Back to the Front (10 page)

Times have changed, and the burghers have become bourgeois. My lift-giver was right about this being an uptight place. Along
the sides of the square files a procession of
baise-beige
couples out for a stroll before dinner. Baise-beige ("fuck wanly") is the rude recent permutation of
bcbg,
a slang term about social climbing that stands for
bon chic bon genre
(roughly, "preppy and presentable"). To be baise-beige is to exude clean-cut smugness, to look askance at anything that tradition
has not consecrated, to ignore rather than inquire. Fortunately for Bethune's soul, the town's well-scrubbed decorum is easily
breached. Every now and then a wreck of a car from the mining district south of town guns its way through the main square,
music blaring and sports pennants trailing in the breeze. The strolling window-shoppers, as if obeying an unspoken agreement,
affect not to notice these intrusions, preferring to continue comparing accessories and offspring, even if the effort entails
raising their voices. The arrangement seems to suit everyone concerned, both the baise-beige on the sidewalks and the working-class
heroes in their cars.

T
IME TO FOLLOW
those heroes. I look at the map: I am heading out of Béthune, a town 130 miles directly north of Paris. I'm
walking southeast to Lens, along a road that runs straight as a geometer's dream, through a gray, treeless plain punctuated
by conical slag heaps and brooding redbrick villages. In the distance, the skeletal remnants of machinery at a pithead stand
out against a metallic sky. The town of Vermelles appears, its streets a succession of cherry-colored
corons,
the compact rowhouses once home to black-lunged miners. This is Germinal country, Zola in the provinces. Successive generations
of families lived and died on this bleak Artesian plain, their menfolk going deep underground to extract coal for the heavy
industries of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix. The factories and foundries have long since closed, as have most of the mines.
Their great dark mounds of spoil now shoulder an unlikely mantle of weeds that shifts and shudders in the wind. The plain
is silent.

Except for this roadway. Trucks, buses, cars hurtle over the blacktop; capricious clouds of dust whirl in their wake. I scan
the horizon for the first signs of Lens. Eyes sting, ears ring. If there are any other pedestrians on this stretch of road,
they must be out of their minds. I bend my head and walk on, the hot breath of diesel never absent for more than a minute.
Every time I glance upward, it seems that I'm looking at the word "Fruehauf," rubbery and dirty, on the rear tire mudguards
of onrushing transport trailers. Occasionally I glimpse a signpost for an incongruously named British cemetery: Quality Street,
Philosophe. The landscape is such that only graveyards provide levity. For the next few miles, the past will be more interesting
than the present.

T
HE YEAR
1915 started well enough. The spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914, during which soldiers on opposing sides clambered
into no-man's land to exchange gifts and compare family mementos, seemed an augury of decency on the Western Front, even if
the skies conspired to make the winter one of the most execrable in living memory. In northern France, from October 25, 1914,
to March 10, 1915, there were only eighteen days without rain. The misery of millions of men, standing in cold and muddy ditches
for months on end, can only be imagined.

The German supreme commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, one of the few farsighted generals of the war, saw that total victory
was now impossible, given the failure of the daring Schlieffen Plan. Falkenhayn concentrated his main offensives on the Eastern
Front, hoping to knock the Russians out of the war and force the French and English into a negotiated peace. On their Western
Front—for it is to the west of Germany, after all—the armies of the Kaiser dug deeper into the earth, poured concrete, and
got ready for a long siege.

The French, under Joffre, thought differently about the coming year. Or rather, they didn't think, they just attacked, again
and again and again. The carnage of 1914 repeated itself, only this time the action didn't take place principally in the lost
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but in the newly occupied regions of Champagne and Artois. Behind their ever-strengthening
defenses, the German army controlled some of the major industrial centers of the north—Tourcoing, Roubaix, Lille, Lens, Douai,
Cambrai—as well as 90 percent of France's iron ore production, 80 percent of its steel, and 40 percent of its coal. There
could be no respite as long as troops of the Kaiser stayed on French soil. This pressure to act, understandable in light of
the national emergency, was unfortunately matched with abysmal leadership. With the exception of a few enlightened instances,
the tactic of head-on, massive assault was maintained, as if no lessons could be drawn from the 454,000 French battlefield
deaths of the previous year. Joffre, ever imperturbable, seemed not to care.

The French army attacked across the freezing, open spaces of Champagne in February of 1915. Perhaps a mile was gained, and
50,000 French soldiers killed. In March, the British, eager to show their battle willingness despite their smaller numbers,
attacked at Neuve Chapelle. In April, the Germans opened their gas canisters for the first time, at St. Juliaan in Flanders,
and won a few acres of the Salient.

The following month the French readied another grand offensive. Undaunted by the Champagne debacle, the general staff drew
up a plan of attack for Artois. The plan called for storming the heights of Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette and then
rushing over the plain of Artois to the city of Douai. The result was predictable: a couple of miles gained, four ruined villages
recaptured, and 102,500 French soldiers killed in forty days. The injured and maimed numbered three or four times that. The
extent of the carnage, let alone its horror, is nauseating to contemplate.

The conscript pool was deep. After a summer spent licking its wounds, the French army went on the offensive once again. In
September, October, and November 1915, Joffre ordered repeated assaults, in precisely the same regions where his tactics had
proved so futile in the spring. One needn't possess hindsight to recognize the work of a dunderhead. Predictably, the same
prodigious bloodletting resulted, but this time only a few hundred yards of wasteland were the reward. In Champagne, a whole
swath of villages were destroyed so utterly that after the war they were never rebuilt, and the scarred land around them was
turned into firing ranges for the French army.

In Artois, the British attacked to the north of the French positions. They lost 60,000 men, killed or wounded, around the
town of Loos, in an offensive that briefly became a byword for butchery. The German defenders called one scene
Das Leichenfeld von Loos
—the Corpse-Field of Loos. Machine gunners had a wide-open shooting gallery as masses of men were ordered to walk toward them
over the plain. Of 10,000 sent over the top on the second day, fewer than 2,000 survived. The Germans, who, as their regimental
history has it, "fired till their barrels burst," felt so bad for their foe that they unilaterally imposed a truce to let
the hordes of injured British soldiers crawl back to their lines. Yet this battle's ignominy has faded, at least from a short
list of remembered debacles, simply because the disasters of 1915 pale in comparison to those of 1916 and 1917. In the Great
War, there was an escalation in command incompetence.

I
N MY JOURNEY
to Loos over that same Leichenfeld, the road from Bethune to Lens has calmed somewhat since the morning, now
that the sacred lunch hour has descended on the land. My Fruehauf-waving tormentors have entered their
routier
restaurants, ready for the thumping big meal that French truckers habitually down at midday. The remaining cars on the highway,
rusty and in need of paint, rush past at irregular intervals, many of their drivers wide-eyed at the sight of a plodding pedestrian.
At a rise in the road, I duck into the Loos British Cemetery and Memorial, ascend a few stone steps in the visitors' pavilion,
and come out onto a rooftop platform. From here I have an unobstructed view of the battlefield.

To the north is the plain of Gohelle, its name apt in its last syllable. It stretches for eight or so miles toward the town
of La Bassee, featureless, flat, empty, ringed with slag heaps. There are no villages on the plain, and the crops, whatever
they were, have been harvested. The prospect is of endless vegetal stubble stretching to a horizon crowned with distant pimples
of dirt. At a military cemetery in its center is the terrain where the British, in a famous incident of the Battle of Loos,
gassed themselves blind. New to the vagaries of what was euphemistically termed the "accessory" and impatient with the unhelpful
readings of army anemometers, the generals behind the lines ordered the gas released against the wind. The toxic cloud filled
the British front and support trenches, so the attackers went forward, wheezing and dying. Nearer to my vantage point is the
spot where a youth named Peter Laidlaw, in a fairly unbelievable act of bravery, jumped up into no-man's-land, ripped off
his gas mask, and marched back and forth across the front line, playing the bagpipes to rally his fellow Scots. The kilted
young men rose up from their ditches and rushed to their deaths in the green fog.

To the southwest, in a hollow a mile and a half down the main road to Lens, is the small town of Loos. From my viewing platform
in the cemetery Loos looks like the gateway to Mordor. Two mountainous heaps of coal dirt loom behind it, identical twins
several hundred feet tall. They are pitch-black, perfect cones, their silhouettes uncannily regular. This landmark is the
Double Crassier
—the double slag heap, a touch of the apocalyptic in an already inhuman landscape. On September 25, 1915, members of the London
Regiment ran at full speed down the hill from where I now stand toward that crassier. It was a paradigmatic moment of the
Great War. Despite the bullets, gas, and barbed wire, they advanced joyfully—because they were chasing a soccer ball. It is
estimated that 1,200 of them fell, dead or wounded, within the first hour.

Robert Graves tells another tale of the Battle of Loos that has entered the canon of Great War lore. The poet, then a twenty-year-old
officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, came to the front lines as exhausted troops streamed back from no-man's-land, gassed,
injured, and shell-shocked. In an oft-cited passage of his memoir
Good-bye to All That,
he tells of one story he heard from a survivor:

When his platoon had run about twenty yards he signalled them to lie down and open covering fire. The din was tremendous.
He saw the platoon on the left flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed to hear. He jumped up from
his shell-hole and waved and signalled "Forward." Nobody stirred. He shouted: "You bloody cowards, are you leaving me to go
alone?" His platoon-sergeant, groaning with a broken shoulder, gasped out: "Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they're
all f—g dead." The Pope's Nose machine gun traversing had caught them as they rose to the whistle.

Not all the gruesomeness of 1915 occurred on the Western Front. At sea, the British liner
Lusitania
was sunk by a German U-boat, and the American lives lost (128 of the 1,198 drowned) did no good for the Kaiser's image in
the
eyes
of the giant neutral democracy. By the end of 1915 American capital had begun to bankroll the British and French war efforts,
and the tide of public opinion swelled in favor of intervention at about the same rate as Allied indebtedness grew. The other
German propaganda blunder of the year was the execution in Belgium of the forty-nine-year-old British nurse Edith Cavell.
Having freely confessed her crime—helping Allied soldiers get out of German-occupied Belgium —she was shot in the early-morning
hours of October 12, 1915, despite a long and loud campaign for clemency by American and Spanish diplomats in Brussels. So
great was the international outcry, from neutrals and belligerents alike, that a startled German military command ordered
all further executions of women civilians commuted or postponed. Two years and three days later, it would be the turn of Margaretha
Geertruida MacLeod Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, to face a French firing squad. There was no outcry this time, just the
beginning of a sultry legend. Aged forty-one at the time of her execution, the dancer and spy for the Germans eventually eclipsed
Cavell as the most celebrated woman of the First World War, which may be taken as a comment on the relative glamour of their
respective professions.

Although the other fronts are beyond the scope of this journey, it's worth noting that 1915 was also the year of Gallipoli.
In an attempt to open another front, the British hatched a scheme whereby a landing in Turkey would lead their troops to Istanbul
and beyond. Badly planned, atrociously executed, and needlessly prolonged, the Gallipoli campaign was another of the war's
great foul-ups, a particularly graphic example of lost opportunities and wrong decisions made at the wrong time. Gal-lipoli's
legacy, the memory of thousands of volunteers from Australia and New Zealand—known by their army corps' acronym, ANZAC—trapped
on a narrow shoreline throughout a sweltering summer and fall, served as fillip to the anti-imperial nationalism down under.
When Australia eventually becomes a republic, its Bunker Hill will be recognized as ANZAC Beach in Turkey.

As for the beach's defenders, 1915 marked the full flowering of the Young Turks movement. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern
secular Turkey, was among the gunners on the heights above Gallipoli. The year would thus be a glorious one for the Young
Turks, were it not for the other event that took place in their homeland. In 1915, the authorities in Istanbul began the wholesale
slaughter of the country's Armenian population. Genocide ushered in the twentieth century.