Back to the Front (22 page)

The British thought otherwise. Haig might have blood on his hands, but Lloyd George had egg on his face. The prime minister's
previous support of Nivelle now looked foolhardy, proof of the politician's misapprehension of all things military. Haig,
claiming that the French generals wanted him to launch a major offensive to keep the German invader away from their convalescing
army, argued for a huge new campaign in Flanders. The French, in fact, had asked the British simply to keep the Germans occupied
with diversionary attacks, but with the mood of I-told-you-so reigning in the war councils of London, Haig was hard to resist.
When the mines were blown under the Messines Ridge in June, signaling the first painless British advance since the heady opening
day of Neuve Chapelle in 1915, the momentum for the Flanders campaign became unstoppable. There was no gainsaying Haig; he
would have his Third Battle of Ypres. It began on July 31, 1917. Another slaughter commenced. On August 29, nineteen-year-old
Private E. R. Cadogan died near the Ramscapelle Road outside of Nieuport. Eleven days earlier, Musketier Leopold Aronsohn
perished in Artois.

The Ypres campaign ended in the ghastly slime of Passchendaele. Now that so much of the Front and the war is behind us, perhaps
the true scale of the crime can be better understood. Field-Marshal Haig advocated frontal assaults, devoid of surprise, in
the rain and the mud of the Salient, and even spoke of his cavalry breaking through into open country. He promoted these tactics
after the Chemin des Dames, after Verdun, after the Somme, after Loos, after Neuve Chapelle, after the Kindermord at Langemarck.
It is astonishing that his name did not become a verb meaning "to learn nothing." At war's end Haig received a lump sum gift
of £100,000 and was made a peer. Leniency was shown once again.

T
HE WALK DOWN
from Craonnelle into the plain of Champagne has me limping in the lengthening shadows. I pass the first vineyard
of my journey—quite an accomplishment for someone who has spent several weeks hiking through the French countryside. It's
as if I'd driven across America without glimpsing a Wal-Mart. This vineyard overlooks the lowlands near the Aisne; next to
it on the slope is a large military graveyard, its headstones perversely planted in the same arrangement as the grapevines.
The effect is eerie, as if the cemetery were a desiccated vineyard and its crosses oversized stakes deserted by the vine.
In contrast to the greenery of the growing grapes, the burnt brown grass of the cemetery seems sad and neglected.

At Pontavert, a village that grew up around a canal lock, I am picked up by a vanful of tipsy country boys. They give me a
lift, at hair-raising speed, to the main road leading to Reims. On the way there we pass a sign pointing to Julius Caesar's
encampment. Yet another battle was fought around here, this one in 57 B.C. There is no record of mutinies or of fallen Cossacks
in that battle.

I am deposited at a road junction opposite the village Berry-au-Bac. On one side of the main road are tanks and a war monument,
placed in memory of a tank cemetery that formed here during the Nivelle offensive. Signs point off to craters where hundreds
were killed by exploding mines. Farther up, there's a farm called Le Cholera.

I look around—cholera, tanks, and craters. In the distance, on the plain of Champagne, the towers of the Reims cathedral stand
out in the deepening gloom. The decision is not too difficult. I stick out my thumb and start walking toward town.

2.
Reims

Hundreds of starlings are swooping around the facade of the Reims cathedral this evening. They dip and dive as one, controlled
by some unseen puppeteer in the scarlet sky above. In the plaza several groups of hang-together tourists wheel about in a
sluggish variation of the birds' aerial dance. The clicking of shutters accompanies the white exclamation of flashes. Automatic
light meters adjust to the failing day.

The crowd grows denser on the square—no one wants to go into the sanctuary as long as the birds continue to career around
the towers, dart between the statues, twist and turn about the spire. The spectacle makes the eye giddy. It's as if the mass
of sculpted stone were suddenly lighter than air, ready to be drawn aloft by the skittering flock. The pale cathedral has
at last awakened to the throngs of men and women staring at it with uplifted faces. That's when I spot her.

Joan. In armor and on horseback. She rides off to one side of the square. This used to be her town and her show. At the moment
she's half-hidden behind a sanitation truck. Someone has managed to climb her tall pedestal to get a better view of the birds.
Of the two great medieval presences in this city, the cathedral and Joan of Arc, one is faring much better tonight.

They used to work as a team, particularly when the Front was just a few short miles to the north of the city. Reims, with
its cathedral and its armored virgin, became the poster child of the Great War. Although other towns suffered greatly, this
prosperous city became the
ville martyre
known throughout the world. When Woodrow Wilson was taken on a tour of its devastated streets after the war, the proponents
of clemency toward Germany cried foul. Reims had become too emotional an object. The Kaiser's artillerymen had pounded much
of the city into rubble—surely Wilson's much-lauded equanimity would be shaken by the sight of the devastation. Besides, Reims's
worst moment of the war, when 20,000 shells rained down from the skies, occurred on April
6,
1917, the same day that the U.S.A. went to war with Germany. It was unfair to upset the American president as he prepared
to negotiate.

For the better part of four years, the German army had been dug into the heights near Berry-au-Bac and Brimont, training their
cannon on the city. Like the tourists turning their cameras on the starlings, all they had to do was point and shoot. The
cathedral was first hit in September 1914. Stupefaction greeted this bombardment. Until then, no one thought such vandalism
possible. The Germans shrugged off international criticism by claiming that the church was being used as a lookout by French
artillery spotters, which it probably was. When the building's roof caught fire after one well-aimed round of shelling and
the magnificent medieval timbers came crashing down into the nave, talk turned to the barbarism of the German soul. This event,
along with the burning of the university library of Louvain, Belgium, counted as the greatest aesthetic crime of the war.
The fate of Reims and its cathedral would henceforth galvanize world attention as French propagandists used the city's predicament
to full effect. Stories were told of schoolchildren taught in the champagne cellars of the city, of local priests and politicians
holed up for months on end as the shells exploded overhead, of apparitions of Joan of Arc during nights made ghostly by the
flares above the trenches.

It is difficult to imagine today the spell cast by the image of heroic Reims. People once avidly read news of the place. The
educated of the world followed the sandbagging of the cathedral in 1915. The mayor's name, Langlet, and the cardinal's, Lucon,
were known to every philanthropist itchy to write a check. The town became a magnet for self-promoters. To be a prominent
Parisian and not to have visited Reims was an unpardonable lapse, an insult to the notion of patriotic chic. Well-connected
tourists flocked to the place—actresses, industrialists, and politicians made sure to have their pilgrimages to this Front-line
fortress followed in loving detail by the popular press. A totteringly old Sarah Bernhardt showed up in September 1916 to
pose with the statue of Joan of Arc on the cathedral esplanade and to film a short scene in some now-forgotten movie. An eyewitness
recounts that the actress, dressed as a Red Cross nurse, held a handsome actor-soldier in her arms and then uttered the line,
"Oh! An airplane!"—after which cast and crew dashed back to the safety of Paris. Other performers came to declaim patriotic
verse in the cathedral doorway as proof of their courage and as filler for the new medium of newsreel. The procession of self-serving
pilgrims did not escape the notice of satirists. One political cartoon published in 1915 showed the silhouettes of several
well-fed grandees picking their way through the rubble-strewn city. Looking on, an older man confides to the youngster on
his shoulders: "That's a cabinet minister, my boy. He's come to inaugurate our ruins."

I
TAKE A
closer look at the statue of Joan the next morning. She looks mannish, with a small head. She was moved from her
place of honor in front of the cathedral sometime after the Second World War. Originally placed there by a national subscription
in the 1890s, Joan was first unveiled by President Felix Faure, the French statesman whose most famous act was to die in the
embrace of his mistress. At the time Faure inaugurated the equestrian statue, much of French nationalist discourse was tied
up with the lost lands of Alsace and Lorraine. Champagne was thus a border province of France. Joan, a mystic from the Lorraine
town of Domremy, had shone in Reims; hence, placing her here would show the dastardly Prussians that turn-of-the-century France
meant business. Joan would soon get around to taking back what was hers.

At the same time as the local and national notables used Joan for their own ends, the French church went to bat for her at
the Vatican. In the nineteenth century, a rash of Virgin Mary sightings by young girls had become a mainstay of European popular
religion. With Joan, France could have it both ways—a visionary and a virgin rolled into one. As her five hundredth birthday
approached in 1912, the pressure mounted to have her made a saint. A first step was taken in 1909, when she was beatified.
It would not be until 1920, however, after the war and the shelling of "her" cathedral at Reims had made its mark, that Joan
would be canonized. The gesture was a metaphysical sedative for a country still in shock.

The psychic pain inflicted by the Great War on the French needed soothing. Just as the grieving English reached for an Arthurian
shrub at Ypres and celestial bowmen from Agincourt at Mons, the French embraced the myth of Joan of Arc. The war had been
too incomprehensibly cruel to fit any rational scheme for most people, and Joan met too many needs. She had repelled the invader,
given up her young life, founded the very idea of France. What better representative of the four war years? A few things might
not match—it was the English, not the Germans, who had burned her—but that did not matter. Her presence would disguise the
squalor and despair of postwar France. Her image began appearing on postcards, on sentimental engravings; her voice was heard
at the many seances held by bereaved families throughout the country. She kept in touch. The First World War made Joan a modern,
and the Reims cathedral sacred once again. The team worked its magic. When the Nazi capitulation ending the Second World War
in Europe was signed in Reims under Joan's watchful
eyes,
the duo's symbolic power peaked.

Nowadays Joan has faded into the background, as has the cathedral as a spiritual force. A more agnostic country than France
is difficult to find. Those who venerate Joan tend to come from the same political family as those who celebrate Petain's
achievements in both world wars. Every May 1, thousands of right-wingers march through the streets of Paris to honor Joan
of Arc and wax xenophobic about her role in history. The idea of expelling foreigners is irresistible to these proponents
of old-style French nationalism. Not surprisingly, some of the same crowd end up at far-right rallies in Dixmude at midsummer.
On November 11, they assemble at Verdun to honor Petain—except in 1995, when they weirdly gathered in the southern French
town of Carpentras. They rallied there to demand an apology for being wrongly accused of desecrating a Jewish cemetery in
the town four years earlier. Posing as aggrieved victims of reverse discrimination, the French neofascists used the Great
War commemoration as a cover. However insulting and absurd the entire exercise, no one was really surprised at their exploitation
of November 11, just as no one balks at their appropriation of Joan. The Great War and Joan have become wed, for better or
worse, to modern France's merchants of hate. No wonder the starlings are trying to get the cathedral away from the two of
them.

3.
Sillery to St. Hilaire

I'm at a french-fry truck outside the village of Sillery. Traffic whizzes by on the main road, kicking up the white dust on
the shoulder. I've just come from the Fort de la Pompelle, a Great War ruin on a chalky hump of land southeast of Reims. Pompelle
was bombed, shelled, strafed, attacked, overrun, smashed, stormed, and defended for four straight years. Now it's a war buff
museum in white, the exploits of its former occupants celebrated in a depressing succession of nationalistic exhortations.
I flee the place.

"Got any salt?"

"But of course!"

The french fries are sprinkled with the stuff and the steaming packet is eventually handed over. A few bees take a halfhearted
interest in the proceedings.

"You sell any drinks?"

"What?"

A Fruehauf-flapping truck passes to deafen us.

"I said: Got anything to drink?"

"Just champagne and Coca-Cola."

"Champagne?!"

"Brut or demi-sec?"

This is definitely like no other french-fry truck I have ever seen. The man pours me some of the local vintage, and I sit
at a plastic picnic table. If only the Front always came this close to the region's vineyards. A few miles to the south, the
green, vine-covered slopes of the Montagne de Reims can be seen rising up on the horizon. Even from this distance, the villages
look postcard pretty with their windmills and red roofs.

The Front, however, lies to the east, away from the vineyards and the charming villages and across the wide, treeless plain
of Champagne where fields of cereal crops stretch for miles in the spring and early summer. At this time of August, everything
has been taken in and the land looks like an enormous empty lot. I can hardly believe I'm going to walk across it. I feel
as if I've joined the Donner Party, those California-bound settlers who took a wrong turn in the desert and ended up eating
each other. Then I remember I'm alone, so I have nothing to worry about.