Back to the Front (11 page)

N
ow IT IS
the past that has become intolerable to contemplate. I turn away from slag heap and cemetery and walk through Loos
into Lens. Despite its name, Lens is not photogenic. The place was obliterated in the war, then rebuilt with no pretensions
to coherence. Here, the squat corons of Germinal were eventually outnumbered by the high-rise
cites
of immigration, the suburban housing projects in which the misery of modern France is hidden.

Saturday night, however, knows no frowns. The young are out in force downtown, showing a regard for come-hither fashion that
would make a Parisian blush. I sit in a cafe and put my feet up, content to forget the truly awful pizza I've just ingested
by watching the passing parade of tanned
rondeurs.
This is a serious scene. Oh, to give up walking and own a cosmetics counter in Lens—I could retire on the memories. A movie
theater empties a wave of adolescent hipsters onto the sidewalk, and soon the air fills with the electric crackle of a French
crowd exchanging quadruple social kisses. Souped-up subcompacts roar out of parking lots, voices rise and fall as car radios
pass within earshot. From one, I hear the familiar drone of "Papa Don't Preach." Only then do I remember where I am. The Western
Front.

3.
Vimy to La Targette

Un vétement qui dort

Est un vetement mort

(Clothing asleep

Is clothing dead)

Poetry stares out at me from the window of a Lens dry cleaner's. It is a white, flat morning, and the road out of town leads
past a row of corons with doors open wide to let out the beery funk of Saturday night. In the redbrick thresholds hang slim
strips of grimy plastic that feebly suggest villa life in some sunnier land. The strips sway slightly in the exhaust that
wafts into living rooms from the main road.

I skip into a backyard and begin my shortcut to Vimy Ridge. A heap of workings from an abandoned mine must first be climbed
before gaining the greener slopes. The black dirt shifts and subsides under my boots —it's like climbing a granular sand dune
that has been treated with tar. Even the local dogs think I'm demented, their barks ceasing abruptly once I take to the black
hill. On the map it looked so simple.

By the time I reach the main square of the village of Givenchy-enGohelle, my once pristine Front-walking outfit—green sweatshirt,
gray denim trousers, tan leather hiking boots—has become a sooty mess. I look ready for a minstrel show. At a riding school
on the very edge of the battlefield, a young lady on horseback glances over at me in horror. Somehow this is not how I pictured
my visit to Vimy Ridge.

D
IFFICULT AS IT
may be for older Canadians to believe, most of their younger compatriots grew up not knowing what Vimy Ridge
represented. Carving soap crosses and wearing red poppies were somehow related to
The Longest Day,
not to a place called Vimy. Granted, there was a Vimy Street in every Canadian town, but that coincidence could always be
shrugged off as some archaic phenomenon needing no investigation.

Long after making this hike, I called a Paris-bound friend in Toronto and asked her to bring me Pierre Berton's
Vimy, a
lively account of the 1917 battle.

"What was the name again?" she asked.

"Vimy. Like Vimy Ridge."

"Vinny?"

"No, Vimy, for Chrissakes!"

"Pierre Berton wrote a book called Vinny?"

And so on. The memory has been washed away far more thoroughly than any similar effacement of the words "Somme" or "Verdun."
This is all the more peculiar since both of those battles represent decay and decline. The Somme spelled the end of the British
century, and Verdun broke the French for the century that followed. Vimy, on the other hand, is a positive concept, the foundation
myth of a country. Vimy was the Canadian Lexington, the moment of a national coming of age. Monuments were thrown up all over
Canada in honor of Vimy Ridge and the troops of the Great War. The national government building in Ottawa has a "Peace Tower"
in front of it, a tall, mock-Gothic belfry erected to commemorate the 65,000 Canadian dead of the Great War. The memory of
Vimy thus informs the symbolic architecture of the Canadian confederation. The Parliament—the totem of national unity—is a
mausoleum.

What happened on the heights of Vimy was quite simple, and quite bloody. One hundred thousand Canadian soldiers successfully
stormed a heavily fortified German ridge on the snowy Easter Monday of 1917. The place was thought to be impregnable, but
overwhelming artillery barrages and meticulously rehearsed attack tactics had been ordered by Arthur Currie, the British Columbia
real estate agent and sometime embezzler in command of the Canadian troops. Currie's methods combined to dislodge the Germans
from a height that they had successfully defended against all comers in previous battles. Flushed with victory, the Canadians
tried to press on beyond the ridge but were cut down by German reinforcements rushed in from Douai with machine guns and artillery.
The capture of Vimy was the sole tactical success in a two-pronged Allied offensive that would come to grief around the Scarpe
River in southern Artois and end in utter catastrophe on the hills of Champagne.

Today the place is a showpiece of Canadian nationalism in the middle of an unlovely corner of France. An enormous two-tined
Dalmatian marble monument rises up from a vast lawn. Into these two pylons and their base Walter Seymour Allward sculpted
a score of larger-than-life allegorical figures to represent attributes of the nation and the emotions of its citizens. Grief
is the figure most photographed. She looks over a commanding view of the plain to the east, with its slag heaps marching away
at regular intervals to the industrial complexes of Douai. The perspective is surprisingly panoramic, as if one had climbed
a tall mountain in the company of Grief. The Canadian soldier at the time must have felt the same way.

Behind the well-tended lawn is a well-tended battlefield, several acres of mine craters, shell holes, and trenches having
been preserved under a soothing cover of greenery. Signs direct visitors to keep off the grass, which most do. Yet the frozen
bedlam of the site only serves to excite small boys into aggression. As I head to the men's room to wash off my Givenchy grime,
a child jumps from a trench and squeals, "
Coucou, je vous attaque!"
("Look out, you're under attack!") I cringe, much to his enjoyment.

Underneath the battlefield, a Canadian college student leads visitors through one of the tunnels that formed the subterranean
city the attackers inhabited before their assault. There are rail lines, dormitories, casualty clearing stations — and everywhere
a dank odor of damp rock and old fear, mixed in with a trace of moldering cloth uniforms. I will later recognize this as the
lingering smell of the Great War. The throat catches and the chest constricts. This subtle scent in the troglodyte part of
the ridge seems truer to the memory of the Front than the fresh air of the battlefield park. Once back outside in no-man's-land,
I pick up a Canadian government handout about Vimy at the information kiosk. My
eyes
fall on a phrase describing the Great War as "very costly in terms of lives and wounds."

When I reach the pines planted on the park's perimeter, I turn to look at the trenches and monument one last time. Vimy surprises
me. It departs from the discretion usually associated with Canada. The nationalism displeases but is inevitable given the
imaginative importance of this spot for earlier generations. As a theater of memory, however, the setting is peerless. I don't
leave proud to be a Canadian; I leave even more wary of anyone in a uniform.

T
HE LAND SOUTH
of Vimy, although reclaimed from the war, exhibits its scars through its abundance of cemeteries. Outside the
village of Neuville St. Vaast, the jumping-off point for many of the Canadian troops in 1917, there is a hamlet called La
Targette. The name is fitting. Two cemeteries sit side by side: French, from the offensive of 1915, and British, from that
of 1917. Across the road is an inn with a mural on its outer wall evoking Napoleonic exploits. Whereas the British graveyard
is gardenlike and domestic, the French resembles a parade ground of crosses and serial numbers. Despite these national differences,
the evocation of waste is the same.

Farther up the road yet another cemetery awaits. I recognize the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgraberfiirsorge (the German War
Graves Commission) logo on its gates from my visit to the Kindermord graveyard at Langemarck. There are 37,000 burials here.
I step out of the entrance pavilion and onto the overgrown lawn of somber black crosses and tall trees. There is a Romantic
strain to this place, alien to the French functionary or the British gardener. Many of the graves hold no crosses. I jot down
the inscription on the first one of these that I approach:

Leopold Aronsohn

18/8/1917

Musketier

There is a star of David alongside the name. Others, in their hundreds, show the same symbol. These are the saddest graves
of all the sad graves in La Targette. To die in a senseless war for a country that would soon want to rob you of life—there
can be no worse trap set by the twentieth century. Twelve thousand Jews died in the German army of the First World War.

Perhaps it was better to die here in Artois and never to have known of the coming evil. Historian Martin Gilbert recounts
that during the Great War there were three Austro-Hungarian field marshals and eight generals who were Jewish. (The Allies,
by contrast, had but one prominent Jewish officer—General John Monash, the head of the Australian Imperial Force.) In 1943
one of the Austro-Hungarians, Field-Marshal Johann Georg Franz Hugo Friedlander, was deported to Theresienstadt, the Bohemian
garrison town where the imprisoned Gavrilo Princip had spent his last days twenty-five years earlier. Friedlander was herded
into the Theresienstadt ghetto, then taken to Auschwitz in 1944, from which he never returned. His ultimate fate was shared
by hundreds of thousands of other Jewish veterans.

Alfred Lichtenstein, a Prussian Jew, was spared such knowledge. As an artist and satirist, however, he did have a keen sense
of where the Great War was leading. Lichtenstein died in Picardy in 1914. His poem "Abschied" ("Off to the Front") is the
only appropriate response to this massing of cemeteries at La Targette and Neuville Saint Vaast and Vimy. The prose translation
is by Timothy P. Morrow.

Vorm Sterben mache ich noch mein Gedicht.

Still Kameraden, stbrt mich nicht.

Wir ziehn zum Krieg. Der Tod ist unser Kitt.

O, heulte mir doch die Geliebte nit.

Was liegt an mir. Ich gehe gerne ein.

Die Mutter weint. Man mufi aus Eisen sein.

Die Sonne fdllt zum Horizont hinab.

Bald wirft man mich ins milde Massengrab.

Am Himmel brennt das brave Abendrot.

Vielleicht bin ich in dreizehn Tagen tot

(Before my death I still must write my poem.

Quiet, comrades, do not disturb me.

We're off to war; death is our bond.

Oh, that my sweetheart would stop wailing.

What do I matter; I'm glad to go.

My mother is crying. One must be made of iron.

The sun sets on the horizon.

Soon I'll be thrown into a gentle mass grave.

The sun in the sky glows dusk red.

In thirteen days I may be dead.)

I leave the cemetery, eager to get to a city of the living.

4. Notre Dame de Lorette to Souchez to Neuville St. Vaast

I left Vimy and La Targette too quickly nine years ago. I had gotten only half the story.

I shift down into third to ascend the rise of Notre Dame de Lorette. It is late August 1995, and I tune in to BBC long wave
on the car radio. Reports from Bosnia say that NATO warplanes are bombing Serb positions in the hinterland of Sarajevo. A
military spokesman comes on to say that all is going well, that all targets are being hit, that lives are being spared. I
pull into a parking lot. This is not the place to be listening to army publicists.

In front of me stretch seemingly endless rows of crosses, marking the graves of those who died in Joffre's repeated attempts
to take this hill and Vimy Ridge in 1915. There are more than 19,000 French soldiers buried here. Looking over these acres
of spiky, waist-high crosses is like looking over fields of unharvested wheat. The image that comes to mind is of the grim
sower, not the reaper. Roses flower at the foot of each of the thousands of crosses.

In the middle of the cemetery squats a monumental eyesore of a church, built in the Romanesque-Byzantine style favored by
French clerics in the early decades of this century. Sacre Coeur on Montmartre in Paris is a similar hilltop blemish; here,
however, the stone is not a blinding white, as it is there, but a dark, dirty gray, the color of despair, of northern France
in November. In front of the church of Notre Dame de Lorette stands a tall lighthouse built of the same ashtray-gray stone.
Inside this tower are caskets for an unknown soldier of 1914-18, an unknown soldier of 1939-45, an unknown French resistance
fighter, an unknown Holocaust victim, an unknown soldier of the Indochinese War, and an unknown soldier of the Algerian War.
They lie on top of an ossuary—a depository of human bones collected from the surrounding battlefield. It is estimated that
this unseen, unknown pile accounts for another 30,000 men. On an exterior wall an inscription reads in the exalted tastelessness
of French martial commemoration:

Ossements Qu 'Animait Un Fier Souffle Naguere

Membres Epars, Debris Sans Nom, Humain Chaos,

Pele-Mele Sacre Dun Vaste Reliquaire

Dieu Vous Reconnaitra, Poussiere des H
é
ros

(Bones Once Inspirited By A Proud Breath

Sundry Limbs, Nameless Remains, Human Chaos

A Scattering Made Sacred In A Vast Reliquary