Remembering Another Kind of War

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/world/europe/remembering-another-kind-of-war.html

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MONTFAUCON D'ARGONNE, France — The austere, white headstones stretch in geometric lines, below linden trees, seeming to march into the fall gloaming much as the 14,246 American soldiers whose names they bore once advanced on German lines toward the end of World War I.

Marc Calluy, a hotelier from this village dominated by a 200-foot Doric column dedicated to the United States First Army’s role in the 47-day campaign that ended the conflict in 1918, surveyed the vista that has become familiar to him. “We can only pray — never again,” he said.

Then he checked himself.

By coincidence, his impromptu tour of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery just south of here — “the largest American military cemetery in Europe,” according to the American Battle Monuments Commission — took place last week on Sept. 11, 14 years to the day after the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon signaled a different kind of global conflict. And it was tempting to compare war then and now.

Here, in these hills and forests, 600,000 soldiers from the American Expeditionary Force were deployed under cover of darkness for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, backed by 2,700 field guns that pounded German positions for three hours in preparation for what, at the time, was described as the biggest battle fought by American soldiers. They “died for their country,” a carved inscription says.

But modern war, particularly the so-called war against terrorism, is not so much about nation as faith and ideology, and there are no massed divisions on the scale of 20th-century cataclysms.

Just recently, for instance, Britain ordered a drone strike to kill two of its citizens in Syria fighting with the Islamic State — a clinical excision ostensibly designed to forestall terrorism on British streets.

Compare that with the close-quarters death of Cpl. Freddie Stowers, who perished in his early 20s, the first black American to be awarded the Medal of Honor for his role in World War I, albeit posthumously in 1991. Under withering machine-gun fire, he led his racially segregated unit until he was mortally wounded on Hill 188 in the Champagne Marne Sector of the front on Sept. 28, 1918. He is buried in the cemetery near here, his name picked out in gold.

“On that September day, Corporal Stowers was alone, far from family and home,” the first President George Bush said as he awarded the medal. “He had to be scared; his friends died at his side. But he vanquished his fear and fought not for glory but for a cause larger than himself: the cause of liberty.”

The same might have been said, this week, of the pilots who flew their Spitfires and Hurricanes against German bombers in the Battle of Britain, who were commemorated on Tuesday with a flyby of vintage warplanes in southern England.

All wars breed fear, in World War I of shells and bullets and gas and death. Now, there is the oft-unspoken dread of some capricious act of violence — private angst fed with images of beheadings and bombings designed to unnerve entire Western societies.

The Meuse-Argonne campaign at least was finite. It had a beginning and an end with the armistice on Nov. 11, victory defined by the physical act of surrender. Who would forecast such conclusive clarity in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria?

Perhaps that is why Freddie Stowers’s war should not be forgotten.

A traveler who arrived in this corner of northeastern France was struck by the force of memory in these wooded lands, where people like Mr. Calluy have uncovered century-old drinking glasses and bayonets, rifles and helmets and munitions.

“There is a lot more left in the ground,” he said. Indeed, carved into the stone panels overlooking the cemetery are the names of 954 American soldiers listed as missing. Their “earthly resting place is known only to God,” an inscription says.