To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (1)

Greetings, Dr. Lengel.

I’m reading To Conquer Hell, your just-released book on the Meuse-Argonne, the World War I battle that proved to be the bloodiest in American history. And I should say that I’m very much enjoying it, although perhaps “enjoying” is not quite the right word. After all, you describe the battle as “an inferno of fire and blood” that, in the fall of 1918, killed more than 26,000 Doughboys. By way of comparison, Gettysburg resulted in only about 8,000 killed in action—and that’s when you combine Union and Confederate forces. D-Day cost the lives of a mere 3,581. Our popular imagination, of course, regularly inflates that last total. D-Day looms large, but the Meuse-Argonne? Not so much.

Why do you think that is? You write that since 1919, when former war correspondent Frederick Palmer “wrote a chatty patriotic book titled Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne),” only two books about the battle have been published. Two! In almost 90 years! “So far as the American public is concerned, the Meuse-Argonne might as well never have occurred,” you write, despite the battle being “the biggest logistical undertaking in the history of the U.S. Army, before or since.” (Again, my mind leaps automatically to D-Day, and I can’t help but wonder, “Really?”) So that’s a lot of forgetting we’ve done in the years since, but you don’t speculate as to why—or at least not at the beginning.

Of course, the First World War in general is not the most studied of conflicts among Americans—and yet it was so culturally significant. (I’m thinking of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which suggests that the conflict gave birth, in many respects, to our modern mindset.) In the course of your writing, did you worry about needing to overcome some kind of years-long silence on the subject? Did it affect how you approached your writing?

The title of your Virginia Festival of the Book panel is “Finding the Story in History,” and you do seem to approach this history in terms of story. (I have heard, by the way, that you’re a great storyteller.) Only a hundred pages in and I feel like I actually know folks like General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force. You begin the book by showing how all the steam was taken out of this very ambitious man’s career right before the war when a fire at the Presidio in San Francisco killed his wife and three of his children. The scene where he receives the news accidentally by phone has all the drama of a novel.

So does your description of Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, who commanded American flyers. You tell us he was “outgoing, independent, arrogant, intelligent, and hardworking” before memorably noting that he sported a walking cane “because he thought it made him look dapper.” Going into war, one suspects that this sort of arrogance may loom large.

Equally novelistic was your description of Colonel George C. Marshall, who would later lead the Army in World War II and the State Department after. Intimidated by his pre-battle logistical duties, he took a walk to calm himself down and ended up sitting with a French fisherman on the bank of a canal. “They did not exchange a word,” you write, “but after watching the fisherman for half an hour Marshall felt a little calmer.”

This is memorable stuff, but do you think it will be enough for Americans to want to remember the Meuse-Argonne again?

Brendan Wolfe

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro)

IMAGE: “A Dangerous Corner is Exermont, Oct. 7, 1918” from American Armies and Battlefields in Europe

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Comments

Enjoying reading this stuff. I have some pre-war Lionel trains including a commodore vanderbilt set