Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (19 page)

Rumors on reservations were strategies.

The First Pioneer Infantry moved in waves of regiments by train and truck to the war. The first wave of infantry soldiers were trucked to the Marne Valley, and then the regiments marched to Cierges, Ronchères, and Goussancourt between Château-Thierry and Reims. Construction soldiers mined quarry rocks and packed and repaired the ruined roads in the area.

The Germans had bombed Saint-Quentin in the Somme Valley with huge high explosive artillery shells at an incredible distance, some seventy miles. The enemy early in the war then advanced on the British and French soldiers on farms and forests near the Aisne River.

Major General John Pershing was the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. He gave the very first order to enter the war and defend Château-Thierry. The French and American soldiers routed the enemy from the city and from nearby Bois-de-Belleau and the Marne River Valley. The allied casualties were severe and weighty. Gruesome shrapnel wounds, shattered and mashed faces, severed legs, and seared flesh. The war continued without mercy or mushy memory. We were in the last wave of the First Pioneer Infantry and arrived a month later to carry out the assault against the fortified positions of the Germans.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, the British, French, and Americans. He was a fancy officer, a stipulator, a mystery to most soldiers, and we heard rumors about the willful word wars between Pershing and Foch. General Pershing honored military traditions and the integrity of distinctive regiments and divisions, and he was determined to protect every American soldier from arbitrary assignments and the sacrifice strategy of fill in soldiers with units commanded by the French.

The First Pioneer Infantry was fully engaged in the last major offensives of the war, the Second Battle of the Marne, the Battle of Soissons, and the great battles in the Argonne Forest and the Meuse River. The German army three months later, and after four years of destruction, was driven out of France. The Kaiser, the ice monster of war, was defeated, disgraced, and to survive the wrath of citizens the German emperor ran away to another
country. I created original stories about the ice monster, an obvious relative of the ice woman in the native stories of the Anishinaabe.

Wars changed familiar native stories.

The French Berliet trucks arrived at the encampment on the Marne River, and, much to the surprise of the soldiers, most of the drivers were Annamese and Chinese from colonial France. This was a war for hire, and a cynical turn of domestic fortunes in the colonies. American soldiers were the passengers at risk with colonial drivers, and we were paid in francs not dollars. I was never sure if the poor peasants and the displaced citizens of war that we met on the road would rather earn dollars or francs for their eggs, cheese, bread, wine, and favors.

The Berliet trucks parked in a perfect row on the road near the river
that morning, and soldiers were assigned by platoons to specific trucks. The canvas covers had been removed, and the ride in light rain on hard rubber tires was hardly more comfortable than the boxcars on the train from
Brest.

The Chinese drivers started the trucks one by one, a deceptive clank and jangle of a mighty army, and slowly drove across the bridge near Saâcy-sur-Marne. The Germans had bombed the bridge over the Marne River at Château-Thierry. The ruins of churches, farms, and entire communes became a common sight as the trucks moved in a column on the narrow roads west to Villiers-Saint-Denis and Château-Thierry.

The soldiers leaned in silence as the trucks bounced through the communes in the Marne River Valley. The train station was damaged but still standing in Château-Thierry. German artillery had exploded the roofs, collapsed the walls of houses and apartments, and cracked louvers exposed the private scenes of the heart, bedrooms, closets, kitchens, furniture, and abandoned laundry on a rack. A carved interior door was cocked on a single hinge, a stiff gray towel covered a wooden chair, broken crockery, and the legacy of lace curtains set sail for liberty. Familiar shadows were disfigured at a primary school, and children searched for the seams of memory. The scent of ancient dust lingered forever in the favors of the country.

Aloysius painted blue ravens perched on apartment buildings with wide wings spread over the collapsed walls. The gaze of the ravens was fierce. The points of the blue flight feathers were touched with rouge. Remarkably, my brother used black for the first time in his paintings, a thin vein
of black on the mane of the ravens. He bounced in the back of a truck and painted mighty blue ravens in the eternal heart of Château-Thierry.

Churches, hotels, storefronts, and warehouses were in ruins, but the narrow streets of the city had been cleared of dead horses, bloated bodies, and war debris for the passage of weary soldiers, horses, cannon wagons, water carts, commanders in motor cars, trucks of food and ammunition. There were more American Ford ambulances on the road than motor cars on the entire White Earth Reservation and northern Minnesota.

The few citizens who had remained in the city waved to the soldiers and some shouted
Vive l'Amérique.
The soldiers cheered and shouted back
Vive la France
to the citizens. The soldiers were heartened by the salutes and the courage of the survivors, and enraged at the same time by the sinister motives of a grabby empire, the demons and ice monsters of destruction.

The Boche burned libraries and museums, wrecked cathedrals, universities, and hospitals, a degenerate act of soldiery entertainment with no military strategy. Notre-Dame de Reims was bombarded and burned overnight. The angels wounded, saints disfigured, and molten lead oozed out of the stone gargoyles.

That slow journey on the back of trucks through the wreck of many communes in the river valley transformed the new soldiers of conscription and adventure into fierce warriors, or at least some of the soldiers were visionary warriors.

The convoy of trucks turned north and later that day delivered several hundred soldiers to the final destination at Fère-en-Tardenois, a commune located between Château-Thierry and Fismes in Picardy. The Rainbow Division and other allied soldiers had driven the enemy across the Vesle River only a few days earlier, and inherited by wary conquest the havoc, wounded soldiers stacked on ambulances and trucks, shattered trees, the reek of dead humans and horses, and the pockmarked earth. The dead had been collected, piece by bloody piece from the ruins, a grotesque heap of body parts, the last ghastly gesture of a military muster. The First Pioneer Infantry soldiers camped in the light rain at Forêt de Nesles near the fortified positions of the Germans.

Aloysius was haunted by the nearby death of more than six thousand soldiers of the Rainbow Division only a few days before we had arrived by truck. The Rainbow Division was a union of soldiers from more than twenty
state National Guard units, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and many more, truly a rainbow of volunteer soldiers. Later we learned that one of the casualties was the romantic poet Joyce Kilmer, a sergeant in the Rainbow Division. He was a poet of the war and a scout assigned to risky reconnaissance missions. Kilmer had turned down a commission as an officer and remained an enlisted volunteer in the war.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

Joyce Kilmer was shot in the head by a sniper on the Meurcy Farm near the commune of Seringes-et-Nesles. The French honored him in death with the Croix de Guerre. Kilmer probably wrote about a white oak near his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, but my brother decided that a blue raven medal carved from any of the trees in the nearby forest would rightly honor the poet.

Sergeant Kilmer was buried in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery near Fère-en-Tardenois. “Rouge Bouquet,” the poem that Kilmer wrote to honor the death of some twenty other brave soldiers in the Rainbow Division, was read at his own memorial service.

For Death came flying through the air
And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey and left them there,
Clay to clay.
…

There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.

The Rainbow Division pursued the withered enemy with courage, resolute vengeance, and the sorrow of a terrible sacrifice. The Germans turned the forests and countryside into a wasteland, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and allied soldiers. Private Phillip Plaster from Oskaloosa, Iowa, died at age seventeen in a bombardment near the Marne River in Champagne. He was the youngest soldier in the infantry regiment. Private Arnold Wright carried a French officer to a first aid station and was wounded by an artillery explosion and died in hospital near Châlons-sur-Marne.
Private Victor Frist from Villisca, Iowa, died from severe facial wounds at Croix Rouge Farm near Château-Thierry. Private Elmer Bruce from Joplin, Missouri, survived combat in Château-Thierry and the River Marne in Champagne and then drowned in a swimming accident in the Marne River near Saint Aulde.

First Lieutenant Merle McCunn from Shenandoah, Iowa, was badly wounded in Forêt-de-Fère and died in a field hospital. He had served eleven years in the Iowa National Guard, including service on the Mexican Border. Private Charles Hudson, who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, was the first soldier in his infantry company to die in Château-Thierry. Corporal Pierce Flowers from Coin, Iowa, was on patrol and died in machine gun fire near Sergy. Private Howard Elliot, from Wilmette, Illinois, was killed by machine gun fire in Château-Thierry. Private Eddie Conrad Momb from Rorchert, Minnesota, died from mustard gas at Château-Thierry. Private Charles Bordeau from Frazee, Minnesota, near the White Earth Reservation, died in action at Château-Thierry.

Sergeant Oliver Wendell Holmes from Council Bluffs, Iowa, died in a bombardment near the Ourcq River. The sergeant was the namesake of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the medical doctor and author of the famous poem “Old Ironsides.” The poem was written when the navy announced a scheme to scrap the
Constitution
, a celebrated warship, but the wooden frigate was saved by a poem.

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the God of storms,

The lightning and the gale!

Corporal Thomas Evens from Glenwood, Iowa, was wounded and died near Château-Thierry. An explosion severed his leg as he connected telephone wires near the front lines. Sergeant Harry Hart from Oskaloosa, Iowa, died at twenty years old, the youngest sergeant in his regiment, in combat near the Ourcq River. Corporal Paul Dixon from Mystic, Iowa,
died in combat at Château-Thierry. Private Frank Keech from Otsego, Michigan, died in combat at Château-Thierry. Private Charles Cunningham from Dyersville, Iowa, a litter bearer, was wounded in an artillery explosion and died in an evacuation hospital near several soldiers he had rescued earlier in the day.

Second Lieutenant Christopher Timothy, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, was wounded by machine gun fire and died near the Ourcq River. Enemy bullets punctured his lung, and when he was evacuated by ambulance he told the driver, “Tell Tommy to tell the folks goodbye, tell them I died an honorable death. I died fighting.”

German soldiers were heavily entrenched on the other side of the Forêt-de-Nesles. They waited with machine guns, mortars, bayonets, mustard gas, deathly fear, and the fury of revenge. Allied and enemy artillery flashed and thundered through the night, a heavy bombardment on both sides of the forest and the front.

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Aloysius carved blue raven medals that night from chunks of wood shattered by artillery explosions. The Elephant Toe knife he used was a present from Odysseus a few months earlier, just before we were mustered into the infantry. The trader told us to attack the enemy at night with our knives, but naturally my brother would rather carve totemic blue ravens for the soldiers than search for the enemy with a pocketknife. The blue raven pendants created a sense of peace, and that touch of rouge on the ravens reminded me of the red crown of the totemic sandhill crane.

The sandhill crane was our native visionary totem.

We had pitched our tent on a secure slope of the forest very close to other soldiers. No lights were allowed, not even cigarettes under a poncho that dreary night of rain, thunder, lightning, and the roar of artillery. The steady rain spattered on the tents, and ticked on metal materiel. The tick, tick, tick sound was an annoyance, and a menace. A soldier nearby had left a mess kit outside his tent to be washed by the rain.

Raindrops shivered with artillery explosions.

My brother carved in the dark by touch and memory, and we told hushed stories about our friend Odysseus. The trader was always with us in memories and stories.

Suddenly Sergeant Sorek pushed his wet helmet and head into our tent and ordered us to report immediately to the command post for our first mission as native scouts.

The reverie of our stories ended on a rainy night.

There was no courtly initiation of scouts, and certainly not for native scouts. Our first night of stealth and surveillance in the rain was solemn but only conceivable in a shaman story. No other scouts were ordered that night to penetrate enemy lines on the east side of Forêt-de-Nesles and to gather critical information on machine gun emplacements, fortifications, or capture one or more enemy soldiers for interrogation.

That night was a decisive moment, and not the only one, when we could have raised questions about the order, but any expression of doubt would have demonstrated unacceptable fear and cowardice for a soldier, and especially a native soldier. We were selected only as natives, and not because of any special training.

Sergeant Sorek was not romantic but he was convinced that stealth was in our blood, a native trait and natural sense of direction even on a dark and rainy night in a strange place, otherwise we would have been breaking quarry rocks for road construction. The choice of risky missions over breaking rocks for roads could not be reversed for any reason.