Back to the Front (4 page)

To review: Austria was Hungary, so it took a piece of Turkey. The piece was Bosnia-Herzegovina, annexed in 1908. The powers-that-reclined
in Istanbul, enfeebled by recent wars and undermined by the Young Turks, could do nothing to prevent their former possession
from slipping away. Serb nationalists in the region were not so listless — they, like most Europeans, knew that Bosnia's latest
landlord was far from robust. Istanbul's empire might be a frail old man, but Vienna's was no youngster either, the government
of its eighty-four-year-old Emperor Franz Josef renowned for comic opera intrigues and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Serb nationalists
in Belgrade and Sarajevo, like their descendants Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, saw a power vacuum and dreamed of
filling it with a Greater Serbia. The most radical of them formed
Ujedinjeje Hi Smrt
(Union or Death), a terrorist group also known as the Black Hand. Run by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a loose cannon in
the Belgrade government, the organization abetted would-be assassins wherever they served the cause of Serbian nationhood.
Dimitrijevic, a bald colossus who today would not look out of place wrestling on TV, went by the name of Apis, the potent
bull in the pantheon of ancient Egypt. Apis supplied Princip and his fellow conspirators with the guns to do the dirty deed
in Sarajevo. Thus it was Apis and his bloody-minded Black Hand, the template for all the semiofficial dirty tricks squads
to have enlivened recent history, that delivered the ultimate insult to the spluttering autocrats of Austria.

I
PUT MY
socks and boots back on and walk through Boezinge. Someone has had the good sense to plant shade trees in the middle
of the village. Boezinge was once a hallowed name in the French region of Brittany because thousands of Bretons fought in
the fields to the north and west of here. Who else passed this way? French, Senegalese, Algerians, Moroccans, Portuguese,
Indians, Chinese, Thais, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Austrians, Bavarians, Saxons, Prussians, South Africans, Australians, New
Zealanders, Canadians, Americans—a roll call of battalions brought to this corner of Belgium because of a murder in the Balkans.
It was not the proverbial "shot heard round the world" (that, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, occurred in Lexington, Massachusetts,
in April 1775), but Princip's bullet of June 28, 1914, had the distinction of being the first of billions to be fired in the
Great War.

Still, the original question remains unaddressed—why were the British and Germans here, in this shooting gallery Salient?
What could have linked the fate of the two nineteen-year-olds: Princip, the trigger-happy Bosnian Serb, and Private Cadogan,
the British teenager buried in Belgium? British soldiers took to singing a pithy answer to such questions. The tune is
Auld Lang Sync.

We're here because we're here

Because we're here

Because we're here

We're here because we're here

Because we're here

Because we're here.

Sing it to yourself, and you'll see what a satisfying explanation it is. There were, of course, official reasons.

W
HEN THE AUTHORITIES
in Vienna learned of Franz Ferdinand's murder, they saw a golden opportunity to squelch the upstart on
their southern border. Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, the man most at fault for the ensuing debacle, issued the Serbian
government a blisteringly severe ultimatum, the terms of which were tantamount to surrendering sovereignty. The advisers of
Serbia's King Peter, suitably cowed by the Habsburg tantrum, agreed to comply with all of the demands contained in von Berchtold's
ultimatum save one — the order giving Austrian police a free hand on Serbian soil. Rather like an old man buying a red sports
car, the Austro-Hungarian empire then declared war on Serbia. By telegram, in French. It was 1:00 P.M., July 28, 1914.

The story now leaves the precincts of south-central Europe to involve the rest of the continent. Over the years a system of
alliances had developed to transform international affairs into a shifting, intrigue-ridden round of diplomatic skirmishing
that gave a civilized veneer to the cutthroat commercial rivalries of the time. Crises in Morocco and the Balkans came and
went in the first decade of the century, causing mustaches to moisten and horses to snort, but large-scale wars had always
been averted. The game of diplomacy was wonderful and glamorous and cosmopolitan and aristocratic, but in the summer of 1914
it fell apart. The well-bred grandees in the chancelleries and foreign offices drafted their customary cables and issued their
usual exquisitely worded warnings, all to no avail. In its final, prewar stages, diplomacy slipped out of civilian control
to fall in step with the implacable logic of military timetables. When that happened, the traditional ruling classes of Europe
became history, in the Boomer sense of the word. They had delivered their citizenry into the maw of the industrial battlefield.
At war's end, they would not be forgiven.

The road to the Western Front began in the east. Austria's bullying of Serbia induced Russia to order the mobilization of
its troops. Pan-Slavic nationalists in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called) viewed the Slavs of the Balkans as their
proteges. The armies of Czar Nicholas II headed by the millions toward the western borders of Russia. Germany, the industrial
and military powerhouse under the somewhat loopy leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was aghast. The government in Berlin had
foolishly given its ally Austria a ''blank check" — that is, a guarantee of assistance no matter what the outcome of its saber-rattling
policy toward the Serbs. Now, panic-stricken at the results, Germany demanded that Russia stop its mobilization.

This was easier demanded than done. Mobilization was a machine years in the planning that required massive resources to effect
quickly, so you couldn't just stop it halfway and run all the troop trains backward—unless you were willing to leave yourself
defenseless in the ensuing chaos. Naturally, Russia refused to do this.

Not that getting your army up to strength and poised on your borders necessarily meant you were going to war. When France,
an ally of Russia at the time, began mobilizing in the last days of July, it was preparing for hostilities, not starting them.
Likewise Austria-Hungary, Russia, Serbia, Great Britain, and Turkey. This may seem like hairsplitting, but it's not—there's
a big difference between pointing a pistol at someone and actually shooting him. In only one country was this distinction
not made: Germany.

In the 1890s a Prussian military planner, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, had rightly surmised that Germany might one day have
to face hostile armies in both the east and the west. He, like all German policy makers, feared
Einkreisung,
or encirclement. Positing that his country could not wage a victorious war on two fronts at once, Schlieffen masterminded
a scheme whereby the Kaiser's armies would deliver a knockout blow to France, then race over the rails to deal with the Russians.
Speed was of the essence for the Schlieffen Plan. When German fighting forces mobilized they would automatically blast their
way into France. And, to get there, they would surprise everyone by marching through neutral Belgium. So what if this bald
violation of treaties brought in Britain against them? As a German military planner had once said of the prospect of the British
sending their small professional army to the Continent: "If the British land, we'll arrest them."

T
HE TOWN OF
Ypres draws nearer, both in this narrative of 1914 and on this day in 1986. The spires of churches and civic buildings
are now clearly visible to the south, pointing skyward in artificial medieval splendor.

Pfft! Pfft!

The detonations are too loud to ignore. I make one last detour off the road to plumb the mystery of the Salient pops. A small,
boxlike object lying a few paces away emits a deafening Pfft! Pfft! as I approach. How humiliating. The source of my World
War I blasts is a scarecrow speaker, placed in the ground to startle birds away from freshly seeded fields. Do the people
of Flanders like playing mind games with obsessed hikers? First the Dodengang bar; now this. I return to the roadway, convinced
the pops are beginning to sound derisive.

Still, the Flanders I've come to see has not entirely disappeared. Beside the Ypres-Yser Canal, almost in the shadow of a
traffic cloverleaf, another weirdly immaculate British cemetery awaits inspection. A plaque informs the traveler that this
is the Essex Farm Cemetery, where John McCrae visited the makeshift grave of a friend on May 3,1915, noticed some poppy blooms
blowing in the breeze, and then became inspired to write "In Flanders Fields." In so doing the doctor from Guelph, Ontario,
made this spot emblematic of the Great War for a large part of the English-speaking world. Originally published in
Punch
to great acclaim, the poem is now pointedly unloved by literary critics and anthology compilers. Of the final stanza's famous
exhortation, which begins "Take up our quarrel with the foe," Paul Fussell, in his peerless
The Great War and Modern Memory,
has written: "We finally see — and with a shock—what the last six lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like
vicious
and
stupid
would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace."

Despite the critical abuse, the sentimental old poem has shown great staying power in popular culture. It, along with the
songs "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" and "Over There" and Remarque's novel
All Quiet on
the Western Front,
may be said to form the final fading pages in the scrapbook of First World War cliche. As such, the Essex Farm Cemetery, its
beribboned wreaths shivering in the wake of onrushing afternoon traffic, now doubles as a shrine to a vanished syllabus. The
cannons of the Salient have long been silenced, as has its canon.

T
HE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN
laid out the route of attack. The bulk of the German army—its right wing—would swing through Belgium,
skirt the Atlantic coast, pass west and then south of Paris. By doing this it could eventually encircle the French armies
that, Schlieffen had once again correctly surmised, would be busy throwing themselves at well-fortified defensive lines to
regain Alsace and Lorraine. Indeed, since the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France had lost Alsace
and Lorraine, the general staff of its army had thought of little else but recovering the two provinces from the Germans.
Out of this keen sense of injured pride came a military doctrine that elevated the attack to an almost quasi-mystical status.
Attacking
a outrance
(to the utmost), no matter what the terrain or the strength of the opposition, entailed wearing the dashing but conspicuous
red trousers and blue coat of the infantryman and running directly at enemy machine-gun fire, presumably protected from injury
by one's warrior insouciance, or
elan.
Such were the pitifully inadequate tactics taught at elite French military academies. Their strategic thinking, which had
been dignified by the name of "Plan XVII," called for remorseless, predictable, frontal attacks into Alsace and Lorraine.
As in 1870 and 1940, in August 1914 the French were hopelessly outsmarted by the Germans.

Under the command of Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre, an avuncular officer with a seemingly boundless appetite for casualties,
the French army went to the slaughter, launching attack after attack a outrance until entire battalions were annihilated.
In the summer and fall of 1914, France lost as many men on the battlefield as the American army would in all of the twentieth
century. Their conscript army was thrown away by incompetent generalship. In the month of August alone, more than 210,000
Frenchmen died in the headlong offensives of Plan XVII. The bloodbath was more than appalling, it was absurd.

Joffre blamed his subordinates. He demoted dozens of generals and sent them to the city of Limoges for reassignment: whence
the French verb
limoger
for any high-profile firing. According to many accounts, Joffre's imperturbable demeanor in the face of horrific losses sometimes
reassured but more often repelled. The sacredness of the general's stomach—Joffre always had two well-cooked, uninterrupted
feasts a day, no matter how dire the military situation — contrasted dramatically with his callow disregard for the lives
of his soldiers.

While Joffre minded his digestion and sent tens of thousands to their doom in the east, 750,000 Germans were walking toward
France from the north. As the Kaiser's armies advanced through Belgium, they carried out a highly publicized policy of
Schrecklichkeit,
or "Frightfulness," meant to discourage any attempts at civilian resistance. Hostages were taken and shot, and cities were
burned, a brutal overture for the total war to come. The Belgians became a nation of refugees, crowding the roads south to
France and the boats over to England. Of the hundred thousand or so who reached Britain, the most famous of the lot never
really landed there at all because he was, in point of fact, fictional. Like his unfortunate compatriots, Hercule Poirot,
Agatha Christie's sleuth, was chased from his homeland by Schrecklichkeit. (Why else would a Belgian detective be living in
London?)

The Belgian refugees were welcomed as heroes. In Britain enthusiasm for the war ran high. Shopkeepers with German surnames
had their businesses patriotically looted, and, in just the first month of a recruiting drive for a volunteer army, half a
million young Britons rushed to sign up to avenge what was called "poor little Belgium." It is difficult to imagine the naivete
of expectations, the trust in one's country, the excitement of being young in that summer of 1914. Rupert Brooke, genteel
England'sundisputed golden boy for both his godlike looks and his felicitous way with words, came to symbolize the vaguely
homoerotic ideal of youth in arms. Previously he had been the athletic, intelligent, effortlessly irresistible upper-crust
Brit, a sort of ur-Calvin Klein male; now he was a noble Galahad off to grapple with the awful Hun. The opening to the first
of Brooke's "1914" sonnets, once committed to memory by a nation swooning over his early death (in 1915), then subsequently
ignored out of embarrassment at the work's politically incorrect martial ardor, deserves to be cited at least one more time
before it no longer catches the heart. The end of the nineteenth century is speaking directly to us when Brooke limpidly writes
of August 1914: