the first.
“He is not forgotten,” Rousman said of Price. “It’s a soldier whose tomb is often draped in flowers.”
Trebuchon’s grave stands out because of the date, underscoring the random fortunes of war.
He was a shepherd from France’s Massif Central and could have avoided the war as a family breadwinner at age 36.
“But he was part of this great patriotic momentum,” said JeanChristophe Chanot, the mayor of Vrigne-Meuse, where he died.
The date on his grave — Nov. 10, 1918 — remains controversial, even if it was meant to soothe a family’s sorrow.
“It was a lie, without a question,” Czubak said.