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An American on the Western Front
The First World War Letters of Arthur Clifford Kimber, 1917â"18
By Patrick Gregory, Elizabeth Nurser The History Press
Copyright © 2016 Patrick Gregory & Elizabeth Nurser
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6910-9
CHAPTER 1
BANTHEVILLE, OCTOBER 1920
The farmer posed proudly in his tractor, staring out over the freshly dug earth at the two Americans. The men were both grimy and sweating from their exertions in digging the heavy, debris-laden mud. It had been a long day for them, only partially successful, and the light was beginning to fade. The farmer hadn't used his tractor to help them – it was too delicate a process for that, he knew – but he'd been on hand to advise and encourage them nonetheless, to help them move some of the heavier earth. Now, at his request, one of the men was taking his picture. A memento, perhaps, of a successful day yet to come, a day when the man with the camera might find his brother.
George Kimber had only recently arrived in Europe, the first time on a continent he hadn't quite made it to as a 10-year-old boy. But this was different. Then, a family holiday in England, after a year's schooling for his elder brothers in Canterbury, had ended with John and Clifford having an extended adventure with their father in mainland Europe, while young George had accompanied his mother back to Brooklyn. But now here he was, back in his own right, in Europe to study. A botanist by training, he had taken up the offer of a scholarship at the University of Brussels, the guest of an organisation which was a hangover of the recent war in Europe, the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. His work under Professor Rutot was as enlightening as it was challenging: he was enjoying his time, enjoying the rigours of the study; and he liked Brussels and Belgium.
But he wasn't in Belgium today. He was standing in what once had been a garden, now strewn with rubble and weeds, in a small village in north-eastern France; and the reason he was there had nothing to do with botany, with the possible exception of the tangle of weeds beneath his feet. Part of what had brought him to Europe in the first place, and this village in particular, was unfinished business with one of his brothers. It wasn't about his regrets at not accompanying him when he was a boy: this time it was to find his body. Because Clifford had not just travelled to Europe once without him: he had gone back again as a young man in the service of his country, and that second time he hadn't returned. His big brother was frozen in time as a 22 year old, just George's age now.
The village of Bantheville and its surroundings were still recovering from the war: the evidence of the war's ravages was still around and about. Two years on, give or take a few weeks, and its after-affects were still to be seen and touched, the detritus under his feet and some remaining mementoes in the ground which sloped above him up to the churchyard, twisted metal reminders of a conflict which had claimed so many. The many in this area had included local French men and women, of course. It also included the German battery which had operated from the village, and it also numbered the young American pilot who had tried to silence the battery.
It had been the opening day of an offensive in this Romagne area of northeastern France, part of a wider Franco-American push to break the resolve of the German forces here at the end of September 1918. Arthur 'Clifford' Kimber had been sent in sometime after 11 o'clock on that misty morning, following the line of the road up from Grandpré to Dun-sur-Meuse. At Bantheville, focusing in on a target on the ground, Clifford had begun to dive. But artillery fire from the ground caught him, his plane exploded, stopping him forever, the wreckage plunging down to the ground and the village.
George remembered the letter his family had received at the time from Cliff's commanding officer. 'He was an excellent flier', Captain Ray Claflin Bridgman had said, 'made a good record while with the squadron and gave his life for a noble cause'. But what ate at George was the fact that his brother's body had never been recovered – and there was an actual body, he was sure of that. A body which had been buried, and somewhere here; he had ascertained as much from various sources. But the question was, where? There was no concrete information from the various sources he had contacted as to where exactly a grave might be, and no obvious clue on the ground here, no marker certainly, and in terms of intelligence only conjecture from the locals. So this was a new chapter for him, trying to fit more pieces into the jigsaw of information that he and his mother had assembled over the last couple of years. Now he was digging into the earth beneath him to see if his belief could be vindicated.
Before setting out for Europe, George and his mother Clara had managed, through various intermediaries, to contact a member of Clifford's old 22nd Aero Squadron unit, a former airman who, they had heard, might hold a clue. Lieutenant John A. Sperry had been shot down and captured by the Germans somewhere near Bantheville days before Clifford's plane was destroyed and had seen an ID tag in the possession of a German officer – Oberleutnant Goerz – and he recognised it as Clifford's tag. If a tag had been found, perhaps it had been recovered from a body. Also, Sperry had been told, a body had been recovered and buried somewhere nearby. Armed with these snippets, and once settled in Brussels in the autumn of 1920, George had written to the German authorities in Berlin. But the information he had received back from the Deutsche Militär Kommission – a numeric list answering his various queries – had been dispiriting:
There was no information available on his query from the German Central Records Office in Berlin.
The warden of Bantheville cemetery says there is no grave there belonging to Arthur Clifford Kimber.
Oberleutnant Goerz has no information. He burned records after the war.
Re: the shooting down of Clifford's plane – It has been ascertained that a Spad plane was brought down by the anti-aircraft battery no. 721 in the western section of the Meuse, behind the German lines, on September 26th, 1918, according to a notice contained in the war diary of the Commander of the Anti-Aircraft of the 5th German Army. As the aforesaid battery had taken up position in the vicinity of Bantheville at the time when the Spad airplane was shot down, it is supposed that this plane was that of the 1st Lt. A.C. Kimber.
So George now found himself in Bantheville in the fading light of an October day. He had to determine for himself what the parameters he was searching within were, what the area looked like, where the obvious places to look might be, how many clearly unmarked graves there were to contend with. He needed to see who might give him some clues, to ask locals what they remembered. Before he set out from Brussels he had written ahead to the local authorities at the American Graves Registration Service who, since the war, had been assembling the nearby American Cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. He asked if anyone might help him search and, also, if they could recommend anywhere to stay nearby. They had replied promptly, assuring him that someone would be on hand to assist him when he arrived and that rooms were available in the Hostess House of their local YWCA. So George had set out, travelling, as was his wont, with two suitcases, one full and one empty, the latter to be filled in the course of his travels with dirty clothes.
The man from the cemetery delegated to help him was Captain Chester Staten and, after making contact with him at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, the two set out towards Bantheville. A quick inspection of the graveyard of the church there bore out what George had already been told: there were no plots bearing the name of Kimber. So they began chatting to some of the locals: what did they know? Did they have any leads or suggestions? Rather curiously, the first thing they discovered was that they weren't the first Americans to visit the village recently looking for a body. An American officer had come from Germany, from Halle, to look for the body of a fellow serviceman, an American lieutenant, an aviator. The officer had been looking, on the locals' suggestion, in the very area George now stood – the garden between the church and the road.
The officer, whoever he was, had apparently found nothing when he looked. That didn't deter George: he wanted to do his own searching and his own digging. George and Captain Staten got to work with spades, turning over the ground as carefully as the soil would allow and throwing rocks and debris to one side. It was hard going. The ground was heavy and frosty and after several hours of labour their work showed only glimmers of hope. Human remains were there all right, and even then, not one but two bodies, but these were not their fellow countrymen: they were the bodies of two German soldiers, possibly simply buried in the ground where they had fallen two years before. The two men decided to suspend their dig for the time being, mindful that in turning over this lumpy ground they might be disturbing and cutting through more bodies – German, American or French – than they were uncovering. 'It was best not to work over the garden too thoroughly,' George wrote later in a letter to his mother, 'for fear of obliterating all traces of graves, until we have more definite information.' They decided to wait some months until springtime when, it was hoped, the ground would be more friable and easily sifted.
But their earlier search of the ground up near the church had proved more fruitful. Among the detritus of metal and other tangled remains left over from the war, they managed to uncover – rather surprisingly, given that it was now two years since the war had ended – the parts of two aircraft, including the two engines. The wreckage of the first was above ground, the second partly buried in the soil. Carefully removing a marker containing a number from the first, Staten then dug down into the earth to see if he could find any clue as to the make and origin of the second, eventually retrieving a metal plate with a serial number. These could, George hoped, prove to be vital clues.
CHAPTER 2
LETTER-WRITING
29 October 1920
Back in Brussels, George wrote to the Headquarters of the American Forces in Germany in Koblenz, reporting on what he had pieced together thus far. Could they, stationed in Germany, uncover more information on Clifford from German records? It had been a German garrison after all, so could those records provide a clue as to who might be buried there, and where? He said he had heard of several cases of new records being found in the German war offices, apparently previously overlooked, concerning the graves of Allied soldiers who had been buried by the Germans. He had been told as much at the cemetery in Romagne and on a recent visit to Paris.
He also asked the Koblenz office for information about the officer who had preceded him to Bantheville, the one from the American base in Halle. Whose grave was he searching for? Where had he obtained information that there was the grave of an aviator? George told them he was certain that Clifford's body was somewhere to be found in the village. He had the word of the Red Cross for that: they had stated 'definitively' to that effect in a letter to him two years previously. He and Captain Staten had also now found plane wreckage at Bantheville which he thought could be Clifford's; and there was that third piece of information to go on – the testimony of Lieutenant Sperry.
In terms of possible locations the area to concentrate on, he told them, in a phrase he was to find himself writing time and time again over the next year, was the patch of garden or grassland between the road and the church in the village. He wanted to leave them in no doubt about that: that was the area to be concentrated on, where a thorough search must be undertaken. Yet in private correspondence home he was more muted, conceding that his conviction was based more on a balance of probabilities: 'From the stories told me by the peasants [locals in Bantheville] who, unfortunately, are not always in accord, and from the more positive information I have regarding the circumstances of my brother's death, I am inclined to believe that his grave is in the garden.'
23 November 1920
George wrote to his collaborator in the search in Bantheville, Captain Staten, at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. He had another piece of information for him to pass on to his Graves Registration Service colleagues there. George had written to his mother in Palo Alto back in California to check on a letter she had received eighteen months before. The Adjutant General's Office at the War Department in Washington had written to her then with some details of how Clifford's plane had been shot down, and the letter had contained some technical specifications of the plane he had been flying: a Spad XIII (pursuit plane), number 15268, engine (Hispano-Suiza) number 35529.
George was excited. The number tallied with what they found. George wrote:
It seems therefore that the airplane which you and I concluded last month was my brother's, the one from which you took the plate near the church at Bantheville, was, in fact, my brother's machine. I think that we may assume for the present, in the absence of any information to the contrary, that the grave in the garden, between the church and the road, if there be the grave of an aviator in the garden, is my brother's.
He also mentioned, in case a body was uncovered, that by way of possible identification Clifford normally carried around a leather pocket chessboard.
George asked Staten if he had managed to do any more searching in the meantime. 'As one of the peasants was so positive that the grave was in a certain location, although digging there at the time did not seem to promise very much, have you looked into that location further?' He also enclosed the photograph he had taken of the farmer in his tractor and developed back in Brussels. Could Staten find his way to leave it for the farmer in the local café in Bantheville? A little 'thank you' for his time.
24 November 1920
To be on the safe side, he followed up his letter to Staten with another one to the head office of the American Graves Registration Service in Paris. He told them about Sperry's confirmation of the ID tag and the fact that locals in the village believed an aviator was buried in the garden. This belief – or was it speculation? – may have been further heightened by the recent appearance of the unnamed officer from Halle. He had been specifically looking for the grave of an aviator in that patch of grassland. How many aviators had been removed from the locations around Bantheville to the Romagne cemetery? Also, did they know who the Halle officer had been – a Graves Registration Service person? Why had he gone and why did he think there was likely to be a grave there?
30 November 1920
For good measure, George also wrote to the adjutant general and the Chief of the Air Service in Washington, giving information on his searches thus far and requesting information on the officer from Halle who had visited Bantheville. Where had he got his information from?
Something occurred to George, a name he remembered from the past: an officer in the American Air Service, a Captain Fred Zinn who had written to his mother some eighteen months before. Zinn had passed on information he had obtained from the German authorities at the time, some of which had since been restated to George in letters from Berlin. Was Zinn the officer from Halle? George also gave the Air Service command the engine numbers on the remains of the two planes he and Staten had found.
2 December 1920
A rather flat response arrived from the American Graves Registration Service in Paris two days later, one of many such messages George would get used to receiving over the months ahead. This was perhaps a reply to both his letter to them and the one he had sent to the HQ of the American Forces in Germany at Koblenz – maybe Koblenz had forwarded his letter to Paris. The Graves Registration letter was brief and to the point. There was 'no further evidence' of burial and 'no further information' had been received from German authorities.
The weeks passed by, and in the absence of any further correspondence from authorities in Germany or France or the United States George concentrated instead on his studies. It was approaching Christmas and he had been invited by a friend, a fellow botany student in Brussels, to spend the holiday period in Switzerland with his family. Fernand Chodat knew that George did not have any family in Europe and besides, he wanted George to meet his father Robert, the professor of botany in the University of Geneva and director of its alpine laboratory. In Geneva, George would also meet Fernand's mother and three sisters, twins Isabelle and Emma, and their elder sister Lucie.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An American on the Western Front by Patrick Gregory, Elizabeth Nurser. Copyright © 2016 Patrick Gregory & Elizabeth Nurser. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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