Chapter 6
Brittany
Villages were ghostly still. The soft blur
of color slowly returning to the land was mostly
the prickly illusion of the thistle.
Present Day
My search had entered its third excruciating month. I spent the next several weeks tracking down the unit archives of the 447th DDE HQ Company and all associated units in Tours and Paris. Because of the age of the archives, most of them were not digitized, certainly not available through electronic means. I would have to go back to the traditional research methods, back to “the stacks” as we called them in college years ago. It would be tedious, boring, and more than likely unsuccessful.
The archives of the French authorities were even more difficult to locate let alone examine. I had taken French in high school - some forty-five years ago! My French was conversational only, and not very good at that.
While the French who worked in traditional tourist or business areas generally could speak better English than I could French, researching document archives was something else entirely. My phone calls yielded little results.
The search for Antoine began to consume me. I spent hours every day searching out obscure references, following dead ends, and compiling background information on the periods of the Great War - but nothing to tie any of this to the elusive Antoine. He was a ghost in my dreams, a phantom that plagued my thoughts and toyed with my emotions.
My client work began to suffer, but I did not care. Antoine was important to my grandfather, so he became important to me. He had eluded my mother’s search, but I was determined he would not elude me. I felt an obligation, a spiritual connection to my grandfather through the letters. I often reinforced my resolve by promising out loud to Grandpa Andy that I would find Antoine. I was getting desperate, running out of ideas.
Researching obscure information on the Internet is often like the punch line of the old joke, “Why are you looking over there? ... The light’s better.” There are numerous tricks to take advantage of the better light. One is to key back through directories in an Internet address from a document you discover to find what may be stored online but not directly referenced in links. It is a process called “scavenging” by technology types. It is frustratingly slow, but can yield interesting if not relevant information.
I found such a source on the website of the International Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. I had searched for “World War I prisoner of war records” and found a brochure in PDF format on the ICRC website and downloaded it. It was entitled “The International Prisoners of War Agency; The ICRC in World War I.” While it contained some interesting yet brief background information, it gave me directory access to mountains of electronic documents in the bowels of the server at the Red Cross, directories not protected by a permissions block that would have prohibited directory access. I began another painstaking search.
One seldom finds exactly what one seeks. This is Research Law # 1 - of my own creation. However, each properly researched and cited paper, as opposed to brochures created for popular distribution, contains citations, references, and reading lists that formed the basis of another writers’ research - the basis for peer review.
In one of the numerous documents I scavenged from the ICRC site, I found a reference to an obscure information repository in the capital of the Somme department at Amiens, France. The Somme was the northern theater of the Great War, and the scene of many of the critical battles of World War I. Information in the repository was used by the writer of an obscure paper entitled “Methods for Cross Referencing Prisoner Chargeback Payments in WWI French Administration, 1919.” The paper listed the information’s location within the general administrative records of the department’s financial archives.
Further research revealed the hint of a point of leverage. It was customary for the French to charge for the services of POWs assigned to various tasks, whether in support of a private company - like the owner of a rock quarry - or a POW assigned to an American unit, perhaps. These charges are sometimes referred to as “chargebacks” or “transfer payments.”
Official records between what are the functional equivalents of states, the French departments, tend to have similar organizational structures. Their methodologies are prescribed by the central government, their location and structure common. If there were identifiable financial transactions for transfer payments between organizations for POW expenses in Amiens, then there was a likelihood such a record exists in Tours for the Indre-et-Loire department (DPT I-L).
A dozen phone calls later and I was frustrated to the point of exasperation. Neither the telephone nor the Internet was going to help me any further.
R
France, 1920
Bouchard roamed west from Tours, staying away from the rails and main roads, seeking out muddy countryside tracks and small villages where he could remain invisible. Although he had proper identity papers, nearly six years of the war and postwar captivity filled him with mistrust. There were so many displaced soldiers and civilians wandering all over France that even with his odd dialect he could slip away through the countryside unnoticed.
He eventually wandered into a small crossroads commune of Peucel. The village was quiet, almost deserted. A mangy dog tied to a fence near a ramshackle cottage barked at him. A few pigs rooted through what seemed like abandoned gardens. Along the muddy track leading into the village was a small church. In the cemetery he saw an old priest, bent over, tending a fresh grave. He rose up slowly, painfully, by leaning on a long staff.
“I have little food, my son,” he apologized, “but what there is I am happy to share.”
“Where are the people of the village?” Bouchard asked. He had seen no one save for the old priest. Fields were left untended, the small square in the village center unkempt.
“The young men were taken by the army when they came of age. None have returned. Many more died of the pestilence. I have two villagers who passed on to God yesterday, and I have not the strength to bury them. Perhaps God has sent you to help relieve them of their earthly suffering.”
Antoine agreed to dig their graves for the old priest himself was weak with the grippe.
“You may stay in any of the empty cottages. The fields were barely planted and there are few left to work them. Some villagers just left, to where only God knows. He has sent you to me to tend to the dead. I am sure He knows your heart is good. Stay here and rest awhile. You can help me glean the fields for the winter, lest we both starve.”
Bouchard holed up in Peucel for the winter. There were fish in a nearby reservoir, frogs in the grasses along the banks, and the fields gave up a paltry supply grain, enough to survive. He managed to catch the free pigs, and gave one to an old woman who kept the skinny dog on a leash. The old priest would come by and break bread now and again, and bring the last of the church wine to help ward off the cold. Bouchard attended mass out of respect for the old priest, although he was the only one there. The old woman was too enfeebled to get to church, so the priest would see her on his solitary rounds through the empty village. As winter slowly loosened its grip and the wretched road turned to mud, both the old woman and the priest had left to join their God.
R
Present Day
The auditorium was filled about half-full which for this small college was a large crowd. I was taken a little by surprise at the sight and the excitement that buzzed in the room. Suzanne excitedly bustled about, introducing me to the faculty members who filed into the room, notebooks and e-tablets in hand - including Professor Douglas.
“We are ready. Could I ask you to give a brief introduction, explaining how you received the letters and who your grandfather was? I will take it from there. Sorry to put you on the spot,” she added with a wry smile.
“OK, but you asked for it. I’m not exactly shy in public,” I laughed.
She walked briskly to the podium and turned to address the crowd.
“Good afternoon, students, faculty, and friends. I must say when we first started this project, I certainly did not expect it to become of such interest to so many. I am grateful to all of you for coming today.
“I would first like to introduce the owner of the letters, a local businessman from Centralia, Mr. Larry Hewitt, who will give us a brief introduction. Larry É .”
“Thank you, Professor Tauscher. Well, I wasn’t prepared for such a gathering, but I’ll do my best. I received a package in the mail from a small village on the Normandy coast of France called Courseulles-sur-Mer. The letters had been discovered in a metal box buried in a small cottage being torn down. A cover letter from the mayor of the town indicated they believed they had been meant for my grandfather, H. W. ‘Andy’ Anderson.
“Grandpa Andy had been a soldier in France with the American Expeditionary Force. I have been researching his journal, and discovered he spent part of the war in Paris - he was there during the German spring offensive of 1918 and the bombardments of Paris. He spent the majority of his time at a supply depot in the center of France, in Tours. He rotated home in April 1919, and his diary entries stopped. Sometime during this period, I believe he met the mysterious ‘Antoine.’
“Andy Anderson became a chaplain, worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, and was recalled to duty during World War II. However, he served in the Pacific, and as far as I can tell he never returned to Europe until the late 1970’s as a tourist - long after the last of the letters was written. At this time, I do not know who Antoine was, or what connection there may be between the two of them. I have started to try to track this connection down, but this is all I really know at this point. Suzanne É .”
“Thank you, Larry. OK. There are two groups of letters. One group are from the Reverend Anderson to ‘Antoine’ - in French, although as many of you have all seen, the French was a little ... creative.”
A small chuckle rippled through the crowd of students who had worked on translating.
“The second group are from Antoine to Anderson, although they were never mailed. The French in these is native, although there are some dialectical issues we had to deal with because of the region of origin.
“We’re going to go through the letters one at a time. After scanning the originals and subjecting them to electronic enhancements, my advanced French class split into teams and each created their own translation. We then compared and reconciled the differences, and I personally approved each version you see today.
“Professor Douglas from the history department has graciously agreed to provide a bit of historical context behind the time each letter was written. We will have a thorough discussion afterwards, so please hold your comments and questions until then. Can we have the lights, please?”
Professor Tauscher displayed the letters one by one. For each letter, Professor Douglas gave a brief description of what was happening in and around occupied France.
“At this stage,” he concluded, “we do not yet know who Antoine is, or how he is connected with Chaplain Anderson - who, if you recall, is back in the U.S. Army and serving in the Pacific.”
“OK, you have all seen the letters. Comments, or questions?”
Students in the auditorium nervously began to raise questions and concerns, prompting Professor Douglas to reach out in a loud, animated voice to elicit more interaction. He was a big man, perhaps 6’ 4” or so, and carried himself just as large, with a loud booming voice and a sharp, challenging intellect. He would accept no half-baked opinions or questions.
“Could this just be a hoax, professor?” asked one student, sitting near the back.
“Certainly, that would be something you would want to verify. You look at the paper, at the ink, the context in which the letters were found. All these are important considerations, but fairly easy to verify.”
“These letters,” another asked. “They are mostly mundane, except for the last ones. I don’t get the point. We can read about all of this time in books and on the Internet.”
“You can read what someone else thinks happened, but these people wrote about what was happening in their lives at the moment it happened. They did not have the advantage of hindsight. In the early letters, they cannot know what is about to be unleashed across Europe. As we read through them, feel the terror build, feel the tension, then try to imagine what was happening to prompt each line, each word.”
“But Professor, I mean, really, why would anyone write a letter they did not intend to mail, and then bury it along with all these others? I don’t get it.”
“Of course you don’t!” He boomed, bounding off the stage onto the floor, waving his arms dramatically. “Because here you are so safe, with your Blackberries and iPhones, exercising your little thumbs,” he chided as he worked his thumbs in a mock-texting manner.
“You do not have to worry about the secret Centralia police crashing down your door in the middle of the night and hauling you away to a concentration camp in Pe Ell. You don’t have to worry your classmate is selling information on your sexual escapades to the police who are planning to round up all of you ‘undesirables’ and ship you off to some place in Asotin County to die in a work camp. And your campus security does not carry submachine guns and haul away instructors like me who question authority.” His rant became more animated with every example.
“You live in a safe community with a tolerant government built of laws, despite your narcissistic complaining. All this we are reading laced in between the writing of the letters - this DID happen! And not in some long lost time, but in the time of your fathers and grandfathers! There are people still alive who wore the black skulls head of the SS, who ran the extermination camps, who jumped out of planes to parachute into flooded fields to liberate France, or somehow managed to survive the withering machine gun fire as they stormed the beaches on D-Day!”
He turned and pointed back to the last letter, still on the screen, and boomed out, “The anguish, fear, and resignation of that letter is all too real! This is what people felt and experienced every day as the world collapsed in chaos all around them! This is the stuff of history, ladies and gentlemen. Not Wikipedia or About.com!”
R
France, 1921
On a morning as cold and still as empty Peucel village, after he washed the wet earth of the cemetery from his hands, Antoine Bouchard headed out on the road again. He had enough bread to last a few days, some dried potatoes, the last slab of bacon from the pig, and two bottles of the old priest’s wine. By October he was wandering among the marshes and fields of the Brittany coast, doing odd jobs for food and a night out of the rain in a farmer’s shed.
“We need some wood chopped, for the kitchen. You can stay with the gardener.” The estate manager of the chateau was a rough and dour sort, but here was warm food and a pile of straw to sleep on. He had walked to the coastal plains of Brittany, seeking work, perhaps on one of the fishing boats that plied the waters of Biscay Bay. He received a cold reception from the villagers. His accent was neither Parisian nor Breton. He was not to be trusted.
But the chateau needed a constant supply of firewood, and Bouchard was young and strong. So many men had been lost to war that a struggling seaport needed a supply of labor. He would soon find hard work could overcome even the most suspicious of Breton minds.
Work was plentiful though it paid little. He worked for food, for a roof, and to forget. Forget the war, forget Alsace, forget captivity. Forget everything of his past life.
He would not forget his friend in America.
28 Oct 1921
My dear Andy,
It has been too long since I have been able to write. For this I am sorry. I am settled in a shed on the grounds of a magnificent chateau on the coast in Brittany. I chop wood for the chateau, and do what I can.
I am well, and I hope this letter finds you so. Write to me, and tell me of life in California.
The chateau manager, M. Garant, glared at me when I asked him to receive my letters, but he is not as disagreeable as he appears.
I wait for your reply.
Antoine
The address on the envelope read:
Chateau Domaine de Kerbastic
56520 Guidel - Morbihan
Bretagne Sud, France
R
The economy flight to Paris seemed like flying in a telephone booth, so I went ahead and splurged on my train ticket. Standing at the ticket counter in the Gare Montparnasse, one of Paris’ six main train stations, I weighed my options: Paris to Tours aboard a high-speed train, the Train ˆ Grande Vitesse (TGV); Nonstop, 1 hour 12 minutes; Economy, 56 E, Luxury â141 E. Luxury it was.
I had landed in Paris two days earlier and taken a cab from Charles De Gaulle Airport to a hotel in downtown, near the Opera House, where I met my daughter who joined me from Germany. I planned a few days in Paris to see the sights - my first time in country. I also brought my grandfather’s diary and planned to visit the hotels where he stayed and the places he visited.
The first was the Opera House, and Avenue de l’ OpŽra - the broad avenue Andy often mentioned where he strolled through the downtown core as a poor soldier in Paris. At the Opera House I asked my daughter to take my picture at the exact spot where Adolf Hitler had been photographed on the steps when he made his infamous visit immediately after the occupation of Paris in 1940.
The Hotel Sainte-Anne was just a few blocks away, so we strolled down the avenue until we reached a narrow side street off to the left, the Rue Sainte-Anne. A few blocks away I saw the sign on the side of the hotel and entered the lobby. The clerk, however, rather rudely insisted I was in the wrong place. “Le Fireman’s, Le Firemans,” she exclaimed in a combination of French and broken English, and pointed down the street. The St. Anne Hotel had been located about a block and a half from this location that was now called the Louvre Sainte-Anne. The original hotel location is a fire station, which explained the “Le Fireman’s.”
A tour bus offered the easiest way to get around downtown Paris, and it stopped along a prescribed route at all the places one might wish to visit - the Opera House, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower among many others. Busses arrived at the drop off points every few minutes and made moving about the downtown core very easy. At the Trocadero, I stood on the exact spot where Hitler had been photographed in his famous Eiffel Tower photo with Albert Speer and his favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, and recreated this photo as well.
After a visit to the Louvre, where I left my daughter to browse the collections, I trudged off for a rather long walk to find the MediterranŽe Hotel where Andy stayed most of the time he was in Paris. Like most of the Parisian hotels, it was a small “store front” hotel sandwiched among the historic buildings, but charming and elegant. The clerk was far more obliging than at the Louvre Sainte-Anne.
After saying good-bye to my daughter, I took the tour shuttle back to my hotel for my bags and had lunch. I then walked the short distance to Gare Montparnasse to board the TGV to Tours. I relaxed in comfort as the French countryside rolled by, reviewing my notes and preparing for my upcoming visit to the document archives.
Promptly on time, the TGV rolled into Tours-Saint-Pierre-des-Corps on the outskirts of Tours, across the canal from the city center. It serves as a hub for rail service radiating throughout France and is why Tours was such an ideal location for a headquarters unit. Now a modern city and rail system, the rail yards would have looked very different in 1918. The Gare Orleans in Tours, the train depot in the city core, is an end-of-the line station where trains do not pass through, so would not be as suitable for the rapid movement of men and materials for the war effort.
My hotel was located near the records hall in the city proper, but given the sunny weather and beautiful scenery, I chose to walk from the station into Tours instead of taking a cab. I crossed over the canal and walked the kilometer into the heart of the city, imagining walking in Andy’s footsteps. After settling into the hotel, I spent the afternoon leisurely exploring Tours, enjoying the beautiful sunny weather, and locating all the places listed in Andy’s diary. After a relaxing dinner in a corner bistro with a bottle of local wine, I returned to the hotel to prepare for my day tomorrow in the records section.
R
The Prefecture was a short distance away, and I met my contact at precisely 8:00 a.m.
“Bonjour,” I called out cheerily.
“Ah, bonjour Monsieur Hewitt. I have been expecting you.” The chief clerk at the records section, Monsieur DuprŽs, was an elderly gentleman with thick glasses who spoke very good English and had previously agreed to grant me access to the records. I could not remove anything from the records section, of course, but there were photocopy machines, and I was allowed to scan materials and copy them if needed for a fee. To protect the record assets, the chief clerk carefully monitored everything.
“I am not so sure you will find what you seek. I have worked here for over 30 years and cannot recall records such as you described. But perhaps you will uncover something to help you in your search.”
He led me into a small anteroom off the main records library where I could set up my computer and portable scanner and work in private. “As we discussed, please do not copy or scan anything until I have recorded the documents. Some may be confidential, though I doubt any such problems will arise from records as old as those you are seeking.”
“I understand. What I am looking for is very specific, and I do not need to copy much I am sure. We shall see.”
“Please call upon me if you need any assistance,” and he walked me into the archives and gave me a general look around to understand the structure.
“As you can see, this diagram reveals the general areas, although the information is of course in French. Can you translate these?”
“The labels are fairly self-explanatory, and I have a translator on my computer that can help.”
“Very well. Again, call on me if I can be of assistance.” M. DuprŽs returned to his desk at the entrance to the section.
I was alone among hundreds of shelves, file cabinets, tall movable ladders, and small working desks - it looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Inside the archives time stood still. Nothing stirred, and in the first eight hours not a soul came in to disturb me. The sound of traffic outside was the only indication there was life at all around me. I was still nowhere nearer my objective. When the office closed for the night, I was politely invited to return the following day.
Day two was the same. Dusty shelves gave way to thousands upon thousands of records, all in French of course, and difficult to read. After a while, however, the patterns of language became more familiar, and I was able to skim over large sections of information more efficiently. Again, my efforts yielded no results. At dinner that night, in the bistro on the corner near my hotel, I wondered just what I should do next. I was going nowhere.
On day three I had uncovered a series of cards in long trays that contained indexes to financial records back hundreds of years. The cards could not be removed from their trays, so I meticulously recorded the information of a series of cards from 1919 and went back to my working area next to the stacks and began to slowly, patiently, unravel the language barrier to see if any of these could be of help. By noon I was spent, emotionally and physically. I cleaned up and began to pack my computer away.
“Monsieur?” Her voice was very soft and muffled among the massive archive building.
“Oui,” I responded. I looked up and saw the young assistant clerk walk in with a wooden box of ledger cards in her arms.
“Monsieur, je m’‡ppelle CheriŽ HonorŽe. I am a clerk in this section. When I first came to work here I helped the public works department of the city locate records for a prisoner compound built near Tours-Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. I remember there were a series of requisitions issued to pay for materials used to build the compound, but there were no such payments for labor. This would be very unusual, for labor in the accounting system used back then would have been the first entry on a ledger.
“These are the ledgers kept for the expenses of that compound. Perhaps they may be of help to you. M. DuprŽs has asked me to help you today to go through these.”
There were several hundred ledgers, recording a multitude of expenses for Compound P223, a prisoner barracks built by the POWs themselves as such bivouacs often were. That explained the lack of labor expenditures. Going through the expense reports was tedious, and seemed hopeless.
“Monsieur, pardon,” the young clerk interrupted. “What was the name again of the army unit you were searching for?”
“The 447th Depot Detachment Engineers, AEF.”
“Perhaps you should look at this,” and she placed a faded ledger on the table in front of me. Near the bottom of the ledger was an entry, barely legible with age and yellowing of the ledger stock. It read,
14/6/19
P64335, transfer receipt, 447 DDE
85 fr
447 DDE-447th Depot Detachment Engineers! Grandpa Andy’s outfit. On June 14, 1919, a transfer fee of 85 francs, or approximately $16.40, was paid by the 447 DDE to the Department of Indre-et-Loire.
“What is this, P64335?”
“Why, monsieur, that would be the prisoner number for the person in this transfer.”
My pulse began to quicken. Here was the first concrete clue connecting anyone as a POW to my grandfather’s unit in Tours. But, I cautioned myself, there would be hundreds if not thousands of such prisoners.
“Perhaps M. DuprŽs can help. He is more knowledgeable about the history of Tours than I.” She disappeared, to return in a few minutes with the chief records clerk. He carefully inspected the ledger, and then cautiously began to unravel its possible implications.
“Well, you see,” he began, “Tours was a transfer center because of the railroads. Few soldiers remained here for any periods of time, except for the air deport and the support depot where your grandfather was stationed. Prisoners would be moved here, processed, and then moved out. Few were ever here permanently. If your “Antoine” was a prisoner here, there would be few traces to find, unless he were assigned to a stationary unit for some reason.”
“And if we found one, it would mean a high probability it could be him,” I extended the logic. “How can we find the name associated with this number?”
“Hmmm, that I do not know,” Monsieur DuprŽs answered.
The young clerk broke in excitedly.
“But M. DuprŽs, that would be easy! Come, I will show you!”
She excitedly left the room and headed for the stairs. She descended three flights, M. DuprŽs and I following, until she unlocked the basement door and entered another storage area.
“I remember moving these records here last spring,” she offered.
“Yes!” M. DuprŽs blurted out. “Yes. I remember. They must be here!”
The two started quickly scanning boxes of stored records, until Mlle HonorŽe let out a shout.
“Over here! ICI!”
Inside were ledger cards with names, numbers, and duty stations written in neat orderly rows. Each card was for a separate person. Each person had a number, beginning with “P” - prisoners of war.
“Look for any prisoner with the first name, Antoine. If your Antoine is here, he will be in such a group. Also, look for P64335. Since his name is French, there should be only a few, if any.” The “only a few” part was encouraging; the “if any” not so.
There were hundreds of cards in last name order, which might as well have been random since we did not know Antoine’s last name. With the three of us pouring over them, we were able to get through the box relatively quickly. It was Mlle HonorŽe who made the discovery.
“Oh, regarder ici! Mon Dieu! Voila!”
She held up a ledger card excitedly. It listed the locations and charge payments for prisoner P64335. Antoine Bouchard.
The three of us started at the ledger, as it stared back at us, incredulously.
“But how do we know it is THE Antoine?
“Come with me,” Monsieur DuprŽs snapped, and he grabbed up the ledger card and headed briskly back upstairs to his office.
He placed a phone call. “Monsieur Richard, s’il vous pl‰is.”
We waited for what seemed an eternity.
“Monsieur. M. DuprŽs, from the records section, le department d’ Indre-et-Loire ... Bien, merci. I have an emergency request. I need a payroll record from the 447 DDE, CO B, AEF, Tours, France, April, 1919 ... oui. Merci.”
He placed the phone down.
“It is time to go to lunch.”
The time dragged on as M. DuprŽs and I sat at the bistro across the street and shared a glass of wine.
“We must wait, but hopefully not for l