THE TAKING OF MONTFAUCON
James M. Cain’s life took a fateful turn one day in 1914 as he sat on a bench in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, contemplating his future. Some time earlier he had given up on his dream of becoming an opera singer. And now he had quit his job in the music department of Kann’s Department Store after being refused a raise. Suddenly he heard a voice—his own voice—say, “You’re going to be a writer.”
In time Cain would be one of America’s most famous writers—the author of such sensational and controversial novels as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. Starting out, though, he settled for a job as a cub reporter for the Baltimore American. But his fledging career as a newspaperman was interrupted when the United States entered World War I. Drafted into the army, Cain was soon shipped to France as a private in the headquarters troop of the 79th Division, an infantry unit raised at Camp Meade in his home state of Maryland in 1917.
In the opening days of General John J. Pershing’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive—a massive attack that would, it was hoped, bring an end to World War I—the 79th Division was assigned the job of capturing Montfaucon, a German stronghold and commanding observation point that towered some 300 feet above the countryside. Cain served as a runner during the battle (one of the bloodiest sieges of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive) and after the armistice he became the editor in chief of the Lorraine Cross, the 79th Division’s “trench newspaper.”
Returning to the States, Cain spent three years working as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Then he began writing short stories for the American Mercury, the celebrated magazine that H. L. Mencken, the Sun’s influential and fearless iconoclast, had founded in 1924. The second of Cain’s stories for the American Mercury, “The Taking of Montfaucon,” was published in its June 1929 issue. The story was presented as fiction, but it was really an autobiographical tale based on Cain’s most harrowing wartime experiences. Cain tells the story not in his own voice but in the colloquial voice of a rube from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he had spent many of his growing-up years.
In 1940, when Cain had achieved fame as a writer, the Infantry Journal reprinted “The Taking of Montfaucon,” saying that “it has never been excelled as an accurate description of conditions in the war and few stories of any aspect of the war will stand beside it.” The version of his story that follows appears exactly as it did in the American Mercury in 1929 and is reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober Associates (copyright 1929 by the James M. Cain Estate).
When Cain died in 1977 at age 85, his New York Times obituary noted that he always scoffed at how critics labeled him, saying that he didn’t think of himself as one of “the boys in the back room” or a “tough-guy writer of the 30’s.” (“I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise,” Cain once wrote, “and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics.”) The Times obituary went on to point out that while Hollywood likely made more than $12 million on motion pictures based on Cain’s books, his own take was just a little more than $100,000.
been ask did I get a D. S. C. in the late war, and the answer is no, but I might of got one if I had
