June, 1917
Paris, France
It was on a warm late spring morning that I arrived in my office to be greeted with a summons to the ambassador's office.
When I arrived, I stopped short, for Mr. Stark had a visitor, someone I knew well, and for whom I had decidedly mixed feelings.
Gen. John James Pershing was seated in a chair across from the ambassador's desk, and he rose when I entered the office.
"Sergeant Guidry," he said as he offered his hand in greeting, using the rank to which I had risen during my service in the Army. "You've done well for yourself. I'm pleased."
"General Pershing," I replied as we shook hands guardedly. "It has been a long time."
For just a moment, my mind went back to the steamy jungles of the Philippines, where I had served under Black Jack Pershing in subduing the Moros.
In some respects, I admired the man. He was a very capable soldier, and leader of men in combat. We had become well-acquainted during our time in the Philippines, and he had been crucial in the advancement of my military career.
However, I also came to believe that he was at least partly responsible for some of the excesses that American troops engaged in during that bloody conflict.
I should make it clear that I don't know for certain whether he ordered or even knew about some of the darker things that went on there.
But I have always been convinced that he at least suspected some things were happening there that shouldn't have been going on, and that his attitude of doing whatever it took to achieve the objective -- in this case, subduing Aguinaldo's rebels -- fostered an atmosphere where atrocities could be committed.
American activities in the Philippines were a deep dark secret in certain circles in the Army. It was a forgotten episode in a faraway part of the world, nobody was willing to speak up, and, frankly, nobody was probably willing to listen at that point in time.
However, Pershing himself had given me a letter of recommendation that eased my entry into LSU when I left the Army, and helped me obtain my position with the college's militia, so I was somewhat beholden to him, and perhaps that ensured my silence on the matter.
All of that passed through my mind in but a heartbeat, then I focused on the task at hand. I had been brought in for a specific reason, and I suspected my previous service under Pershing was a major factor in that reason.
Pershing had just arrived in Paris a week or so before to begin the process of establishing an American presence in the war. He was to be the supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Force, which would soon be joining the French and British in fighting Germany.
As I had expected all along, the Germans had finally done something stupid that pushed the United States into the war on the side of the Allies.
The stated reason was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which President Wilson believed was a grievous breach of American neutrality, and which many Americans believed was an inappropriately sneaky way to wage war.
Personally, I thought that was incredibly naïve. The British blockade of the European continent, which Germany rightly called a, "starvation blockade," was having a debilitating effect on the German people, and the best means at their disposal to fight that blockade was the submarine, which by its very nature was a stealth weapon.
And there was no doubt in my mind -- nor that of anyone in the know -- that American merchant ships headed for Britain were secretly carrying armaments to Britain that ended up with the Allied armies.
So I didn't have a serious moral problem with unrestricted submarine warfare as a tactic of war, and by itself that might not have been enough to jolt America out of its neutrality.
What did it was the so-called Zimmerman Telegram, a notorious bit of correspondence from the German foreign minister, Alfred Zimmerman, to the German Embassy in Washington. The British had intercepted the telegram, figured out what it meant and had eagerly -- gleefully -- passed it on to the Americans.
Basically, the Germans were suggesting an alliance with Mexico against the United States, and in return Mexico would be given the states of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in the event of a German victory.
It was outrageous and outlandish on its face, because Mexico was in no position to offer Germany any sort of material assistance in the war. Mexico was more than five years deep into a bloody and chaotic civil war that had left that nation ruined.
In fact, Jack Pershing himself had spent months campaigning in Mexico with a small force in pursuit of Mexican bandits after one of them, one Pancho Villa, had come across the border and shot up a small town in New Mexico.
Nevertheless, the mere thought of some of our states as booty in the Great War inflamed American opinion, never mind the fact that we had taken those very states from Mexico by force almost 70 years earlier.
It was that something stupid that I had told Marcel Lévesque years earlier would be what got the U.S. into the war, and in April, the president had declared war on Germany.
Now, Gen. Pershing was in Paris with his staff and my assignment was to be a liaison with him and his staff in acclimating them to the brutal realities of war on the Western Front.
We weren't any too soon getting involved, either. Just weeks earlier, the Tsar of Russia had abdicated and a democratic government had been formed, but it was precariously perched in power, and Russia's continued involvement in the war was uncertain.
My good friend Sergei Hoffman had been called back to Russia, and he had reluctantly gone home. We had enjoyed a farewell dinner at Marcel's the night before he departed, and he wished Madeleine and I good luck.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I would never see my friend again. We heard from him for awhile through letters he sent, but after the Bolsheviks took power in November, those letters stopped, and we never heard from him again.
I can only assume that as a diplomat for and a minor noble in the tsarist regime that he had been a target of the Bolsheviks and that he had paid for that with his life in the madness that befell Russia in the years that followed the revolution of 1917.
I spent the rest of that day, and the rest of the week in consultations with Pershing and his staff members. I quickly realized that I needed to disabuse our officers of the nature of this war.
"There is nothing glorious about the fighting in this war," I told a group of staffers in a lecture one afternoon. "It is dirty, brutal, monotonous, terrifying and bloody."
The next week, I got an assignment that both thrilled and terrified me. I was asked to accompany an American pilot to take some aerial photos of the front lines.
The pilot was one of the men who had been flying and fighting with the so-called Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American volunteers who brought their expertise to the Allies.
I had never been up in an airplane before, and the experience was like nothing I'd ever had before. It was exhilarating in one sense, but I was also shaken by the thought of the many things that could have gone wrong.
We were not up there to fight, but to do some reconnaissance, and I wasn't sure what would happen if we had encountered an enemy plane.
We were actually flying over German territory, and I was afraid we would draw the attention of the Germans, who would send a squadron up to take care of us. But, fortunately, we were able to do our business unimpeded.
Another concern was the matter of taking photos from the rear cockpit of an early airplane. I had to take a firm grip on the camera and lean slightly out of the open cockpit to shoot. Sure, I was strapped in, still, it was a terrifying experience.
From up high, however, one could get a real sense of the trench system, and the photos I took were instrumental in giving me and the Army staff the overall picture of the geography of the war.
Nevertheless, I was relieved when we finally landed. I kissed the ground when I disengaged from the plane, much to the amusement of my pilot.
In early June, something happened that drove home the importance of my job. Earlier in the spring, the French had suffered heavy losses in a futile assault near Verdun, and the French troops reached their breaking point.
Thousands of French soldiers had mutinied, and others who were prodded into battle marched to the front bleating in derision, the implication being that they were simply sheep being led to slaughter, which was not far from the truth.
Gen. Pershing heard about the mutiny and pressed to me the importance that something like that must not happen with our troops.
The French mutiny, however, was a manifestation of a wider war-weariness that was finding more and more expression in art and literature, as well as on the streets of Paris. Nearly three years of butchery, with no end in sight, had fostered a bitterness and a coarsening of life that was palpable in Paris, so close to the front.
I, for one, had taken to carrying my trusty pistol with me at all times, even in public. I procured a smaller one for Madeleine, as well, and I took her out to the country south of the city to teach her how to use it, should it become necessary. I was taking no chances with my life, nor that of the woman I loved.
