Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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utterly beyond my powers of comprehension, let alone my ability to describe or scenarioize [sic]. . . . I could not write of the war, of the agonies, of the bravery of our boys or the things they endured—I simply couldn’t do it.”
Still, she continually worked on ways to shape their film into a cohesive story and whenever the truck wasn’t too bumpy or the candle still had a flame, she took her notes and occasionally turned to writing comedy vignettes “for relief from the strain.”31
More and more soldiers were being sent to the front, but the 143rd Field Artillery company remained in Brest. Fred’s frustration built as time and again his company was held back to train the new recruits that kept landing. He managed to visit Frances in Paris in the middle of October, but a massive air raid prevented them from enjoying the brief interlude. A Paris school was bombed during the raid and dozens of French children were killed. This reality of the war hit Frances harder than hearing the guns of the front; nothing was sacred and she was learning it firsthand.
She was preparing to leave Paris on the last day of October when Fred arrived with the news that his regiment was finally leaving for the front. She was relieved he hadn’t gone sooner and kept her worries to herself. For several years, everyone had been saying that the war couldn’t last much longer and now rumors abounded of German retreats and armistice, but still the war raged on.
The German occupation remained strong in some areas, but in the Alsace and Lorraine territories they had almost “melted away.” Her orders were to attach herself to the Signal Corps and the Red Cross units heading there to tend the wounded Allies abandoned in prison hospitals as the Germans retreated, but when she arrived at the caravan departure site, her division had gone. All the remaining trucks, ambulances, and cars were filled with doctors, nurses, and equipment. She was debating what to do next when an officer told her, “You’ll have to turn back.”
“As ‘turning back’ was not in my life’s pattern, I walked past the long line of trucks filled with supplies until I came to the only one where the seat beside the driver, a Sergeant, was unoccupied. At that moment, a bugle call signaled for the caravan to leave. Just as the driver of the truck was about to start his motor, I scrambled aboard. ‘You’re in for a tough ride,’ was all he said.”32
It was a nightmare of a ride. Once-prosperous towns were rubble; destruction was everywhere. Bomb shells had created holes the size of craters in the roads and made them a maze to maneuver. The heavier trucks fell behind as they passed the battlefields where millions of young men had lost their lives.
Fires set by the Signal Corps to protect the convoy from rats were blazing when they finally approached Verdun. The silhouette of the half-destroyed walls of the town’s cathedral reminded her of a Doré illustration from Dante’s Inferno.
Mary’s latest letter had helped convince Frances that the end of the war was near because the studio bosses had told them to lighten up on the “Kill the Kaiser” plots and start making romantic comedies again. Still, it would be hard to turn the tide of the anti-German sentiment that had swept the country—what one journalist called “the ecstasy of hate that gripped the American people.”
Perhaps that was how some back home saw the situation, but in the ruins Frances found a small child’s shoe and she knew she would never see the world quite the same again.33
She slept fitfully in the truck and, before dawn, the caravan was moving away from Verdun. Downed bridges mandated creative detours and the rain that had been intermittent the day before was pouring now. The roads became impossible to traverse and truck after truck pulled to the side, waiting for the weather to clear. Frances and her sergeant kept going until late in the afternoon when a pothole broke one of their axles. Too impatient to wait for help, Frances decided to start walking toward Luxembourg. After several hours darkness was descending and her initial confidence turned slowly to fear. She became acutely aware of the smell of death all around her that even a downpour of rain could not erase.
Cold and soaked through to the bone, she was wondering why she had left the truck when the lights of a motorcade flashed behind her. Frances stepped out into the middle of road, holding out her hands so they do could nothing but stop. She saw a general’s star on the windshield and as apprehensive as she had been walking alone, she found herself with a new set of fears. A deep, angry voice came from the dark interior of the car: “Good God, an American woman. Let me see her pass.”
She put her papers into the outstretched hand and a flashlight shining on her also revealed several shadowed men and the bristling eyebrows of the man who was reading her papers.
“Lieutenant Frances Marion. Where do you think you are going?”
“To Luxembourg, sir,” she replied with a salute.
“Not in this car.” But then came a small smile and resignation: “Damn fool women poking their noses into a man’s war. Get in.”
Frances was in no position to argue and it wasn’t until she squeezed into a seat in the back that she realized how totally exhausted she was. She slept off and on for the next two hours, quietly hoping her presence had been forgotten and desperately grateful for the ride.
They arrived in Luxembourg a little after ten at night and Frances immediately fell into conversation with some American soldiers. They told her that another carload of officers would be leaving for Trier within the hour and she managed to hitch a ride with them. There was talk of an advance guard moving across the Rhine and so when they parked outside the hotel where General William Mitchell, chief of the army’s air service in France, was meeting with other Allied officers, she sat up in the car the rest of the night hoping to catch his attention.
Wrapped in the spirit of adventure and a euphoric state of exhaustion, she spotted General Mitchell emerging from the hotel just before dawn. After his gruff reaction at finding her walking alone and giving her a ride, he said he was not going to be the one to stop her now and approved her accompanying his aide Major Louis Brereton into German territory.
Frances and the major drove through the small villages, where Germans stared in amazement but no one tried to stop them. As they drove at full speed through one of the larger towns, people threw rocks and clods of dirt at their car and from then on, they stayed on the back roads. Finally, a little after five the next morning, they approached Koblenz. At first the town appeared quietly menacing, but as they crossed the bridge spanning the Rhine river, a small band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” bringing tears to their eyes.
Major Brereton encouraged Frances to return to Paris without delay. There were rumors of riots in other parts of Germany and the only troops immediately following them into Koblenz were a small band of military police. But Frances stayed on for several days, working with the supply troops as they arrived and the doctors and nurses who tended to the prisoners and the wounded left behind by the retreating German forces.34
Frances was flown back to Paris on November 10 and the next morning, as word of the Armistice started to spread, the city slowly came alive. By afternoon the crowds made the streets impassable and honking horns, beating drums, music, and song filled the air—“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “God Save the King,” “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” and almost constantly the “Marseillaise.” There were too many women in mourning for sons and husbands to have the joy be unabashed, but the relief was palpable. Frances made the rounds as best she could and ended the evening at Maxim’s, squeezed into a table with General William Mitchell.35
A few days later, Frances learned that she had been declared the first correspondent and the first American woman to cross the Rhine. Mary Roberts Rinehart had finally made it to France only two days before the end of the war, but was happily reunited with her son Stanley and stayed on for several months to cover the peace conference that was to follow.
As the war was ending, the international flu epidemic of 1918 hit. Frances was one of the hundreds of thousands struck with the virus, which killed so many people that newspaper obituaries were divided into three sections: deaths, war dead, and “epidemic casualties.” Letters from home told her that everyone was wearing masks, theaters were closed,