Back to the Front (21 page)

Trouble came to Nivelle's paradise when the Germans retreated from the Noyon Salient in March 1917 and hunkered down along
the Hindenburg Line. There was no Salient left to pinch—the Germans had shortened their lines by forty miles and thus freed
valuable divisions to use as a reserve in case of Allied attack. Such a defensive coup might have given other commanders pause,
but not Nivelle. A collective suspension of disbelief reigned at headquarters, despite a few rumblings from rivals he had
beaten for the top job. These criticisms were discounted as sour grapes from also-rans, even though detailed plans were known
to have been captured by German raiding parties. Nivelle's own loquaciousness around the press ensured that the coming attack
counted as the worst-kept secret of the war. As March became April, disaster drew nearer.

That winter and spring of 1917 were, in many ways, as momentous as the summer of 1914. The changes latent since Princip fired
his bullet finally took place, and the nineteenth century expired. In December 1916, Franz Josef, the decrepit Austro-Hungarian
emperor who had let his ministers issue Serbia the unanswerable ultimatum thirty months earlier, died unhappy in Vienna, to
be succeeded by a twenty-nine-year-old eager for peace. The glue that had held Mitteleuropa together quickly began to come
unstuck. In Germany, a failure of the potato crop turned the winter into a nightmare of watery turnip soup and starving children.
Hurt by the British-enforced shipping embargo, the German government felt compelled to return the favor and cut Britain off
from its vital supplies. On January 31, 1917, the Germans announced that they would begin unrestricted submarine warfare—that
is, they would sink any ship on the high seas, whether belligerent or neutral in its national origin. The Americans were naturally
appalled; three days later the American cargo ship
Housatonic
was sunk by a U-boat in the north Atlantic. It was the first of many that spring.

The American century began in 1917. The U-boats ushered it in, with the help of the new German foreign minister, Dr. Alfred
von Zimmermann, and the strange, unsolicited telegram he sent to the Mexican government. Zimmermann promised lavish German
support, in the event of an American entry into the war, should Mexico wish to wrest the southwestern states of the union
back from their Yankee usurpers. Bribes were paid, and the telegram was deciphered, translated, and leaked to the press. Five
weeks later, on April 6, 1917, the United States Congress declared war on Germany. President Wilson, elected the previous
autumn on the slogan "He Kept Us out of the War," couched the American action in the terms of unalloyed idealism. He was a
new pope launching a new crusade. He might also have added that American business could not afford to let France and Britain
renege on their mountainous debts, and that the Allies' credit line was exhausted. Someone had to make sure that they won
the war—or everyone would go broke.

At the same time, ice was breaking in Russia. Two weeks after incensed Americans read about the Zimmermann telegram in their
newspapers, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate by his rebellious army. The bloodbath on the Eastern Front had been too
great, the suffering too harsh, the incompetence too patent. The creaking, 303-year-old oligarchy of the Romanovs came to
an ignominious end on March 15, 1917. Russia remained a belligerent nation at grips with the Central Powers, but it was now
teetering on the brink of neutrality. The German government gambled that it could get Russia out of the war altogether before
the Americans arrived in force. In April, it allowed a closed train with Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin as a passenger to cross its
territory and shunt home to Russia. The newly empowered democrats of Petrograd intended to continue the fight alongside the
Allies. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, promised to have no truck with the imperialist powers of either side.

Thus in April 1917, a new era dawned, one in which the old powers of Europe would eventually have to share the world stage
with an internationalist America and a turbulent Russia. Fittingly, for a senescent civilization that had placed millions
of its youths in two long parallel ditches, spring refused to come in 1917. The weather over the Front was execrable, a filthy,
unseasonable mix of cold sleet and chilling winds. On April 6, the shivering Allied troops were warmed by America's declaration
of war. Three days later, the British launched their attacks near Arras as part of the Nivelle offensive. The Canadians took
Vimy Ridge in a snowstorm, but elsewhere the usual failures occurred with the usual horrific human cost. A week after that,
on April
16,
Lenin arrived at the Finland Station of Petrograd, ready for his rendezvous with destiny. The same day, in northern France,
the weather was a howling mess as a cold deluge of sleet and snow swirled out of lowering gray clouds. In the murky darkness
of 6:00 A.M., the French army stepped out of its trenches and headed uphill toward the Chemin des Dames.

I
HAVE REACHED
the fertile desolation of the plateau. A straight road leads east through the wavering kinks of scorched air.
Unlike many rural routes in France, the wayside is devoid of shade trees. There is nothing to block the prospect or deflect
the wind. The fields have been harvested, leaving the baked brown earth a cracked labyrinth of tractor treadmarks and flattened
furrows. A few skeletal hayracks stand out against the blue sky, their supporting beams bleached by the sun. By the shoulder
of the road, a small
borne
informs me that I'm on the Chemin des Dames. No one is in sight. My stride quickens, and soon several miles have passed and
the inventory of the hours lengthens: a huge graveyard, a flagpole, a private memorial; a chapel built in the late 1950s and
visited in 1962 by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle; a rebuilt village, Cerny-en-Laonnois,
snoozing at a crossroads; then more empty fields with distant ricks sweltering in the afternoon glare. Off to my right I catch
occasional glimpses of the Aisne valley. In places it still bears the puckers of seventy-year-old detonations.

The morning of April
16,
1917, was a massacre. As one lieutenant later told a French parliamentary committee investigating the fiasco: "At six in the
morning, the battle began; by seven, it was lost." Regiments disappeared in a withering hail of bullets and shellfire. Nivelle,
whose plan had called for an intense artillery barrage, made precisely the same mistakes as the British had on the Somme.
There was a ten-day artillery campaign before the sixteenth, which robbed the attack of any possible surprise, and the wrong
guns were used. Less than a third of his artillery was of the heavy caliber needed to entomb the defenders in their cavernous
shelters. Worse, of the 392 German gun batteries trained on the advancing troops, only 53 had been spotted by reconnaissance
aircraft in the run-up to the fatal day. The French thus climbed up an inclined no-man's-land rocking with deadly explosions.
Worse still, the stormy weather had prevented most airplanes from flying in the days immediately preceding the battle — thus
no one detected the fresh divisions the Germans had moved into the sector. The French attackers were meant to follow a creeping
barrage in the manner of the Canadians at Vimy. They were meant to effect a war-winning breakthrough, to advance seven miles
in a few hours. By day's end, those still alive were five hundred yards at most from their starting point, hugging the ground
as the wind swept snow into their faces. The next day, Nivelle sent thousands more to their deaths.

I arrive at the Dragon Hole, scene of some of the fiercest fighting of 1917. The land to the south becomes clifflike; there
are shell craters in the meadow far below. Inside, a pompous little man leads a group of war tourists around the dankness,
extolling the courage of the doomed army in a spiel of florid French that never once shrinks from cliche. Nothing is said
about the wisdom of attacking the spot or about the subsequent mutinies. The guide sells us a version of 1917 with a shrill
nationalist pitch, like a paraplegic celebrating the car crash that disabled him. We look at fading displays under glass.
Once back out into the air, everyone breathes easier. A bottle blonde in high heels clicks across the parking lot in pursuit
of her hyperactive son; an old man soothes a crying youngster who has fallen off a cannon; an Assumption Day picnic on a crater
lip degenerates into a family quarrel. The view and my mood suddenly improve—at a feature of the Chemin des Dames called the
Isthmus of Hurtebise, the land drops away on both sides, and the prospects to the north and south stretch to rivers and ridges
that lie outside this crude swath of the Front. Undamaged France beckons. Champagne has been reached.

The time line falters as well. At Hurtebise I have stumbled onto a Napoleonic battlefield. On March 7, 1814, Bonaparte's men
clashed on this picturesque height with the Russians of the Grand Alliance sent to crush the French Emperor. Napoleon, as
usual, won, but the victory was Pyrrhic at best: for the 5,000 Cossacks killed on the battlefield, there were 7,000 French
dead. A monument marks the spot at Hurtebise Farm. A poilu holds a tattered flag with a
Marie-Louise,
the name given to the conscripts of 1814. The casualty total a century later would show the progress of technology and the
regression of generalship. Nivelle lost 275,000 soldiers on the Chemin des Dames. Napoleon would have been dumbfounded by
Nivelle's mulish wastefulness, and by the result—in mid-May, the descendants of his Grande Armee began talking back to their
officers. The soldiers heading up to the line bleated like sheep, derisively, in an open admission of loss of faith in their
leaders.

From Hurtebise, I walk to the easternmost, wooded end of the Chemin and the villages of Craonne and Craonnelle. This is the
so-called California Plateau, named by a nineteenth-century entrepreneur who thought the gold rush association would attract
quarrymen to his outdoor dance-hall. It became the most dreaded part of the battlefield. By May 1917, it was known to the
entire French army, thanks to a song that smacked of the now-rampant defeatism. The
Madelon
was forgotten. I quote from Rene Courtois's monograph,
Le Chemin des Dames:

Adieu la vie, adieu I amour

Adieu toutes les femmes

C'est bien fini, c'est pour toujours

De cette guerre infame

C'est d Craonne, sur le plateau

Qu 'on doit laisser sa peau,

Car nous sommes tous condamnes

Nous sommes les sacrifies.

(Goodbye to life, goodbye to love

Goodbye to all women

It's all over now, finished for good,

This awful war.

At Craonne, on the plateau

That's where we'll lose our lives

Because we are all doomed

We are sacrificed.)

Mutiny and sedition got started among those about to be rotated back to such places as Craonne and Cerny-en-Laonnois. In early
May, a regiment that had been taken out of the line and promised leave stayed in their billets drinking wine and playing cards
when the order came that they were to return to the Chemin des Dames. The poilus elected representatives, who politely told
their officers that there was no way they were returning to the Front. When the officers insisted, the men said they would
shoot them first.

The revolt spread with astonishing speed. Before long, more than two-thirds of the units of the French army were affected
by insubordination, or worse. Some units agreed to man the trenches, but not to attack. For the first time on the Western
Front, men got together as a mass and denounced the madness. It was the war's finest moment. Tens of thousands of poilus refused
to go back to the Front. They wanted the whole sorry slaughter to be history. Now. Immediately.

Ordinary soldiers took over towns behind the Front—martial Soissons is still trying to live down the shame—and commandeered
troop trains. There was talk of taking Paris, of overthrowing the government, of going home. The offensive on the heights
of the Chemin des Dames petered out into inertia. Henceforth, it would be "the sanatorium" of the Front, the place to send
the shell-shocked and those too weary to fight.

Something remarkable happened in May 1917. A shared wave of common sense and common dignity swept over multitudes of mistreated
men. The message implicit in their mass disobedience was clear: No longer could their lives be squandered in pointless slaughter.
They were men before they were soldiers, individuals before being Frenchmen. The mutineers of the Chemin des Dames are the
Front's only true heroes. It is their statues that should have pride of place in the capitals of Europe instead of those of
their executioners. The mutineers, by their actions, resisted the industrialization of murder. Had their example been followed
more often during the twentieth century, there might be less reluctance to look back at history. The men of the Chemin des
Dames tried to save their skins and, in so doing, save the past from the obloquy of forever being an example of the grotesque.
Instead, the skeleton of Soupir's chateau stands alone in its field, unknown and unneeded.

T
HE SUMMER AND
fall of 1917 saw the tumult on the Western Front return to its more normal medium. Pieces of steel, rather
than ideas, were exchanged. Nivelle was dispatched to an obscure command in North Africa after being found blameless by an
indulgent board of inquiry. His replacement was Henri-Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Petain, a saturnine but humane general who
would disgrace himself in old age as head of France's collaborationist Vichy regime. Petain quelled the mutinies in the army
by promising to call off suicidal offensives, institute more frequent home leave, and improve the food. That was the carrot.
The stick was the series of courts-martial conducted by an army hierarchy terrified of its brush with total collapse: 23,385
men were convicted of mutinous actions, 432 were condemned to death, and 50 were shot. Henri Barbusse, according to historian
A. J. P. Taylor, claimed that 250 men were purposely obliterated by their own artillery. The soldiers whose death sentences
had been commuted were sent instead to penal servitude in the tropics. It is a complaisant commonplace in French histories
of the war to state that these figures prove that the army showed leniency toward its mutinous men. To make such a statement
is to be a stooge. Leniency was shown to Nivelle, not to the four hundred or so lives that were ruined for standing up to
the lunacy of 1917. Even Petain realized this. Henceforth, the strategy of the French army would be to sit and wait for the
Americans.