Back to the Front (16 page)

The defeat is not total. I coast around a BMW with British plates parked by the corner and almost run into a couple snapping
off a roll of pictures. In front of them is a sign that reads
Reconstruction d'un Boyau
(Trench Replica). Inside the trench their two sons play an irreverent game they call over-the-top, which, as far as I can
gather, consists of pelting each other with dried sheep droppings. There don't appear to be any rules.

The woman turns toward me with an ivory grin of complicity, then holds out the camera. Her husband, recognizing a fellow Somme
buff, points out the essential elements of the replica: parapet, firestep, transverse cuts, communication trench, dugout,
duckboards, sandbags, and sap. On the corrugated metal sheet protecting the sap someone has chalked helpfully, for the benefit
of cross-Channel visitors, WAR
WAR
WAR
.

Inside their car sits a disgusted daughter, bored out of her wits, reading a comic book. It takes some coaxing but she's eventually
persuaded out into the sunlight to pose for the family portrait. The shutter catches the five of them beaming up from the
trench. I move the camera to the left. A bicycle, one wheel still slowly turning over the edge of the parapet, comes into
view. With a start, I realize that this time the bicycle in no-man's-land is mine. This family and I are the levelers now,
giving new meanings to old landscapes. We're like the Belgians at Bellewaerde, steamrolling an earlier generation into oblivion.
The bike and the smiles are just gentler ways of doing it.

"I
CI ON PISSE
dehors!"

The waitress in the cafe near Longueval, a village on the Pozieres ridge, has pointed me to the great outdoor toilet that
is Picardy. "There's lots of room out there," she adds, to the delight of two farmhands standing at the counter. They echo
her words to my back as I sheepishly head outside.

I look at an abandoned factory standing out in a field in the middle distance, its windows shattered, its walls buckling,
at last a monumental structure that has nothing to do with the war. There are more than 250 military cemeteries and dozens
of private memorials on the Somme, the great majority of them lovingly maintained. The villages of the living are a different
story. The dark redbrick and black-slate houses have now settled into a permanent ugly slumber. The hamlets I've passed through
since Thiepval—Pozieres, Martinpuich, Bazentin, Courcelette—have been tightly shuttered, perhaps to block out the old tales
told by their surroundings.

Here at Longueval, to take an example, two woods on either side of the town hold the usual dreadful secrets. The one on the
highest ground, logically called High Wood, was the scene of a successful nighttime attack by the British on July 14, 1916,
followed the next day by a cavalry charge that was supposed to break out into the open country behind the German lines. This,
the essence of Haig's tactics, was suicide. One moment, there were lances glinting in the sunshine and magnificent caparisoned
animals galloping across open country. The next, the shallow cough of the machine gun sent the thundering anachronism crashing
to the earth.

The wood on the other side of town is Delville Wood, which is the property of the Republic of South Africa. From July 15 to
July 20, 1916, troops from South Africa fought for every yard of ground in Delville. All but one tree, it is said, were destroyed
by the blizzard of bullets—most of them were sawed off just above ground level by the streams of red-hot metal. Of the 3,150
South Africans to have gone into Delville, only 778 could reply "present" to roll call five days later.

In the village of Guillemont, I brake to look at the Celtic cross erected in front of the church. A couple of British motorcylists
speed past me and take the turning back to Albert, as if showing me what to do. I decide to follow, suddenly impatient with
monuments and memorials and ready, rather crassly, for a good dinner. The Guillemont road rises as it leaves town, passing
yet another cemetery on its way to high ground crowned by a wood. Despite my newfound hurry, I stop and get off the bike to
take in a beautiful view. I scribble a hurried description in my journal: "Let's make a movie: to the immediate right [of
me], the black pointed spires of Guillemont and Longueval piercing the level of the trees. Far to the upper right, along a
rolling quilt of green and yellow, the town of Bazentin, and further still, on the limit of the horizon, the hazy behemoth
at Thiepval. In front, a road skirting a dark green wood pouring down the slope toward a little cemetery. To the left, fields
upon fields of wheat, interrupted only by a small spur on the Montauban-Carnoy road." I set off again, determined to return
the bike to Albert on time. On passing the wood, I glimpse a memorial to a rifle brigade, inscribed with the strange words
"The Greatest Thing in the World." Later I will see a picture of the view I have just described — mud everywhere, not even
the hint of any feature on the land. The only distinguishing characteristics are injured and dying men in a shell hole.

The road leads across the ridge to a rose-covered house in Montauban, someone's solitary attempt at beautifying the village.
A further couple of miles to Carnoy, past the stretch of no-man's-land where a certain Captain Nevill handed out four soccer
balls to his platoons and had them dribble their way toward the German trenches at zero hour on July 1. One platoon wrote
on its ball:

The Great European Cup

  The Final

East Surreys v. Bavarians

  Kick-Off at Zero

Elsewhere on the Somme, a public schools' Pals battalion kicked a rugby ball ahead of its leading wave of attackers.

I turn at Carnoy to breeze past the villages of Mametz and Fricourt. The rising land beside the sunken road still looks as
if some furious giant had ripped it apart. Soon the odd Madonna is ahead of me, silhouetted against a reddening sky.

3. Vaux to Chaulnes

Yesterday's mobility has spoiled me. Out of Albert after an early breakfast, I hope to thumb a ride to Maricourt, where the
Front fords the River Somme and heads straight southward across the plain of the Santerre. But to hitch in Picardy, I conclude,
is to intrude on the animal privacy of drivers in their cars. Not only do they not want to pick up a hitchhiker, they do not
want him to be there at all, littering their field of vision and souring their sweet solitude. The icy glares turn the summer
morning cold; the animosity is almost palpable. I check to see if I've inadvertently been brandishing a bloodstained ax or
lewdly fondling a statue of Joan of Arc—how else could I have possibly offended all of these people?

One reason must be war. Not just the Great War, but every war. This fertile swath of France has known the tramp of armies
since its forests were first cleared by the farmers of Gaul. The morning's route, for example, was not only the trace of the
trenches — it also carried Henry IVs men to nearby Agincourt in 1415, and who knows how many other wild-eyed armies on their
way to binges of the id. In this, Picardy is eminently European, a province awash in past violence and insult. Such a legacy
must seep down into some murky collective well, from which people instinctively draw when confronted with the unfamiliar.
Here, at the Somme, that well must be bottomless.

The other reason for the glowering faces, I know from long residence in France, is the automobile. An occasional outlet for
aggression in all cultures, the car turns many French people nearly autistic in their relation to society. Anyone who has
traveled French expressways and secondary roads knows this generalization to be true—it is never Dr. Jekyll at the wheel of
that Peugeot, but always Mr. Hyde. The central, soul-bending pretense at the core of cultivated French behavior—feigning indifference
to strangers whom you've been trained to despise—can be safely jettisoned once within the insulated confines of the car, and
all of that stifled malevolence can at last be expended. Thus, the respectable matron on foot may become the classic snarling
harpy in a car; the well-mannered, obsequious notary, a nose-picking speed demon delighted with his last road kill; and the
mildly hostile shopkeeper, an Attila of the
autoroute.
If in America the car has turned into a prosthetic device in the service of mobility, in France it remains a form of therapy
for the strain of moral hypocrisy. Putting a hitchhiker in front of most French drivers is like waving a red flag before an
already dyspeptic bull. The wonder is that they don't swerve to hit him.

It should be apparent by now that I do not get a ride.

T
HE WALK DOWN
to the river from the village of Vaux gives a commanding view over the Somme to the east. Land and water bleach
together into one wan pastel under a milky August sky. The Somme here carves not so much a valley as a wide ravine, guarded
above and below by spinneys of sentinel poplars. The road descends gradually through the trees to the marshes and pools formed
by the stream's meanders. Near the grassy hamlet of Eclusier, at the bottom, scores of fishermen sit in small, fenced-off
plots, not letting anyone or anything venture onto their sacred patch of shady riverbank. A few have managed to squeeze undersized
camping trailers in between the fenceposts. They try to land their catch unseen, their fishing rods sticking out of the side
doors of their trailers. The scene looks slightly less convivial than the cemeteries I have been visiting.

A lunch of fresh eel, no doubt caught by one of these introverted sportsmen, helps to dispel any lingering lack of pedestrian
enthusiasm. I powder my feet and start up a steep incline, leaving the riverbank of compartmentalized fishermen behind me.
At the top of the rise, an enclosed pasture fans out from the edge of a bluff. In a far corner, as if afraid of the commanding
view, a couple of old draft horses huddle close together, their enormous brown and white backsides the only landmark I can
see on what appears to be a blank, flat plain. This is the plateau of Santerre, from the Latin
sana terra,
or good land. It is so boring as to be almost painful to behold. The sun has gone in, turning everything a uniform gray. Harvested
crops stretch out in unbroken monotony to the village of Dompierre-Becquincourt. I sing "Do You Know the Way to San Jose"
to kill the time and continue to put one foot in front of the other, a speck in motion from one map coordinate to the next,
a lone pedestrian in this wilderness of mechanized agriculture. The miles pass, slowly.

At Dompierre my arrival creates a stir. I suspect that anything would, given the vapor of ennui in the air. As if on cue,
a buxom young woman comes out from behind a mournful gray fence to stroll aimlessly about the village square. She casts three
backward glances as she walks, then rounds a corner. Gone. A group of boys on bicycles swarms about me at a respectful distance,
hoping that somehow I'll amuse them. Who knows? Perhaps I'll ask for directions, or fall over, or explode. Even a few of the
local pre-apéritif crowd waver in the doorway of the square's spare, echo-chamber café. The black roofs and dark red bricks,
the blazon of Picard towns, do not look welcoming, so I set out across the shorn fields in the direction of Fay and Estrees,
the next settlements in no-man's-land. A hint of relief to the right—a long and narrow wood standing over what was the French
front line in 1916—makes this stretch of the walk more tolerable than the last.