Thursday, October 10,2019: Meuse-Argonne, Compiègne, Paris

We checked out of the Le Tulipier hotel in Vienne Le Chateau. This was the worst hotel of the trip, thus far. Cold breakfasts and minimal amenities.

Before leaving town we stopped a the inevitable war memorial in the center of town. We didn't do any walking around town since the hotel was located about a mile out in the woods. Pretty, but not very convenient. I took some photos of the center of town. It is very clean with nice looking buildings.

For one of the few times on the trip, there is actually some blue sky in the morning. As it will turn out, we did get rained on later in the morning so as not to disrupt out string of daily rains.

We don't have many stops on the last full day of our tour. The first one is at the largest American cemetery in the Western hemisphere and only second in size to the one in the Philippines. The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery currently is the home of just over 14,000 American soldiers. At its peak, there were over 26,000 in the cemetery, but over the years, many of those have been repatriated back to the US.

Almost all of those buried here died in the last six weeks of the war, October and November 1918, during the last major engagement of the war, the Meuse-Argonne offensive. We found many who died after the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

We first got an introduction by the Superintendent Bruce Malone (Bruce Malone) who has been at the cemetery for the past nine years and was obviously very happy to have a bunch of Americans come visit him. He estimated that only about 10% of the ~50,000 visitors that come to the cemetery are Americans. The exception of course was last year, on the centennial of the Armistice.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive was the largest engagement ever experienced by the US Army with over 1.2 million American soldiers taking part.

After breaking free of Bruce, we wandered around the cemetery at our leisure. It is an extremely well kept place. Bruce assured us that the US will not spare any expense to honor those residing here. Something I reminded him of just before we departed.

A soldier who died the day AFTER the war ended

This soldier died on the day of the Armistice

I found a couple of Howells

Bruce told us about the Marine who was awarded the Army Medal of Honor (the Marines fought with the Army's 2nd Division during the battle) for his actions. Being a Marine however, the Navy decided he should be award the Navy Medal of Honor. I didn't know that at that time, the different services had different Congressional Medals of Honor. After Matej was awarded his two medals, it was decided that, in the future, there would be only one Congressional Medal of Honor for all the services. We found Matej Kocak's marker.

We walked up to the chapel, where on the wings are engraved the names of the missing.

If you zoom in, you can see the Montfaucon Memorial on the far high ground, 7 km away

The other US battles relative to the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery

Neither Stephen or I were familiar with the Pioneer military occupation. Stephen thought they were a branch or variant of an Engineer. He was correct. As it turns out, both Pioneers and Engineers are Sappers, or a soldier who performs a variety of military engineering duties such as breaching fortifications, demolitions, bridge-building, laying or clearing minefields, preparing field defenses, as well as working on road and airfield construction and repair.

If there is a distinction between the two nouns, it is that the Pioneer moves ahead of the main combat formations to prepare the means for the main force to move ahead, building bridges, tunnels, etc. An Engineer seems to be a more general category and could include someone working behind the lines on infrastructure to support on-going operations, building airfields, ports, etc.

It was getting close to the time to head back to the bus when I noticed the marker of Esdras R. Wheatley from Idaho who died on October 16, 1918. What caught my eye was that it showed Esdras was a Sargent First Class in the 43rd Balioon Company. Either this was a typo, or I needed to look up what a Balioon Company was responsible for doing.

A few markers down, I found the marker of Everette J. Cooper who was a private first class in the First Balloon Company.

When I got back to the bus, Bruce Malone was there chatting with the others and I showed him my picture of the Balioon marker. Bruce was shocked and said he would see to it that the misspelling was corrected immediately. I'm not sure why the haste since it has been this way for almost 100 years.

Another Howell

We loaded up and drove about two hours toward Paris where the tour will end. Our last stop was Compiègne where the Armistice was signed on November 1, 1918 and where the French surrendered to Germany in 1940.

The actual rail car where the 1918 and 1940 signings took place was destroyed in Germany during WWI. The car we observed is one of several built that was configured in the same manner as the famous No. 2419. This car was actually No. 2439.

On to Paris where we checked into the Hotel Mercure Paris CDG. We had a farwell dinner at the hotel. Most are flying out in the morning. We are going to check out and taxi to our hotel for the next three nights, the Hotel Duc de Saint-Simon, in the center of Paris (Hotel Duc de Saint-Simon).