Back to the Front (3 page)

At the tourist office on the square, posters suggest that Dixmude is "The Heart of the Flat Country." Once my turn at the
counter comes, I ask, in French, whether there are any vacant hotel rooms in town. After a pause, the blond hostess replies
that everything is booked solid.

"What, nothing?"

"That's right," she says briskly, "nothing at all."

I ask her if there are
any hotels in neighboring towns, whether I could get a bus to them. My French must have faltered, for she looks me in the
eye and says, "Are you Belgian?"

When I tell her no, a transformation takes place. The wall of indifference vanishes. Concerned and motherly now, she leads
me by the arm to a seat by her desk and asks me to wait a few moments. Of course we can find you a place to stay the night;
Dixmude is crowded for the holiday weekend but we can phone around. Please, make yourself comfortable, m'sieur.

Thus I learn the dangers of addressing a Fleming in Belgium's other official language, without so much as an excuse-my-French.
This proof of animosity between Belgium's Flemish-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons gives me a guilty little
thrill—having grown up a Canadian, I feel at home whenever I encounter bickering over language. The French speakers of Belgium
used to have the upper hand in business, finance, politics, and the arts of the nation, but now demographic trends and economic
changes have tilted in favor of the Flemish speakers, who are tired of being portrayed as oafs by the Walloons. That age-old
habit of derision has long since spread south to France, where the telling of Belgian jokes is now a national pastime. These
are often enjoyably stupid, as in the story of the public address system at Paris's Gare du Nord: "The train for London departs
at 8:15; the train for Berlin departs at 9:15; and the train for Brussels departs when the little hand is on the ten . . .
"

Such jokes don't go down too well in Flanders, especially if told by a Walloon. Understandably, militant Flemings want respect;
unfortunately, their loudest voice is the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block), the kind of truly repulsive party of racist xenophobes
that European political culture excels at producing. In Dixmude, the Great War plays a leading role in the Blok's theater
of ethnic rage. What, from a distance, I took to be an enormous water tower wavering in the heat haze turns out to be a twenty-seven-story-tall
memorial to the First World War that doubles as a shrine for the extreme Right. The IJzertoren (Yser Tower), a great brown
truncheon rising out of the plain, looks the part.

Originally erected to honor Belgian soldiers who died on the Yser, the tower gradually became a rallying point for local patriots.
Flemish veterans of the First World War claimed that their fallen comrades had been wantonly sacrificed by the Belgian army's
French-speaking officer class. Thus the Yser war monument automatically became a symbol of aggrieved nationhood. This was
especially true after March 15, 1946, when the original IJzertoren was unceremoniously blown up, allegedly by anti-Flemish
dynamite. The spectacular act of vandalism, spurred by indignation over the pro-Nazi sympathies of many Flemish nationalists
during the Second World War, naturally engendered more resentment. Using the masonry from the original tower, the people of
Dixmude constructed on the site a modest peace arch. Beside that the massive new IJzertoren rose, inaugurated in 1962 by a
bevy of bishops and old soldiers. On its side is an acrostic:

This stands for
Alles voor Vlaanderen
y
Vlaanderen voor Christus
(All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ), a mix of Musketeer and Crusader sentiment that pushes the correct reactionary buttons
for the extremists who hold rallies here. They are sometimes joined by like-minded fellows from France, Britain, and Germany
in gatherings at the foot of the tower where, presumably, everyone compares skull tattoos and trades Adolf and Benito bubble-gum
cards.

I feel distinctly queasy as I pay my money to ascend the IJzertoren. Here in Dixmude, the Old World seems incurably steeped
in old ways, and the contemplation of the past reserved for people bearing grudges. I have barely begun my journey and already
I find myself wondering whether visiting the Western Front merely adds another small brick to the edifice of Reaction. Perhaps
it's better to ignore history, for history is too often used as a defense of the ignoble. The know-nothing ugly American exists,
but so too does the do-nothing ugly European, who constantly invokes the past as an excuse for his present. We've always done
it this way, so it must be right; we've never had your kind living amongst us, so we can't allow you to stay; my father hated
your father, so I hate you.

I share the elevator ride with a small boy and his parents. We are enclosed in the heart—the dark heart—of the flat country.
The problem of history and hate continues to nag. When the cult of the past involves a war, the freedom to speculate shrinks,
for the more destructive the activity, it seems, the more zealous its curators. Even far from the battlefield in North America,
remembrance of wars past regularly brings out the thought police. Veterans' groups act as self-appointed censors of large
swaths of history, shrieking like outraged virgins whenever the record is challenged. In Canada in 1992, veterans tried to
quash a TV documentary about the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War. In 1995 the Smithsonian Institution canceled
its Enola Gay exhibit under similar pressure. Intolerance came disguised as warrior virtue.

The museum at the top of the tower, organized around the central shaft and composed of mementos evoking life in the trenches,
is dusty and deserted. The Fleming family and I head for the windows to look out over a patchwork of green meadows and redbrick
villages lying far below. Guy de Maupassant once said that he liked the view from the Eiffel Tower because it was the only
place in the city from which he couldn't see the Eiffel Tower. The same holds true,
mutatis mutandis,
of the prospect from the IJzertoren. To the north is the blue blanket of the sea. To the south are the first timid signs of
relief in the Flanders plain. A modest, wooded ridge rises beyond the distant spires of a large town. The scene is disingenuously
ordinary, for the town, Ypres, and its surroundings form one of the most terrible landscapes of the twentieth century.

I take the elevator down. The distasteful connotations of the tower have faded, as have visions of aiding the mastodons of
conservatism by pursuing this journey. War, French Premier Georges Clemenceau is supposed to have said in the wake of a battlefield
debacle, is too important a matter to be left to the generals. The same could be said of the past. It needn't be surrendered
to the nostalgic and the intolerant, to the ugly European, to the frat boys of neo-fascism, or to the antidemocratic mullahs
of military memory. The past belongs to everyone. It's too important to be left to the professionals.

3.
Dixmude to Ypres

Strange popping noises punctuate my walk out of the village of Nord-schoote on the road to Ypres. Pfft! Pfft!

Silence.

I take a few more steps, then hear them again: Pfft! Pfft! The detonations are loud but slightly muffled, as if coming from
a great distance. Is it hunting season? Murder month? Has some well-armed cuckold come home too early?

I squint into the flat afternoon light, searching for a better explanation out in the pale green mantle that unfurls to the
horizon. My bewilderment is noticed and misinterpreted as telescopic lechery. A couple of girls bent over double at some vague
agricultural task straighten up and wave at me from the middle of a field. I wave back, embarrassed.

Pfft! Pfft!

The usual parallel about distant echoes is now inescapable. What had been a silent landscape now rings with this faint cannonade,
like a far-off and feeble remnant of one of the most deafening dins in all of history. With every step southward, toward the
villages of Zuidschoote and Boezinge, I walk toward what was once known as the Ypres Salient, a great C-shaped curve in the
Western Front. Seldom, if ever, has any place on earth been rocked by so many millions of pounds of whizzing steel and high
explosives.

For four years the Germans held the low ridge to the east of Ypres. Their lines were on the outside of the C. Inside that
letter, bulging out toward them, were the British and their allies, an entire army of sitting ducks. They could be fired on
from the front and from either side by an enemy who had the distinct advantage of holding the higher ground.

Pfft! Pfft! The sound seems to be growing louder the farther south I go.

The Ypres Salient was a remarkable shooting gallery. Both sides took part in hellish artillery duels that tore up the waterlogged
ground and transformed it into a foul seething swamp. The Salient's defining moment was the week of July 25 to July 31, 1917,
when the British army fired off 4,283,550 shells (or 107,000
tons
of metal) along a front twelve miles wide, then had its infantry try to wade through—in the rain — the ensuing soupy morass
in the face of sustained machine-gun fire. Defining, because this place is one of the three or four on the Western Front,
along with Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, and the Somme, where the criminal stupidity of the First World War still seems manifest,
even after the passing of eighty years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, in more ways than one. I sit down by the road outside Boezinge and massage my feet. A squadron
of mosquitoes arrives from a nearby puddle to keep me company. The mysterious pops continue fitfully, farm dogs bark, cars
whoosh past, the bugs start biting. What am I doing here?

No, that's the wrong question. What were the British and the Germans doing here?

P
FFT
! P
FFT
!

Two shots were fired at 10:34 A.M., on June 28, 1914, in front of Schiller's Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip, the
nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb holding the gun, mortally wounded Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the imperial throne
of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Sophie. When they died, about half an hour after Princip had blasted away at point-blank
range, the nineteenth century entered its death throes. The event was a fluke: The archduke's driver made a wrong turn onto
Appel Quay and had to back up, right into the sights of the scrawny Serb student with the world-historical mission. But for
the chauffeur'sinept driving, the continent-wide car wreck of the next four years might have been avoided.

Earlier in the morning of that June 28, the victims had been celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary. Since Sophie's
soon-to-be-spilt blood was not blue enough—she did not have the requisite degrees, or
quartiers,
of nobility—to be accorded formal honors at the Viennese court, her doting archduke of a husband made a point of going to
places where she could be given royal treatment. Sarajevo was just such a city. As every protocol martinet in central Europe
knew, when Franz Ferdinand acted in a military capacity, in this instance as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army
on a tour of the Bosnian capital's garrison, he—and his wife—had to be given the full panoply of feathered deference, decorous
bowing, and stylized scraping that Habsburg vanity required. Franz loved his wife, and the cream-puff perquisites of his office.

Princip loved his cause. June 28,1914, was also the 525th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the resounding defeat that
Serbs still perversely celebrate as their nation's brush with greatness and respectability. Today they might mark the occasion
by gunning down demonstrators—as they did in Sarajevo, to open the latest bout of barbarity in Bosnia; in Princip'sday the
anniversary usually called for beetle-browed acts of sedition against foreign overlords. In this the Bosnian Serbs were helped,
surreptitiously, by their brethren in Belgrade, who had enjoyed independence in a sovereign Serbia (or "Servia," as it was
often called) ever since an earlier conflict had wrested their territory from the control of the Ottoman Turks. And everyone
in Europe, then as now, got excited when real estate changed hands.

In fact, all five of the Great Powers—Britain, France, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany—were talking Turkey. The Divan, as
the Ottoman court was known, had once controlled the Balkans, but Turkey was now the so-called "Sick Man of Europe," a tottering
empire no longer able to restrain its restive peoples. As outsiders greedily looked on, insiders weakened the Ottoman presence
in Europe. A vocal, dissident faction, impatient with the dotty despots in the Topkapi Palace, agitated for modernization
under the name of the Young Turks, a term that entered turn-of-the-century English to describe any collection of lean and
hungry hotheads.

This Balkan cocktail of Young Turks (many of whom were Bosnian Muslims), angry Serbs, and smitten Habsburgs was the brew that
sent the Old World on its self-destructive bender of 1914-18. Even though Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had famously
adjudged the Balkans undeserving of "the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,"and every political commentator worth his
postprandial cigar had pointed out that,
pace
the English humorist Saki, the benighted region produced more politics than could be consumed locally, it was indeed the mountainous,
hidebound, backward Balkans that ushered in—and would later usher out—the twentieth century.