Prologue
“Tears on Their Faces”1
I.
When Katharine Lee Bates—poet of “America the Beautiful,” world traveler, social activist, foreign correspondent, mentor to Robert Frost, and Wellesley College English professor—went to sleep on Sunday night, November 10, 1918, American soldiers were still fighting in Europe’s Great War. Only three days before, she had watched “the world and the college” go “wild” after a New York reporter mistakenly announced the war’s end.2
But after four years of bloodshed and thousands of dead, wounded, and missing soldiers, when would Katharine and other Americans be able to celebrate the end of “the war to end all wars”? Would Germany finally agree to a cease-fire now that the other Central Powers had surrendered?
II.
November 11 had already arrived across the Atlantic on the hills above infamous Verdun, France. In drizzling rain American soldiers awaited the cease-fire that would end their exhausting days and nights of German shellfire, poison gas, ratholes, lice, and deep mud. Part of the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive line, at that time the largest American military operation ever attempted, the Yankee Division—National Guard troops from all six New England states—had been ordered to continue holding off as many German troops as possible and to attack night and day, without any letup.
In the previous two days of fighting, 2,454 American Army troops had died in Europe’s bombarded villages and blasted fields.3 Now, near Verdun, American artillery boomed along the entire front all night to show that the war was still on, in spite of the peace rumors.4
An ancient Roman garrison, Verdun had been a strategic military fortress for centuries, overlooking a long stretch of the Meuse River at the point where the historic highway from Rheims crosses toward Metz. By 1918, in this “modern” war, Verdun’s battlefields were covered with more dead bodies per square yard than any others. In farmyards near field hospitals, corpses were sometimes buried with empty wine bottles in their arms, their names sealed inside to identify them long after their dog tags had rusted away.5
Katharine’s friend, young Harvard poet Robert Hillyer, described the grisly job of driving wounded soldiers in his ambulance through one of the bloodiest battle areas, “Le Mort Homme” (Dead Man’s Corner):
Here is the crossroads where the sl
