Authors: Stephen O'Shea
Back to the Front (2 page)
But what if learning about history led me, against all odds, to a love of war lore? To a geek passion for guts and guns, to
fetishism about medals and stripes, to furtive erection at the sight of fighter aircraft, to anachronistic anger over enemies
never met, to hand-over-the-heart hypocrisy at monuments to massacres, to voyeurism disguised as compassion, to the fetid
bath of patriotic cliche—what if it led, in short, to the woodenheaded fellowship of war buffs? If that's where it was leading,
then there was no point in being a lapsed amnesiac. My dinner companion may have been right to despise me, after all. History
is for the dead, or for rednecks. Perhaps I would become the expatriate equivalent of a Civil War reenac-tor who spends his
Sundays playing Johnny Reb and pining for slavery.
Perhaps not. I felt that there had been something else out there, at the Somme, something other than a temptation to yield
to a boyish love of destruction. I had
seen
it. The scar of the Front pointed to a curiosity that I did not know I had. In the months following that visit, reading brought
home to me some of the connections between a generation long dead and my own, between those who witnessed the start of a century
and those who would see it out. (Not that they are all gone: In March of 1995, the literary supplements of newspapers celebrated
the hundredth birthday of Ernst Jiinger, fourteen times wounded in the Great War and author of the classic German war novel
In Stahlgewittern
y
or
Storm of Steel)
If initially the code of the past seemed as hard to crack as the strange turns of phrase that had stumped me as a child, it
eventually revealed itself to be a compelling language of irony, bitterness, and great beauty. I could scarcely believe that
these loud, vital, angry voices, the voices of my grandparents'generation, could have been so easily forgotten, that their
experience could have left its imprint on the earth itself but no trace in our minds. Or almost none. Familiar expressions
coined at the time popped out at me—"over the top,""nothing to write home about"—and half-remembered, perhaps half-suspected,
snatches of poetry rose up from the pages of anthologies. The sensibility seemed excruciatingly immediate, as mordant and
disillusioned and undated as the latest world-weary wisecrack currently exchanged on-line by ponytail capitalists and their
slacker offspring. The famous opening to Guillaume Apollinaire's poem
"UAdieu
du Cavalier"
("The Cavalier's Farewell") speaks for a generation made sardonic by its experience in hell:
Ah Dieul que la guerre est jolie
Avec ses chants ses longs loisirs
(Oh God! what a lovely war
With its songs its long idle hours)
The sarcasm sounds newly minted. Less well known, but just as sadly universal, are the great poet's entreaties as he lay on
his deathbed, fatally weakened by war wounds, in 1918: "Save me, doctor! I want to live! I still have so much to say!"Apollinaire,
to choose but him as an example, had stepped out of the cobwebs of a forgotten college curriculum and become an immediate
presence for me. In glimpsing the Front, even more than a lifetime after the war had taken place, I opened the door to a haunted
house full of invisible acquaintances.
Then there was, as I learned from perusing some of the excellent World War I histories published in the past twenty years
or so, what can be called the Importance of the War. Had I read them before going on that winter weekend hike, I might not
have tread so lightly around the Somme, content just to marvel like some idiot surveyor at the physical traces the conflict
had left. The Great War is a great divide, as well defined a boundary as the Western Front was on my friend's shaded map.
First, but not foremost, were the political changes it helped engender. Even an incomplete list of them goes on and on: the
fall of the Romanovs, the fall of the Ottomans, the fall of the Hohenzollerns, the fall of the Hapsburgs, the rise of Soviet
Communism, the dress rehearsal of American hegemony, the dismemberment of Austro-Hungary, the creation of Poland, the creation
of Yugoslavia, the creation of Czechoslovakia, the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the birth of nationalism in Australia,
the birth of nationalism in New Zealand, the birth of nationalism in Canada, the revolt, independence, and partition of Ireland,
the guarantee of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, the creation of Turkey, the birth of Arab nationalism, the fall
of the monarchical principle, the extension of voting rights to women, the introduction of income tax, the introduction of
Prohibition, the acceptance of total war, the rise of Fascism, the rise of mass pacifism.
However earthshaking that list might once have been, many of its items seem unimportant now because another world war followed—and
because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1918. Boundaries have been drawn and redrawn, and almost all norms
of decency broken. There is, however, another list to compile on the Importance of the War, which I've made from other encounters
during my post-Somme war book binge. This time the great divide of the Great War is in the mind, and some of the items may
sound embarrassingly familiar to any of my peers who believed his/her worldview to have sprung spontaneously to mind,
ex nihiby
during a station break. It is generally accepted that the Great War and its fifty-two months of senseless slaughter encouraged,
or amplified, among other things: the loss of a belief in progress, a mistrust of technology, the loss of religious faith,
the loss of a belief in Western cultural superiority, the rejection of class distinctions, the rejection of traditional sexual
roles, the birth of the Modern, the rejection of the past, the elevation of irony to a standard mode of apprehending the world,
the unbuttoning of moral codes, and the conscious embrace of the irrational. Admittedly, the emphasis once again is on destruction,
on disintegration, but not of the exploding car crash variety deplored earlier. It is far more serious—more punk—than that,
and to be fascinated by it may betray an inner malevolence greater than the one tapped into by the guys watching a demolition
derby on cable. On this second list, with few exceptions, absence wins. Liberating, insecure, ironic absence.
I closed the books. The Western Front was out there, ready for my pilgrimage, my own private hajj. There was a lot to think
about, a lot to look for. This book follows that journey, or rather those journeys, along the Front. In concrete, historical
terms, the Western Front stretched from the North Sea on the Belgian coast to the border of France and Switzerland, some 450
miles, between the autumns of 1914 and 1918. I walked the length of it in the summer of 1986, precisely seventy years after
the war's worst period of murderous immobility. It was the Front as it stood in mid-1916 that I then attempted to trace, the
time of stupendous, static carnage that is now meant whenever the phrase "Western Front"crops up in conversation. Wherever
possible my path kept to what had been no-man's-land, the treacherous moonscape lying between the German and Allied trenches,
where the scar of barbed wire and shell holes disfigured the face of Europe. My first hike, from mid-July to late September,
was succeeded in subsequent years by quick forays to different parts of the Front whenever I got the chance. I went back to
the Front, again and again.
What follows, then, is a record of frequent visits to a vanishing metaphor, a scrapbook of journeys made between 1985 and
1995. I did not go to the Front to lay wreaths, or to say again what has been so well said by writers closer to the conflict
in both time and temperament than I could ever hope or want to be. Stirring words are for speeches, not for travelers with
sore feet, self-doubt, or eyes that seldom see beyond the present. At times I went to the Front as an amateur historian, at
other times as a map reader, a literary tourist, a picnicker, a boyfriend, a trend hound on holiday, a curiosity seeker, a
(I'll admit it) weekend war buff, a family researcher, a Canadian, a hiker, a married man, but always as a Boomer, trying
to figure out why I was reaching for something beyond the horizon of living memory. Perhaps I did it out of an impulse to
"mark the spot,"as described in Michael Ignatieff's splendid family history,
The Russian Album:
I still cannot shake off the superstition that the only past that is real, that exists at all, is the one contained within
the memories of living people. When they die, the past they hold within them simply vanishes, and those of us who come after
cannot inherit their experience, only preserve the myth of its existence. We can mark the spot where the cliff was washed
away by the sea, but we cannot repair the wound the sea has made.
I. Nieuport to Dixmude
U
BENT HIER.
You are here. Or, fancifully, you are twisted. A municipal map of Nieuport, Belgium, tells me where, and perhaps who, I am.
I have arrived in Belgium from Paris today, ready to set off on a summer-long hike down a metaphor. My light backpack contains
a fistful of maps, a change of clothes, a bottle of mineral water, a couple of novels, a six-pack of chewing gum, and a notebook
for collecting trivia. I have come back to the Front.
The First World War has been preying on my thoughts ever since I visited the Somme in the dead of winter. Throughout the following
spring I invariably steered conversations toward the trenches, like a tiresome old soldier who wears out his listener's patience
by telling and retelling the same stories. Now, in the summer of 1986, my remaining friends have given me a silver hip flask
and a compass for my thirtieth birthday—in case, one of them says hopefully, I get lost in no-man's-land.
Thanks to the city map, however, I know where I am. Here. This is the spot where the Western Front began. From 1914 to 1918,
you could walk from Nieuport, on the North Sea coast, all the way to Switzerland, approximately 450 miles if you followed
the serpentine meandering of the trenches, without ever sticking your head above ground. Several million men hunkered down
in two long, parallel ditches and tried desperately to duck the fragments of steel and lead that whizzed overhead for four
years. It was a nightmare, a monumental exercise in folly. A generation of young men dug a sinuous graveyard from the sea
to the mountains, and proceeded to bury themselves and their certainties in it. Nieuport—or as Flemish has it, Nieuwpoort
Bad—is the place where they ran out of land.
••••• author's route
I finish the last of my mayonnaise-smeared french fries and wander out of the shadow of the high-rise apartment blocks on
Nieuport's main street. Trams click past with understated Low Countries efficiency. The loud colors of leisure rule the sidewalks.
Clutches of beefy teens stroll the avenue in sweatshirts emblazoned in Ginza English: "Morgan Sisters Scoop Canada Best Hockey
Wyoming"seems to be a favorite. At the point where the River Yser meets the sea there is a paved promenade overlooking a sandy
beach. A fitness instructor is leading a group of laughing young girls through an aerobics routine as Madonna's "Papa Don't
Preach"plays on an unseen loudspeaker. Beyond them, out to sea, a car ferry plows a gray-green path toward the horizon. This
Belgian riviera, a collection of brave little resorts with names odd-looking to the untutored Anglo eye (Koksijde Bad, Sint
Idesbald, Knokke, Heist, Nieuwpoort Bad), does not appear to be the type of place where epochal change could have occurred.
Yet the girls are jumping and pumping on a spot where an era collapsed, and the Flemish-speaking families thronging the boardwalk
tread a historical fault line.
Before the Great War, the thinking ran, this part of the world was a sunny Arcadia of perpetual progress, a sort of Merchant-Ivory
drawing room with exquisite manners and delicacy of feeling. Europe was a summit of moral sophistication that towered over
the bumpkins, dwarfs, and savages inhabiting the other continents. After the war, the world became a cruel, cynical place,
riven by ideology, hatred, and bloodlust. And that was not all. Love itself had been extinguished in 1914. The fairest, finest
summer to have graced Europe since the age of chivalry was followed by a century peopled by hollow men intent on mass murder.
Ubenthier,
indeed.
The best-known utterance about the Great War, attributed to Edward Grey on the eve of the conflict, typifies the feeling.
"The lamps are going out all over Europe,"the British Foreign Secretary is supposed to have sighed as the armies began to
march. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes."After the war, after the fondly imagined good old days before 1914
were seen to be forever irretrievable, the sentiment became stronger. F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night
contains a paragraph to that effect which has been so often quoted in studies of the war as to have become scriptural in its
authority. Before I leave the shore at Nieuport to walk down the Front, the passage must be invoked. It will be my traveler's
prayer. In the novel, Dick Diver visits the trenches less than a decade after the armistice and announces to his companions:
This western front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time . . . This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous
sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes . . . You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment
going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee,
and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your
grandfather's whiskers . . . This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and
country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurttemberg and Westphalia. Why,
this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here . . . All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself
up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.
B
EYOND A TANGLE
of road junctions and canals south of Nieuport the countryside finally stretches out in front of me, that
"great gust" at the onset of the century having long ago blown offshore and out of memory. If anything is borne on the wind
this nineteenth of July, 1986, it is a few stray embers from the blast at Chernobyl three months earlier, as explosive a symbol
of human incompetence as any created by the military mind. That too will fade into obscurity eventually, but not for another
generation or so.
For the moment, the simple glory of a blue sky forbids thoughts of mud or war or oblivion. The flat, almost featureless plain
of Flanders looks neither threatening nor welcoming today, like a landscape you could ignore from a speeding car. The morning
sun beats down, present and immediate. To my left the Yser, its banks two obedient concrete strips; to my right, cow pastures
drying pungently in the heat.
I could be anywhere, but I'm instantly reminded that I am not. The traveler on the road out of Nieuport, south to Dixmude,
is almost immediately met by the vanguard of the sad column of memorials and cemeteries that marches across northern France
and Belgium. This confetti of slaughter—an isolated graveyard in a farmer's field, a forlorn stela beside a cow track, a rusted
plaque in a forest clearing—lies lightly on the landscape, a ubiquitous presence whose stone keening is now inaudible to all
but the very old. The first graveyard I come across is British. Enclosed by a low, redbrick wall, it holds rows of off-white
headstones, each inscribed with a religious, regimental, or national symbol. Flower beds have been planted and maintained,
in keeping with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's mandate to make gardens of its many properties. I jot down the inscription
of the first headstone I read. For me, he'll represent the ten million other soldiers who perished in the Great War:
28237 Private
E. R. Cadogan
Lancashire Fusiliers
29 th August 1917 Age 19
He died that we might live
To one side is a plinth embossed with a sword and engraved with a collective epitaph taken from Ecclesiastes: "Their name
liveth forever-more." A sense of failure hangs in the air.
The line of high-rises on the coast shrinks to toy size as the day progresses. Ahead all is inoffensive pastoral flatness,
except a point far to the south, where what appears to be an enormous water tower dances in the heat haze. Fields of beetroot
and mustard come one after the other. If I stop and make a full 360-degree turn, a dozen or so tawny-colored steeples can
be seen poking skyward, signs of distant villages. Aside from the cows grazing in a Zen trance near the road's edge, sweating
packs of sports cyclists are my only occasional companions.
The meanders of the Yser lead me through a few villages with names longer and livelier than their main streets: Schoorbakke,
Stuivenskerke. The unplanted borders of the fields between them, despite the heat of midsummer, still bloom with a profusion
of wildflowers. Occasionally the homely company of buttercups gives way to a scarlet burst of poppies. I pick one, and am
almost surprised to find the bloom does not conceal a lapel pin. My notebook closes over its lurid red petals, and I continue
southward under a blistering afternoon sun. Soon I am limping, an urban tenderfoot already bested by a few miles of reclaimed
marsh.
On the outskirts of Dixmude, I stop into a bar for a beer. Thoughts of rural Belgium are banished once my eyes adjust to the
dim light. The bamboo-covered walls show posters of basset hounds, Tyrolean castles, and Venice's Piazza San Marco. A rendering
of the Virgin and Child feeding mendicant pigeons looks over a collection of beery knickknacks scattered round the room. The
one at my table, a porcelain statuette, takes as its theme the incompatibility of keg draining and male sexual arousal. Normally
I would cluck appreciatively out of tavern etiquette, but not here, not in the expectant silence that has greeted my entrance.
The Flemings at the bar, their eyes staring out of great steaks of faces, look as if they've just lumbered in from posing
for Brueghel the Elder. There is a pause as they take my measure, then the room rings once again with their bellowed repartee.
I like this jolly spot. It's called Dodengang—the Trench of Death.
Across from the bar is the Dodengang itself, a preserved stretch of trench that runs for about three hundred yards along the
left bank of the Yser. The sandbags that make up its walls (the front wall was called the parapet;the rear, the parados) have
been filled with cement, so that the fortification can now withstand the assaults of tourism. On the firestep, the platform
from which soldiers fired over the parapet, a few wild poppies compete for attention with discarded Coke cans and potato chip
bags. Like all trenches, this one zigzags in a saw-tooth pattern, to buffer the impact of explosions and to prevent an attacking
enemy from having a clear field of fire should a portion of the trench be captured. Thus, the elaborate ditch was even more
claustrophobic than it might have been, for the man in it could see only his traverse, that is, his section of the trench
between two saw-teeth. He could of course step up and look out over no-man's-land, or behind his own lines, but that would
be foolhardy. In the quiet months of the war that saw no great battles or offensives, the British army alone lost 7,000 men
a week, what it termed "wastage," to snipers and random shellfire. Not all these casualties were from wounds, however. Rotting
feet—called trench foot—and venereal disease took their toll as well.
I stand on the firestep and look out over the river and fields beyond it. There is scarcely a sound, except the odd plop of
a fish in the water. Imagining the Front is difficult, if not impossible, even here in an old trench. A British officer, quoted
in historian Martin Gilbert's
First World
War,
wrote to his friend Winston Churchill in 1914 about a place like the Dodengang, in which "crouch lines of men, in brown or
grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven hollow-eyed with the continual strain, unable to reply to the everlasting run of shells
hurled at them from three, four, five or more miles away . . ." The officer also described for Churchill the Western Front
in its infancy:
Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively
littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves; in which farms, villages and cottages are shapeless
heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by shells and disfigured by dead
horses, cattle, sheep and goats, scattered in every attitude of repulsive distortion and dismemberment.
The writer was a Fleming, but not of the Flanders variety. A British MP and a major in the army, Valentine Fleming died in
battle in 1917, leaving behind a nine-year-old son, Ian, who would in turn bequeath James Bond to the world. The father, in
his description of the Front, gives us the sad scene that would haunt the imagination of his peers until the end of their
lives. Although immune to the glamour of violence, they would nonetheless encourage their children to go to war when the time
came. The Dodengang stretches well into the twentieth century.
2. Dixmude
The main square of Dixmude is surrounded by a Germanic gingerbread of gabled houses. Its central Grote Markt, awash in a sea
of parked cars, holds scrupulously maintained monuments to a Belgian general and to the man in the moon. The square's cobblestones
are well scrubbed, uniform, obedient. The flowers in the flower boxes are petunias, the cafe tables are rigid plastic forms,
and the radiating streets are lined with cookie-cutter redbrick rowhouses straight out of a British suburban sitcom. If Dixmude
were a person, it would wear socks with sandals.