Preparing to Unearth Stories Untold: Packing my Mud Boots and Notebook
with Sights Set on the Chemin des Dames
Penn Global Seminar: Caves, Cathedrals, And Curiosities: Unearthing Stories On The Chemin Des Dames
Owen, one of the Spring 2026 Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares his experience abroad during the Spring Break. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
On May 13th, I’ll be traveling to the Chemin des Dames in France, an historic stretch of battlefield from World War I, about an hour and a half northeast of Paris. Having never taken a course on the Great War, I enrolled in this PGS, officially titled “Caves, Cathedrals, And Curiosities: Unearthing Stories On The Chemin Des Dames,” hoping to learn more about a subject that was so unfamiliar to me. What I soon realized was that this course was not a study of an event, but rather a place, and the inspiring people who give it meaning.
As a Sociology and French major, I thought I had a pretty accurate understanding of French culture and people – that stereotypical stuck up French person with their smug look, cigarette, and comically large scarf. While some of these assumptions have held true, consider the “Poilu” (name for French soldier) and his never-ending attachment to la cigarette et le pinard (French wine distributed to soldiers throughout the war). Many others, however, didn’t hold so true. I was painfully unaware of the French-American camaraderie within the war and how that friendship mapped itself onto the interpersonal connections between French and American soldiers. “Yes, the poilu… comes pretty near to being the only ideal that this war of misdirected energy has brought to our knowledge (History of the American Field Service in France – Friends
of France – 1914-1917).”
But the Poilu and American Field Service worker, nor the later involved actual American soldiers, don’t serve as the only significant actors upon the Chemin des Dames. This course, that is to say our brilliant Professor Lisa Britton, took great care in highlighting those so often overlooked stories within the greatest events of history. We’ve interrogated, questioned, and grappled with the work of the Tirailleurs Senegalais, The Black Devils (Black, American soldiers from Chicago who served in the war despite not having equal rights back home), and Anne Morgan with her Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées of France. I’m heading to this landscape with all of this in mind: the stories we know, the stories we forget, and those we’ve yet to discover.
I’m heading to the Chemin des Dames with mud boots, a notebook, and a hope that standing on that ground might let me feel, even briefly, how those history never learned to remember once lived.