Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (22 page)

Strut and Hunch, our scout comrades, had agreed to meet at the Y Hut or canteen in a military reserve area. Soldiers in reserve units were on a slight pause and prepared to relieve other units and divisions in combat. The canteens were common in training areas, but scarce near the front lines. The canteen was a combat café and sold groceries, cigarettes, and other items.

Frances Gulick was our mother, sister, reverie lover, and saint on the manly way to combat. No doubt thousands of soldiers were charmed by her warm smile. I remember the dimple on her chin, the dark gray uniform
with a blue collar, and she wore black stockings and laced shoes. Frances was the first canteen worker we had met in France. She was astonished that we had hawked the
Tomahawk
, and that my articles on the war were published on the reservation. She was rather sentimental about the absence of natives in history, and had no idea that there were so many native soldiers in the war. We drove with her once as she delivered newspapers, the
Paris Herald
,
Chicago Tribune
,
Daily Mail
, and
Stars and Stripes
to soldiers near the front lines. My brother painted the blue wings of a raven over a canteen, a gift that brought tears to her eyes. Naturally we expected to meet her at another canteen. Frances, we learned later, had been permanently attached to the First Engineers.

The Young Men's Christian Association sponsored the canteens and many other activities for soldiers. The Salvation Army, Jewish Welfare Board, and the Knights of Columbus were active in services to soldiers. I would proudly serve the native Knights of Augustus, or my uncle, the Knights of Aloysius, my brother, Margaret, my mother, Odysseus, the trader, or Misaabe, the healer, but not as a token in a chess game or in the name of Christopher Columbus.

The canteen was a tent, nothing more, with a few tables and chairs. We ordered hot chocolate and waited for our comrades. The roads were badly rutted and crowded with supply trucks, artillery wagons, and equipment moving in both directions. We could hear in the distance the lurch and clatter of light tanks, always the disabled and noisy French Renault.

I leaned back in the chair and imagined that the war was over and we had returned to the livery stable at the Hotel Leecy. The maple leaves had turned magical and radiant in the bright morning light that brisk autumn on the reservation. The sandhill cranes were on the wing, ravens bounced on the leafy roads, and the elusive cedar waxwings hovered in the bright red sumac.

The forests around the canteen tent were creased by savagery, and shattered from constant artillery explosions. The hornbeam, oak, and beech were broken, turned awry and slanted in grotesque war scenes, but the few tattered leaves that remained on the trees were brilliant, the glorious banners of nature not nations.

The French Fourth Army and fifteen divisions of American Expeditionary Forces had advanced against the enemy on the front line more than
twenty miles wide near the Meuse River. September, the first phase of the offensive, was cold and rainy, and the narrow muddy roads to the hilly combat areas were blocked with command motor cars, ammunition trucks, and artillery wagons.

The Meuse offensives and the Battle of the Argonne were so massive that the logistics to move equipment and supplies to the soldiers were unworkable. Many soldiers in fierce combat, for instance, had not eaten for four days. The soldiers carried out the strategies of the generals on empty stomachs. The allied command decisions to deploy and supply so many divisions were only mighty mappery.

The Hindenburg Line of enemy trenches, bunkers, and other defenses ran more than a hundred miles from Lens, a commune northeast of Arras, near Saint-Quentin, and Reims, and then to the south past Verdun. The Germans used prisoners of war to build concrete bunkers, emplacements for machine guns, and secure command posts to direct artillery.

The military objectives of the first two phases of the offensive were to penetrate the lines of the enemy and capture the commune of Sedan, a major railroad center near the Meuse River and the border with Belgium. The American Expeditionary Forces crossed the Aire River near Verdun and advanced through the Argonne forest and the valley of the Meuse River.

The French forces crossed the Aisne River and advanced at the same time on the left of the American infantry toward Mézières on the Meuse River north of Sedan. The casualties, dead and wounded, were very high at every commune, farm, forest, and turn in the road, and extremely high in the Battle of Montfaucon. The Germans directed artillery fire from concrete bunkers on a hill near a church. The intense resistance slowed the surprise advance of allied soldiers in the first phase of the offensive.

The American Expeditionary Forces in six weeks suffered some twenty-six thousand dead in combat and more than ninety-six thousand wounded in the Meuse River and Battle of the Argonne.

The American Expeditionary Forces that served in the two offensives that defeated the enemy and ended the war included former National Guard divisions, the Red Arrow, Rainbow, Blue and Grey, Keystone, Santa Fe, and the Buckeye Division. The Regular Army divisions included the
Statue of Liberty, Pine Tree, Trailblazers, Buffalo Soldiers, and Ivy, or the nicknamed Poison Ivy Division.

Corporal Lawrence Vizenor, our close cousin, was drafted and mustered early to train at Camp Logan, Texas. He was transferred to Camp Merritt, New York, and then boarded the
Mount Vernon
at Hoboken, New Jersey. The ship docked at Brest, France. We sailed on the very same troop ship and arrived at the same port, but about a month later. Lawrence was a soldier in the Thirty-Third Infantry Division. He survived the bloody battle of Château-Thierry only a few weeks before we drove through the ruins, the Second Battle of the Marne, the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, and he was an infantry soldier in the Battle of the Argonne, the second phase of the offensive in early October 1918.

Hunch arrived with a heavy bandage on his right hand. A few days earlier he had disarmed an enemy soldier and was cut by a bayonet. Aloysius teased him that the protection of the blue raven pendant would not cover the ordinary cuts and bruises of a scout. Hunch returned the tease with a reference to our fur trade surname and native rights to the nearby Forêt-de-Beaulieu. We pretended that our relatives once owned that forest in France.

Strut ordered hot chocolate, a favorite at every canteen, and then he turned, smiled, and declared how natural that four native scouts drank chocolate because the actual drink was first prepared by the native Aztec and Maya.

Strut had talked to several scouts in the Thirty-Third Division and was told that Corporal Lawrence Vizenor had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross a few weeks earlier on October 8, 1918, for extraordinary heroism at Bois-de-Fays in Forêt d'Argonne, the Forest of Argonne. Bois-de-Fays was a hilly wooded area more than twenty miles wide between Cunel and Brieulles-sur-Meuse.

Lawrence was on patrol with several other infantry soldiers, a reconnaissance mission to gather strategic information on enemy positions and fortifications. The patrol encountered intense fire from an enemy machine gun emplacement in the forest. Three soldiers turned back and found cover in a trench. Lawrence and the officer in charge of the patrol, and one other soldier, continued to advance on the enemy positions. The officer was mortally
wounded in the chest by gunfire from a machine gun. Lawrence and the other soldier circled the enemy machine gunner and shot him in the head and chest. Lawrence disabled the machine gun and then carried the wounded officer to a medical aid station.

Private Ignatius Vizenor died in combat at Montbréhain on Tuesday, October 8, 1918. He was a close cousin and one of the most elegantly dressed natives on the reservation. Ignatius died on the very same day that his younger brother Lawrence was decorated for heroism some hundred miles away at Bois-de-Fays.

The brothers wore blue raven pendants.

Montbréhain was a commune east of Saint-Quentin, near Ramicourt and Brancourt-le-Grand, and a critical military position close to the Hindenburg Line during the Hundred Days Offensive. The artillery bombardments had weakened the enemy, but in turns the military strategies were savage and catastrophic to the ordinary way of life in the countryside. The pastoral cultures of sugar beets, Charolais white cattle, bygone chapels, and houses with fancy brick patterns, concrete lintels, and heavy lace window curtains were in ruins. The allied casualties sustained to recover these common country scenes have forever wounded the relatives of the dead soldiers, haunted the memories and stories of war veterans on the reservation, and the strategies of the military commanders have been recounted around the world. The war started with empires, horse parades, and manly military traditions and ended with havoc, constraint, enormous tanks and cannons, and new commune cultures of women without men.

Private Ignatius Vizenor and other soldiers of the Thirtieth Infantry Division were assigned to the British Second Army in northeastern France. Later, several infantry regiments were ordered to advance against the enemy at Bellicourt and Bony. Ignatius and the Hundred Eighteenth Infantry Regiment advanced under machine gun fire on Sentinel Hill near Bellicourt. The Australian infantry moved on both flanks to enclose the enemy. Ignatius survived the fierce combat and served bravely with the British and Australian Corps.

The Hindenburg Line was breached in late September 1918, and thousands of allied soldiers defeated the enemy in bloody battles at Montbréhain. The Thirtieth Division was ordered to the front lines a few days later to continue the advance against the enemy in early October 1918.

Ignatius rested overnight in the ruins of a farmhouse. Early the next morning the infantry regiment secured positions in the muddy trenches east of Montbréhain. Private Vizenor and other soldiers in the Hundred Eighteenth Infantry Regiment were ordered to lead the perilous offensive. The military objective was Prémont to the east of Montbréhain. The infantry regiment advanced with artillery and heavy tank support early that rainy morning, Tuesday, October 8, 1918, sixty-two days into the Hundred Days Offense. Ignatius was shot in the chest by an enemy machine gun. He collapsed and died slowly on a cold and muddy verge near a new series of trenches east of Montbréhain.

Private Ignatius Vizenor entered service on February 25, 1918, and trained at Camp Dodge, Iowa, and then was sent to Camp Sevier, South Carolina, a new military training cantonment. Ignatius and the other soldiers were then transported to Camp Merritt, New Jersey. A few days later the division embarked from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the
Haverford
for a twelve-day voyage to Liverpool, England.

The soldiers were transported by train to Dover and by channel steamer to Calais, France. The Thirtieth Division continued training at Reques, France. Ignatius and other infantry soldiers were ordered to exchange their standard Springfield Rifles issued by the American Expeditionary Forces for British Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles, belts, bayonets, and other equipment. The Thirtieth Division was assigned to the British Expeditionary Forces in France.

Tuesday, October 8, 1918, was no ordinary day in the course of war or peace. That day became an epoch of native memories. Private Charles Beaupré, for instance, served in the American Tank Corps and died in action at Saint-Quentin, France. He was born on the White Earth Reservation and died in combat on the same day as Ignatius Vizenor, and the same day that Corporal Lawrence Vizenor was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Sergeant Thomas Lee Hall received the United States Medal of Honor for valor on October 8, 1918, at Montbréhain. Sergeant Hall, who served in the same infantry regiment as Ignatius Vizenor, advanced on an enemy machine gun position and killed five enemy soldiers. Ignatius and Thomas Hall died on the same day in combat.

Corporal Alvin York received the United States Medal of Honor and the
French Croix de Guerre for valor on October 8, 1918, at Chatel-Chéhéry in the Argonne Forest. He had served with the Eighty-Second Infantry Division. York was the leader of an attack on enemy machine gun positions and in the course of the maneuvers he captured more than a hundred soldiers.

I read more of book five of
The Odyssey
that night.
Then, as one who lives alone in the country, far from any neighbor, hides a brand as fire-seed in the ashes to save himself from having to get a light elsewhere, even so did Ulysses cover himself up with leaves; and Minerva shed a sweet sleep upon his eyes, closed his eyelids, and made him lose all memories of his sorrows.

Ellanora Beaulieu lost her memories and her sorrow as a military nurse in the Army of Occupation. She was buried at the Episcopal Calvary Cemetery on the White Earth Reservation. Ellanora and Ignatius Vizenor were the only direct native relatives who died in the First World War.

John Clement Beaulieu, Paul Hudon Beaulieu, Paul Vizenor, Lawrence Vizenor, Robert Fairbanks, Allan Fairbanks, Romain Fairbanks, Everett Fairbanks, Truman Fairbanks, George Fairbanks, Arthur Fairbanks, Herman Trotterchaud, Allen Trotterchaud, and other relatives served with honor in the American Expeditionary Forces in France and returned to the White Earth Reservation.

Patch Zhimaaganish returned a corporal and was honored as a hero at the government school. Even the federal agent celebrated his service in the war. Patch was hired by the Soo Line Railroad as a conductor on passenger trains and sang his way around the country for more than twenty years.

The First World War continues forever on the White Earth Reservations in the stories of veterans and survivors of combat. We were the native descendants of the fur trade who returned with new stories from France.

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P
ONT DES
A
RTS

— — — — — — —
1919
— — — — — — —

The German government had consented to end the war on November 11, 1918. Yes, a mere promise between generals, an agreement to cease the brutality, but never an actual declaration of surrender. The armistice was formally signed in a railway carriage in Forêt de Compiègne, the Compiègne Forest, between Saint-Quentin and Paris.