The bone-chilling fog still drifts between the clusters of woods and farm fields that 100 years ago were soaked with over a month of seemingly endless rain. To walk on these fields then was to go ankle- to knee-deep in a limey, greasy mud that got into everything. It never got quite cold enough to freeze the ground or the rain, which would have been blessed relief. It was, in the words of one who experienced it, a "pluperfect Hell."
It is now the location of the largest American burial ground outside of the United States, the Meuse-Argonne cemetery just outside the small village of Romagne sous Monfaucon in France. Originally, there were more than 26,000 Americans buried there. Reinterments back to the States, mostly in the 1920s, dropped the number down to under 15,000, but the effect of this serene, meticulously maintained place is stunning and somber for anyone who sees it. Even if Americans seem to have forgotten it, almost every day it is visited by young French students who research the names on the white crosses and stars and remember. It remains the source of wonder and awe to them that all of these men came all the way across the sea to fight for, and die for, French freedom. America's first African-American Medal of Honor recipient is buried there, as are several others.
In 1918, Romagne was ground zero, the central objective of an American attack through what were considered by both the German and the French to be an impenetrable, deep defensive sector, miles deep, between the Argonne Forest and the Meuse River. There was reason for the German focus on defense here: Just to the north, in Sedan, were critical railroad junctions that were essential to supplying the entire German front in France. Capture of Sedan would mean the collapse of the entire front. The French had spent four years trying to move back the Germans in this sector. In most places, what progress they had made could be measured in a few yards. Elsewhere, the gains were all German.
The Americans, under Gen. John J. Pershing, had a new, large, mostly very green army that had now been assigned this seemingly impossible task. The French and British, it seems, thought the Americans might keep the Germans occupied on this key flank while they pushed forward with their own offensives farther to the west.
What ensued was the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which remains to this day the largest battle ever fought by the American Army. Beginning on Sept. 26, 1918, and lasting 47 days, more than a million-and-a-half Americans succeeded where no one else expected them to under impossible conditions. At first, they all but stampeded through areas in a day or two that the French had been attacking without success for years. But the losses were galling, amplified by the inexperience of American commanders and inappropriate battlefield tactics. The Germans had targeted virtually every square yard of the battlefield, which meant no place, even miles from the very front lines, was safe. Field hospitals, kitchens and supply trains were regularly targeted by artillery using both explosive and gas shells.
The final and strongest point on the line, what the Germans called the Kriemhilde Stellung, ran in a trench line just south of Romagne and then through some very high, steep hills just to the west of the town. The highest crest of those hills had a name: Côte Dame Marie. Hundreds of feet above and overlooking the open plains around it, Côte Dame Marie and the Kriemhilde Stellung that it was part of contained a honeycomb of deep concrete bunkers and machine-gun nests with interlocking fields of fire that the Germans — who had developed considerable experience in such things during the war — considered to be absolutely impenetrable.
So intense was the fighting approaching the Kriemhilde Stellung, that at least one division, the 35th, a National Guard division out of Kansas and Missouri, fell apart and withdrew or, more accurately, "dissolved" from the assault. Replaced immediately, the Americans pressed forward to the base of the Côte Dame Marie. There, the 32nd Division, a veteran division originally made up of Wisconsin and Michigan units, was ordered to do the impossible: Assault and take the Côte Dame Marie. The idea was that the 32nd would keep the Germans occupied while the 42nd "Rainbow" Division and the Third Division would move to outflank the Germans.
However good that plan looked on paper, both the 42nd and the Third were stopped in their tracks. No one had bothered, however, to tell the doughboys of the 32nd that it wasn't really thought that they would be able to take the Côte Dame Marie. In what is still one of the great feats of American arms in history, the 32nd took both the Côte Dame Marie and the small village of Romagne next to it. The startled and exhausted Germans were pushed back into a 4-mile salient behind the Côte Dame Marie where, in near desperation a few short days later, they would launch the single-largest gas attack on an American position in the entire war in an attempt to deny to the Americans any further advances in the sector.
