Montigny-sur-Aube

Montigny-sur-Aube was the village in which Harry S. Truman spent five weeks at an elite artillery school in the spring of 1918. Set in a gently sloping valley, it seemed almost untouched by the war: a place of gardens, old stone buildings, and quiet beauty. Yet the village was also the setting for an exhausting course that pushed Truman to the limits of his preparation and gave his reflections on France a counterpoint in longing for home.

Setting and Quarters

Truman’s quarters were in a seventeenth-century gray-stone château surrounded by a walled park. The building’s moat, six-foot-thick stone walls, tiled floors, marble stairs, hand-carved woodwork, and magnificent garden made it, in his estimation, the kind of place one read about. With spring in full bloom across the nearby fields, he found the village so peaceful and pretty that it was difficult to imagine a war raging in the same country.

The quiet had one persistent interruption. During his first nights, the church clock struck eleven, followed five minutes later by the clock at the town hall and then, five minutes after that, by a third clock he could not locate. Before that sequence ended, the church clock was striking eleven fifteen, and the bells continued their staggered rounds through the night. The scene joined the village’s old-world charm to a comic inconvenience: even its clocks seemed unable to keep time together.

The Artillery School

The village’s calm surroundings concealed a punishing routine. Truman later described the first week as the most difficult ordeal he had experienced, and said the work became harder afterward. He had never attended college, yet the mathematics was at college level; his studies included surveying and astronomy. From seven in the morning until ten at night, classes and work left scarcely enough time to get from one lesson to the next. Cut off from news of the war and the outside world, he felt as ignorant as if he were in Arkansas.

The school’s classroom and firing-range training focused on the French 75-millimeter gun, a mobile, accurate weapon designed for rapid fire. The course therefore placed an unfamiliar technical burden inside the sheltered landscape of the village: beyond its park and château, Truman was being prepared to command artillery. By the end of five weeks, he felt extremely lucky to have passed through the ordeal and was ordered to rejoin his regiment.

France and Home

Truman’s Sundays offered a different measure of his time in Montigny-sur-Aube. He attended services at the Catholic church, where the air was cold and he could not understand a word. He admired France and did not blame the French for fighting to defend it; at the same time, he wrote that he was for helping them but preferred America, Missouri, and Jackson County, especially with the finest girl in the world at the county seat. The village thus became more than a training station: its beauty sharpened his appreciation of France, while the distance from home made his own attachments more explicit.