Chapter 5
Repatriation
When the tide of battle turned, the victims
were the silent ones who disappeared into
the night and fog of war.
Present Day
Two days later I received a reply from Madame Lesperance at the commune of Courseulles. The email was fairly short and to the point.
Merci, M. Hewitt.
His Honor Mayor Pouille appreciates your confirmation of the receipt of the letters.
He extends his regrets, however, that we do not know who Antoine is. We would be pleased to assist you in any way, but a check of our records has yielded no such person in Courseulles during this period.
Not a good beginning.
I had reached a dead end. Neither the village of Courseulles-sur-Mer nor the department of Calvados had any record of an “Antoine” that shed light on the letters.
I sat and puzzled over the dilemma at my table in the Olympic Club making notes on the back of the children’s coloring page in longhand. I drew a rudimentary timeline of the key locations in the diary, each forming a box connected by lines to show the chronology. It began with Andy arriving in France, being stationed in Paris, his transfer to Tours, subsequent duty station changes, and ending with his locations described on his return trip to California. Inside each box I decided to add the number of days spent in each location. A picture emerged I had not considered when I started.
Andy spent the longest amount of time in Tours. 378 days. If he met “Antoine” and developed a personal relationship over time, it would make sense it likely occurred in Tours. It was a place to start.
This was no small task. What would be the trigger that could reveal the relationship between one American and one Frenchman in such a large city? If there were a key anywhere, it would be in the letters.
Dr. Tauscher from the college had given me a text file with the letter translations, and the originals were safely put away. On a separate page I drew a grid and tried to create a chronology out of the letters, with few dates to guide me.
The “Boche” seemed obvious. The series of events and a sense of desperation and resolve in the letters revolve around the German occupation of France in 1940, and especially Normandy. That letter chronicles the arrival of the German army. The letter that would be the last one in the chronology was also obvious. The others were more problematic being the backside of the written conversation - my grandfather’s replies to Antoine’s original correspondence - and letters to Andy that were never posted. I circled key words and phrases, looking for answers through the span of over seventy years.
I knew I needed help to unravel this mystery.
R
Tours, 1919
The Armistice changed life in Tours. Bouchard was not under constant guard any longer, although his movements were still regulated. He was assigned to regular work details in and around camp besides morning mess hall duties. He often found himself cleaning at the Engineers division where Anderson was stationed.
The two began to slowly, carefully, build what could be called a friendship in those early days. When George learned Bouchard was French instead of German, he called him the “Fritzie-Froggy” in the derisive manner soldiers have of referring to their enemies in slang. It caused an irreparable rift between him and Anderson, and the two drifted apart. When George received orders home, Andy did not bother to see him off.
As winter turned cold life in camp became dull and routine. The opportunity to develop their friendship grew, albeit slowly. Although Bouchard was restricted to the camp, he could attend regular church services as long as he was not on work duty, and he attended alone.
He had spent most of the last four years alone with little news from his home. The Red Cross occasionally had been able to pass letters from prisoners’ families during the war, but as the location of specific prisoners was a closely guarded secret the process was slow and cumbersome. Every letter was opened and read at least twice, and return correspondence was scrutinized even further. Even though the fighting had ceased, and lapses of procedure became increasingly common, letters were rare. Those that did make it through the administrative morass were still censored. Bouchard was surprised to find a letter waiting for him when he finished his morning shift. He sat on his bed and opened it anxiously.
The letter was from his cousin Rachelle, the daughter of his mother’s sister, who had immigrated to Strasbourg during the war.
14 Dec 1918
My dear Antoine,
There are terrible rumors the French want to rid Strasbourg of all who have German roots.
They are forcing some Germans from their homes. It is said soon they will be forcing merchants and workers out to make way for the French moving here. More come everyday.
The people are close to hysterical.
In the market they shout jeers at us even as I protest we are French. A man threw horse manure at me and screamed I should leave. Justin was cut badly on his forehead by a rock thrown by another.
I pray for a relief from this terror, and for your safe return.
Rachelle
He tucked the letter away beneath his crude bed. His mind raced with worry and concern. He thought of Rachelle, and wondered just what would come of his last remaining family. He had to get out of that bare room for some air or he would suffocate.
He stepped outside and walked off through the damp late winter mist that hung in the air, heading for the small canteen at the edge of the depot - just within his “freedom” boundary. He had no money, but could draw a hot cup of coffee nonetheless.
Antoine was sitting in the canteen by himself when Andy and Roy walked in. They took their seats at opposite ends of the long table. Antoine did not acknowledge the two soldiers. There were still unspoken barriers between them, at least in public places like the canteen.
In private, he could talk freely with Andy. They spoke of their homes, of the beauty of the Alsace as well as of California and Illinois. Antoine encouraged Anderson to take French lessons, and would often grill him over language. Anderson in turn helped him with his English.
Antoine would not talk of his experiences at the front. Whenever the conversation drifted toward current events, he would become agitated and pull away. Andy was a compassionate observer of people, and could feel the pain his friend felt. He tried to stay clear of those conversations. The mistrust dividing these two from such different backgrounds faded with time even if the society around them forbade it. It is much harder to hate a man when you look straight into his eyes when you speak, Andy thought.
Andy had seen so many things that shook his foundation values to the core. He had seen black American soldiers shed their red blood for a country that denied them, and yet watched as they joked and jostled with the French soldiers as equals. He had seen Turks and Indians in strange costumed uniforms as well as drab khakis strolling through town, welcomed by strangers. He had watched in amazement as French civilians turned out in the streets at the news of the armistice with bottles of wine to share spontaneously with anyone in uniform, regardless of their nationality. Young women openly hugged and kissed any soldier in uniform, white, brown, or black, on that joyous day.
His own countrymen, from the land of freedom, denied equal footing to these men who shed their blood in this far off place. The locals were simply glad to be free of the horror of the war. Just who was free, and who was still in chains? In this place, where violence had been routine for so long, he had learned so many lessons of tolerance. He wondered just how he would feel towards the life he would return to in America.
Bouchard rose and left the canteen. He did not look at Andy. For the troubled young American, it felt like the stab of a bayonet.
R
Present Day
“Professor Douglas? Larry Hewitt. I phoned you last week and you asked me to stop by your office É .”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Hewitt. I have been expecting you. Please, come in and have a seat ... let’s see ... where are my notes ... OK, here they are. I am sorry, but you caught me a little disorganized.”
I had arranged the meeting with Professor Terrance Douglas as Suzanne Tauscher suggested, and had emailed him both a copy of the “D-Day” and “Boche” letters along with a list of knowns and unknowns. I had phoned him for an appointment, but he insisted I simply drop by during office hours at my convenience. In the meantime, he would begin to do some background research to help me.
“I’m sorry, professor. If there is a better time ... .”
“No, no, this is fine! Just fine! Quite a puzzle you have here, Mr. Hewitt. Let me ask you first, do you have any experience with pure historical research?”
“No, not really. A have an interest in history, and a Master’s degree in business. I did a lot of research for my degree. I just have not had much reason to delve this deep before, and it is harder than business research.”
“Yes, quite so. Using peer-reviewed sources is one thing. You can leverage someone’s research to your advantage, and build on another’s foundation. Using original source material is something else. It is quite the inexact science. I am sending you a link to an article I want you to read that will help you in your search. It’s about applying the physics Principle of Uncertainty to sociology. Your letters, they contain several seemingly inexplicable contradictions, don’t you agree?”
“That’s why I contacted you, professor. They do not make much sense.”
“Ah, my dear Hewitt, but they do. They do! Because they made sense at the time they were written by the men who wrote them! That is the key. Your job is to find just what that sense was, in the reality of the writers! Just because it is unknown to us now does not mean it was not real! Every phrase, indeed every word, has a reality. If not, it would not have been written, do you agree?”
“OK, I can agree with that.”
“Good. That is the foundation. Now, if you had been able to read that article on the Uncertainty Principal first, you would have had a toolset at your disposal to help you with the next big step. In this case, a giant step backwards.”
The professor was quite eager to share his discoveries with me, but took an even greater delight in lecturing me on methodology. For my part, I was grateful for better ways to help unravel this puzzle, even if it meant a very long visit.
“The Uncertainty Principal tells us if you look closely at the micro-elements of a set of actions, the larger context becomes diffused because the very action of observation changes the outcome. And vice versa. Just like in quantum physics, where the principal was first postulated. To measure the speed of an atomic particle you have to change its mass; to measure its mass, you have to change its speed. The very act of observation changes the result, and you cannot therefore know both properties at the same time.
“To understand the context within which your letters were written, you need to step away from the details and take a broad view. You must, in actuality, discount the accuracy of the details. Both context and detail cannot be known simultaneously. And do not trust the micro elements.
“Have you ever played the parlor game where someone runs into a room, acts out a scene for the others, then just as quickly runs out? If there are eight people observing the mini-play, and they immediately record what they just witnessed, you will receive eight different accounts of the same event. Sometimes the details of what we search for are unintentionally misleading.”
The professor was making sense in a broad view, I supposed, but I was uncertain how all this was going to help. He pulled a stack of letter copies with scribbles and notations all over them as he continued.
“Let’s begin by breaking the first letter down by phrases. ‘the Boche are back.’ Boche is a very negative term, implying a form of racial prejudice or bias. I am sure you figured that out. But ‘back’ ... back from what? You say these were written somewhere on the French coast? The Germans did not occupy the coast in the first war, nor the War of 1870 for that matter. So how could they be ‘back?’ Were they really even ‘back’ or did your Antoine mean something else?
“Perhaps the Germans were ‘back’ in your Antoine’s world, his own personal perspective, as opposed to back in some geopolitical sense. That would imply they started by intruding into his world once before.”
“The ‘discharge papers’ is what throws me,” I interjected. “If he were discharged from the French army, perhaps it simply meant he was fighting the Germans?”
“I do not think so. As an American, you would think the name “Antoine” was French, so therefore he would have been a French soldier. I do not think so. His discharge papers were sent to Strasbourg. That would be a key that would have limited meaning outside of a very narrow context, which shrinks the universe of possibilities significantly.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Official papers would be sent to the district of record for anyone with a civil matter that was resolved, what I call a ‘civil signature.’ The administrative capital of his home district - much like a county auditor here - would have to be Strasbourg, the district capital of the Alsace region bordered by the Rhine.”
“OK, but I checked. Strasbourg sounds German, but it is in France.”
“Now it is, yes. But in 1914 it was under German control. It was taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War - what we call the War of 1870. Over the nearly fifty years that followed, most of the region became dominated by German culture. They did, however, tolerate the Franco subculture. As a result, there was a substantial minority population of ethnic French who spoke the language and lived a local variation, or dialect if you will, of French culture.
“As a Frenchman in German-controlled Alsace he would have been subject to conscription in the German army in 1914. Some 370,000 Alsatians were rounded up and in many cases forced to serve the German Imperial Army. They were usually sent to the Russian front. They were considered too unreliable to fight in the west against their fellow Frenchmen.”
“OK, so we are supposing he was a German soldier, in Tours, discharged and sent home.”
“No. Not quite.”
I groaned inside. This was getting convoluted. The professor sensed my confusion.
“Look, Mr. Hewitt ... May I call you Larry?”
“Yes, please.”
“Good. By the time this is over we will be quite familiar with one another, I can assure you,” he offered with a slight air of whimsy.
“Consider this. You are an American. You were raised believing the story in your school history books that America is a ‘melting pot,’ under the presumption it somehow made this country different. Yet the truth is that compared to Europe, our culture is and always has been relatively homogenous. On the continent, wars have been fought over such trivialities as dialect differences let alone national interests. There are hundreds of subcultures, and mixes of people from many countries, all jumbled up. The Great War was fought over conflicts between such subdivisions.
“Nothing is what it seems to an outsider,” he continued. “Your Antoine was French, I am sure. He served in the German army, I presume. And not by choice, most likely, which places him geographically in Strasbourg, and politically in the Alsace-Lorraine, one of the most hotly contested regions in Europe.
“But you say he met, or likely met, your grandfather in Tours. Tours was behind the lines. It was a rail crossroads, a supply and air depot. It was far from the front. Antoine would not have been dischargeable at Tours if he were a German soldier, especially not in 1919. As a German soldier, after the armistice, he would have been quickly demobilized and sent home, not anywhere inside France proper, and certainly not with an official civil signature. There were simply too many soldiers scattered over too great an area - an area where civil order and process had long since been disrupted.
“However, if he were a POW, that would be a completely different story. First, his location and activities would have been closely monitored and recorded. He would not have been repatriated in 1918 and simply sent home. Most prisoners were not allowed home until late 1919 or even 1920 - long after the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.”
The details that comprised his logic seemed to contradict the essence of his so-called broad contextual view, and I told him so.
“Ah, my friend. That is the point! The universe of human interaction is inextricably bound together with contradictions! You are familiar with popular conspiracy theories, are you not? They take on a life of their own because it is very easy, and convenient, to draw causal relationships backward in time. Looking back, you see everything as connected because they DID occur in sequence, however chaotically. Looking forward, can you predict any outcome with such causal certainty? Of course not.
“It is not the intricate details that matter, but the scenery within which they might have occurred. Build the scenery, and you will know where to look for the detail. Hold onto nothing that resembles a preconception. That is the contradiction you must reconcile to locate this Antoine.
“Remember, the clues and solutions to your puzzle will be scattered to the four winds. Your missing puzzle piece could be the solution someone else is seeking. So publish your results as soon as you can, and let others who are also searching help you, and you them.”
R
France, 1918
Antoine could occasionally retrieve a newspaper left by one of the officers and get caught up on current events. Now that the war was over, security was relaxed even more than the usual carelessness of soldiers away from the front. He was always eager to receive news from his homeland in the Alsace region. The little news he could get was unsettling.
French troops had entered the Alsace-Lorraine in December 1918 just as President Wilson arrived in Versailles for the peace conference. The story of the French repatriation of his homeland was big news, igniting a frenzy of nationalism and fueling Deutschfeindlichkeit, an anti-German paranoia. It would not take long for reprisals to begin against the minority German population in the Alsace region as citizen was pitted against citizen in a frenzy of racial purity propaganda by French central authorities.
The French government began a vicious policy of ƒpuration, or purification, shortly after the hostilities ceased. The objective was to eliminate any semblance of German culture, influence, and language from the region that for hundreds of years had been a mixture of German-Franco influences and cultures. While “high” German and formal French were used in official business and taught in schools, the populace spoke a mix of dialects influenced by both cultures.
For the Germans in the area, it simply meant expulsion. The news shortly after the armistice told the story.
Dec 23. Germans Ordered to Leave the Alsace. The central government announced today that persons of German descent would be repatriated to German soil, effective immediately. Holders of B, C, and D identify cards must return to their native Germany.
Antoine had heard only bits and pieces about the identity cards during the active days of fighting. Rumors the French would enforce language-based categories on citizens of the region would occasionally filter in through various sources. Holders of the “A” card had privileged rights in the region. This card identified them as legitimate French-speaking natives, and conveyed certain privileges, among them a favorable exchange rate on German marks and other Allied currency. All others exchanged currency they could no longer use at great cost.
Antoine received another letter from Rachelle. The censors had blacked out parts, but he could manage the meaning.
18 Jan 1919
My dear Antoine,
They have taken our home. The government moved in with terrible restrictions and classified us as German. My identity card is class “D” which puts us at great risk. We have been forced across the river into Gehl, but there is nowhere to live and no work. We are despised by the Germans just as much.
Justin is ill now, and very weak. We have no medicine.
Please, my dear cousin, if you are soon released, do not try to go home.
Rachelle
The system was confused and complicated, so much so that the tone of the news articles began to change as the year 1919 progressed. By late spring even the liberal Parisian press began to charge the system was corrupt and unworkable.
On April 22, 1919, the French paper “La Nacionale” carried a blistering attack on the excesses of the civil authorities in carrying out the policies of ethnic purification.
A woman of mixed parentage, a widow of the war whose husband was forced at gunpoint to fight for the German army in the east, was ordered to vacate her home with her three children. Each traveller was permitted 30 kilo of baggage, 2 days rations, and a maximum of 2000 marks. Gold, coin, or French or Allied money of any kind was forbidden. French authorities promptly confiscated all additional property. The family left Metz and crossed into Germany at Strasbourg, destitute and homeless.
Are they better off in Germany? A land so devastated by war that even persons of property are starving?”
The story ended with the publication of an anonymous letter sent to a civil servant in Metz, smuggled out by a sympathetic worker, and forwarded to the newspaper. It carried an ominous warning.
Something terrible will happen which will result in war, for the humiliation you are inflicting on these people will leave them gripped by a secret, implacable and wrathful anger, which will avenge itself in an indescribable manner.
Over 90,000 Germans were forced to leave their homes in the Alsace-Lorraine region between 1918 and 1921. Antoine Bouchard would receive no further letters from his cousin Rachelle. She had been forced east into Germany at war’s end, and simply dissolved into the refugee chaos that is the ultimate spectacle of this most terrible invention of man.
R
April 1919
Andy left the paymaster’s office where he collected his allotment, and dutifully recorded his monthly pay in his diary’s pay log. He had earned corporal stripes by now, and his pay had been raised to a whopping $19.30 per month.
Today there would be none of the usual grousing over the pay. Instead, Andy hurried through camp heading for the back of the mess hall. He burst excitedly through the back door into the kitchen.
“Antoine!” He was breathing hard, as much in excitement as winded by the long run. “Antoine, I have orders. I get to go home!”
The news was greeted with a stunned silence, immediately felt by both. Going home. Antoine was losing the only friend he had here. This was good news, nonetheless. Years of sacrifice and witness to horror had steeled him toward displaying his emotions too openly.
“Andy. When do you leave?”
“Today! I just cleared payroll, and I am on the train today!”
The orders were brief.
Prepare for transport to embarkation port immediately.
Leaving 18:30 hours.
“I don’t know where I am headed right away, but I am going home.”
Home. Antoine knew this was his friend’s most fervent wish. Home was where he could never return.
“Look, I have some things here I will not need. Take them. A jacket, these mud boots. The scarf. I will not need them in California.”
Andy and Antoine had talked of California often. It seemed a magical place, of hills and warm winds, with fruits and vegetables year ‘round. And the wine - not as good as from Alsace, he would tease Andy, who knew little of wine or other spirits.
“You can write to me, and when you get out of here and go home we can remain friends,” the excited Andy blurted out. Antoine smiled carefully, looking around to see they were not being watched. Now was not the time to talk of the repression in his homeland, or his fear of never seeing the Alsace again. It was a time of joy, a time to remember. He gave Andy a hug and kissed him on the cheek as he would if he were home, a move that startled the reserved Swede.
“Yes, I will write you. All of this will end one day, and I will find a new home, too. The world is becoming a smaller place. Perhaps there will be a time we see each other again.” He knew that would be unlikely, but he would not dampen his friend’s enthusiasm at heading home.
Andy left him his small stash of personal items, then quickly scribbled an address on the back of a post card he had planned to send home before he had received his orders.
“This is my parent’s home. That is where I am headed. Write me here, and I will return a letter. When you get out of here, we will stay in touch. I promise.”
He then removed the gold cross that always hung around his neck, a gift from his father when he left California for France. It was inscribed with characteristic simplicity, “To Henry from Father.”
“My father said it was blessed by the pastor of our church for luck. I pray He blesses you with the same good fortune He has blessed me.”
With that, and a firm grasp, Andy was off. He had little time to complete his processing before heading to the train. His head was spinning, thoughts of home, of family, seeing Lawrence, Ruby, Sam, his mother and father, of never seeing his friend Antoine again. What a strange thing war is, he thought. It brings the strangest of fellows together and just as quickly flings them apart. Memories are left hanging in the air like a morning mist that refuses to rise.
Antoine could not see him off. Such was the lot of a prisoner even when the war was over.
Andy boarded the train, and a few hours later was bivouacked in temporary quarters in Aignan. It was a miserable place, full of mud, cold tents, and little to do. April turned to May, and the air began to warm, and green began to return to the ravaged land, if only as the irritable thistle. The land would heal, somehow, as it has always done, despite man’s incessant folly.
R
The company was called to parade formation on May 3. Orders were to “spit and polish” which meant someone important was coming to do something completely unimportant. After standing for an hour, a group of officers arrived. General Pershing himself inspected the company, although it made little impression on young Andy at the time. It was something in later years he could recall, although it is likely it made a greater impression on him than it did on the general.
He wrote in his diary,
May 6, Tue
Left ‘Agony’ at 10 am on ‘doughboy Pullman’.
Stop over at Tours, arrived Le Mans 11:00 pm.
For twelve days he had little to do but walk through town. He wrote a few letters home, but mostly waited, and waited more. He finally left on the last train leg of his French journey, and arrived in the seaport of Brest on May 18.
Two days later Andy was marching through the streets of Brest in formation, preparing to board the S.S. Finland. He endured eleven days at sea jammed four deep in canvas bunks, a parade through Newport News, and Pullman cars to Fort Grant, a luxury compared to the rude transport of army life in France. Fort Grant was near his hometown, Rockford, Illinois, and Andy visited his brother Lawrence, other family, and friends. Finally, he was bound for the coast.
He wrote his final diary entry on June 18.
This Way Out!
Discharged!
Never again!
R
Present Day
“Now, to continue. The letter to your Grandfather was sent to the states, was it not?”
“Yes. In late 1919.”
“Headquarters units often used German POWs for manual labor - in lumber camps, rock quarries, hospitals, mess halls, garden tending - any form of menial labor not directly connected with armaments manufacture and the like could have been filled with forced prison labor. I predict Antoine was a prisoner working somewhere near where your grandfather was stationed, somewhere they would have met.”
“OK, that gives a place to look, but how would he have been here instead of the Eastern Front if the Germans mistrusted their French conscripts so?”
“That’s not such a stretch. By the time the war was in its bloody fourth year, the early conscripted units would have been chopped up badly, subjected to resupply and breakups, and scattered all over the Eastern Front. When Russia dropped out of the war following the Bolshevik Revolution, those troops would have been sent west. They would have been scattered even more. The original ethnic basis for their unit formation would have long ago been turned inside out.
“So, where are we? We have made some long distance extrapolations, and conjured up a story where Antoine was a Frenchman living in the Alsace region, swept up by the Germans at the start of the war, sent east, and then ended up on the Western Front late in the war. He ended up a prisoner, and was assigned to menial labor at or near the 447th Depot Detachment HQ Company at Tours, where through some unknown series of events he met your grandfather.”
“But how and why did he end up on the French