Back to the Front (30 page)

I
N THE SPRING
of 1918, the Germans got to the gates of Amiens. Their attack on March 21 opened at 4:40 in the morning when
close to 7,000 artillery guns fired off steel and gas shells on the unsuspecting British front and rear positions. It was
the most massive bombardment of the war. After five hours of this inferno, the
Sturmtruppen
dashed out of their trenches into a thick, protective fog and by noon had smashed through the British lines and were heading
into open country. By nightfall, the Germans had gained more in one day on the Somme than the British and French had captured
in all of their offensive of 1916—which had lasted 140 days and cost them more than 500,000 casualties. The following days,
the feats were repeated as the British were forced to scramble back over the downlands of Picardy in utter disarray. Guillemont
fell, as did Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, even Albert, all the towns and villages so viciously contested two years earlier. Trench
warfare was over. My grandfather Bartholomew, caught up in this rout, was made prisoner as half a million German soldiers
advanced forty miles into the west.

An Australian friend also had a grandfather involved in that distant turmoil. Private Frank Gordon Turner, a survivor of Passchendaele,
celebrated his twenty-first birthday on March 21, 1918, the fateful day of the launching of Ludendorff's so-called
Kaiserschlacht
(Kaiser's Battle). He and his fellow troops from New South Wales, then stationed in Artois, were hurriedly sent south to the
Somme and eventually into billets at Villers-Bretonneux, a village just six miles east of Amiens. It was there, on April 4,
1918, that the Australians would finally be the ones to halt the overextended German forces. His journal for that day is a
common man's experience of an uncommon day:

I was awakened by the loud report of a shell which landed just a few yards from the room I was sleeping in & opposite the
window, parts of the shell came through the window & splintered wood must have been flying. With my first waking breath I
got the fumes from the shell down my throat & to make matters worse a piece of wood hit me in the face making my left: cheek
bleed a little, the fumes of the shell burnt my throat terribly. I thought I'd snuff it. I got out into the fresh air & slime
& slobber streamed from my nose & mouth . . . an officer came up & asked me if I could detect any gas about. I'd a liked to
have told him what I thought of him asking me if I could detect gas when I reckon I had got a stumack full of it. That shell
wounded 6 . . . & killed one poor chap. One of the fellows . . . had one leg blown off below the knee & the other one partially
cut off. . . We stood to at about 7 a.m. we got word fritz was advancing towards Villers Bretonneux & so we got all our gear
on & went out to meet him. We had some close goes with shells as we passed down the narrow streets along the road to the open
fields, we had only gone about ¼ of a mile from the town when we could see the Germans coming about ½ to ¾ of a mile away,
there was an aerodrome between us & him & as it afforded a bit of cover we made in that direction . . . we went forward again
about 300 yds. & got along a road in front of the aerodrome from where we got a very good field of fire, as we got into our
position the nearest germans were about 300 yds. in front of us. hundreds of them must have fallen by our rifle shots . .
. it was raining all the day; about 2 p.m. there seemed to be some movement on our right, all our men were retreating & we
knew no reason for it. we thought fritz must have broken through & was cutting us off. . . Fritz evidently didn't grasp the
situation of things on our side & never stirred from his position, we dug ourselves in when it got dark & was fairly comfortable
till word came we had to go about 200 yds. further on. The night was pitch black & we went forward once & got lost, found
our old position & started out again, this time after a good deal of wandering about we found the place we had to go to. &
so we had to dig in for the second time in one night. I was very tired but daybreak was approaching & it rested with ourselves
whether we were under cover by daylight or not. My mate Ted Ryan & I dug in together & was quite safe by morning.

Ludendorff then launched a scaled-down but nonetheless murderous attack in Flanders and Artois. The spearhead of his forces
encountered a Portuguese unit, who abandoned the Christ of the Trenches at Neuve Chapelle and disappeared behind the lines.
Debacle threatened again as stormtroopers raced past the whorehouses of Bethune and Armentieres toward Hazebrouck and Bailleul,
major supply depots for the British army.

Fatigue now stepped in. Many German soldiers, half-starved after years of fighting on the side that had been successfully
blockaded, could not believe their
eyes
when they saw the relative opulence of British supplies in food and drink. They realized that their leaders had been lying
to them about the effect of submarine warfare and the parlous state of Allied economies. In the open countryside behind the
old British lines, the conquering Germans busted open wine cellars. The best army on the Western Front began to disintegrate.
In just over a month, more than 350,000 German soldiers had been wounded as a result of the attacks in Flanders, Artois, and
Picardy; 50,000 had been killed. Mass drunkenness and bouts of long-deferred gluttony stalled Ludendorff's latest advance,
as did stiffening British resistance. The ordinary, stoic Feldgrau began to disobey orders. As at the Chemin des Dames in
1917, the human spirit momentarily triumphed.

His Flanders breakthrough thwarted and his army disgruntled, Ludendorff called off the offensive. During May of 1918 the Germans
secretly moved thirty divisions to their lines behind the Chemin des Dames, the quiet "sanatorium of the Western Front" ever
since the Nivelle disaster thirteen months earlier. The French suspected nothing. Worse yet, the general in charge of this
section of the Front, Denis August Duchene, refused to implement the defense-in-depth system of manning the trenches out of
a stubborn belief that every single speck of his beloved France should be defended to the utmost. Thus the bulk of his forces
were in front-line trenches—and were consequently annihilated when the awesome German artillery went into action on May 27.
Within a day, the attackers had overrun the French line, sprinted down the slopes from the Chemin des Dames, crossed the River
Aisne, and gone more than twelve miles. For the French army, which had broken itself in the Nivelle offensive, the German
success on this day and over this terrain was a slap in the face felt for many years. It was yet another reason to ensure
that the miracle on the Marne and the myth of Verdun became the sole French memories of the war.

The spirit of
Götterdämmerung
had overtaken the military minds in control of the Kaiser's armies. Nothing mattered but the battle, regardless of the future.
As the Germans came ever closer to the Marne, even Pershing grew alarmed enough to allow his new doughboy divisions to be
put under the temporary control of the French and the British. Eventually the offensive was stopped at Chateau-Thierry.

This astounding spring of 1918 was not yet over. A debilitated Europe came into contact with an influenza strain that would
kill millions more than the war itself It was called "Spanish" influenza, because Spain, as a nonbelligerent country, had
allowed its uncensored press to report the multiplying instances of the sickness within its borders. On the Western Front,
whole regiments of Allied soldiers fell ill; the underfed and extenuated Germans fared even worse. Ludendorff, unfazed, ordered
more attacks. By mid-July of 1918, the German army could do no more. The stage was set for the endgame.

9. Alsace

In Flanders the river that separates the Latin from the Germanic peoples is called the Douve. I crossed that linguistic front
on a sunny day in July, just south of the village of Messines, Belgium. Here in the Vosges, the Liepvrette forms the divide
and runs through the town of Ste. Marie-auxMines. It is now mid-September and the sky seems to have resigned itself to remaining
gray. To the north of the Liepvrette lived the French speaking Catholics who owed allegiance to the Duke of Lorraine, to the
south, the Alsatian-speaking Lutherans and Calvinists bound to the Count of Ribeaupierre. The political and linguistic division
was enshrined in an agreement of 1399; the religious complexities came later, shortly before Ste. Marie-aux-Mines turned into
the site of a sixteenth-century silver rush. Hence its name.

On the town's main square, the facades of half-timbered houses form a staircase of gables on either side of steeply pitched
roofs. French is definitely not the only
lingua franca
in the streets here. Alsatian drifts out of pastry shops selling rich butter and pound cakes unknown in the Latin lands of
petits fours and croissants. Alsace, the smallest of France's regions, is the final staging ground of the Front.

These last days are spent hiking and hitching along the Route des Crêtes, a summit-skirting roadway built in the First World
War to help French troops get to and from the diabolically placed battlefields of the Alsatian Front. On peaks such as Tête
des
Faux and the Linge, men fought each other so as to control vantage points over other peaks. It was inane, even by Great War
standards. Wherever the high ground was highest, the loosely organized lines suddenly became full-blown trench systems, in
spots just a few yards apart, accessible only to French
chasseur
and German
Jäger
troops on their skis. It sounds more exalted than the trench warfare in Champagne or Artois, but in fact it was as brutal
as any other sector of the Front. A relative dearth of artillery meant more hand-to-hand fighting, more desperate bayoneting
in sneak attacks, more gas canisters in the still mountain air, more blood on the snow. Thousands of men perished in these
fights of 1914 and 1915, until both parties to the pointless savagery realized that stalemate had descended on the mountains
and that the war would be won or lost elsewhere. This land was meant not for war but for hikers.

Make that hikers with the legs of a champion cyclist. My second day in the Vosges Mountains has brought me huffing uphill
to the Bonhomme Pass, formerly the boundary between France and Germany. The Front passed onto imperial German soil here for
the only portion of its entire 450-mile length. Bonhomme, at 3,084 feet in altitude, leads to higher battlefields yet. I take
a hiking trail south from the pass and am soon within hollering distance of two mountain lakes, Lac Blanc and Lac Noir. They
look cloned from a postcard image of northern Ontario. Great gray rock formations and lone pine trees stick out at odd angles
along their shores. As I leave Lac Noir, its green-black waters turn blue in a sudden and brilliant burst of sunshine, and
the morning's autumnal chill is banished. Soon the forest thins in the warming air and the first of a series of alpine meadows
appears before me. I have somehow gone from Ontario to Austria in a few steps. Cowbells tinkle over great slopes of deep green,
which are bordered by hardy bushes the color of rust. I continue on, enchanted, Maria von Trapp-like, forgetting why I am
here—until a French tricolor can be seen fluttering incongruously in the distance. I am nearing the Linge, one of the two
famous Front sites of Alsace.

The battlefield, or rather battlehump, looks like a garden strung with barbed wire. A strange park suitable only for mountain
goats with a metal detector, the Linge stretches on seemingly indefinitely, its trench systems snaking up and down a summit
denuded of trees. A level path has been carved out through the topsy-turvy contours; whenever the trail-makers struck a body
they put up a cross—white for French, black for German. The resulting random cemetery of black and white against the purples
and greens of the thistles and junipers makes the place oddly beautiful.

The attention to appearance continues in the Linge's small museum. In 1914, a French commander gave his assessment of what
it took to be a chasseur soldier and wear the broad berets of his regiment with the appropriate swagger. His words are blown
up and put on a large cardboard sign. The man should have been writing cover lines for fashion magazines. The original French
is worth citing:

C'est la rapidite dans Vexecution des gens qui "pigent, " qui
^(<
galopent. " C'est
Valiant, c'est Vallure, c'est le chic.

(It's about doing things fast by people who "get it," who "move it." It's about drive, it's about pace, it's about style.)

The other major battle site in Alsace is far less tony. It spreads like a stain over a peak called Hartmannswillerkopf, a
lookout over the valley of the Rhine. On leaving the Linge, the Front runs downhill to the east of Munster, a tourist town
now principally famous for its cheese and the storks that nest on its gaily colored rooftops. From there the broken line of
bunkers heads into the shadow of the Grand Ballon, the summit of which, at 4,628 feet in altitude, is the highest point of
the Vosges. Hartmannswillerkopf, a few miles to the southeast of the Grand Ballon, qualifies as the Alsatian Verdun in both
senselessness and empty symbolism. The French chasseurs, unable to get their stylish mouths around the Alsatian, dubbed the
place Le Vieil Armand (Old Armand).

In the first two years of the war a horrible game of King of the Castle was waged here by troops destined to perish after
each fragile conquest. It became a point of honor to take the summit of Hartmannswillerkopf. There were attacks and counterattacks
in almost every month of 1915. The battles here surpass even the Linge for feral atrocity. At the peak of the mountain the
trenches came within four yards of each other. Pumped-up units would capture the height, celebrate their victory, then disappear
to the last man in the inevitable reprisal raid a few days later. When in the beginning of 1916 it finally dawned on both
sides that neither could dominate the highest point for long, the armies retreated to comfortable trenches slightly downhill
and spent the rest of the war awaiting the decision of Picardy, Flanders, and Lorraine. It had taken a murderously long time
for this modus vivendi to develop. Aside from Hartmannswillerkopf's huge cemetery of the identifiable dead in their separate
plots, there is a mass grave here for more than 10,000 soldiers.