Back to the Front (5 page)

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

  And all the little emptiness of love!

On August 23, 1914, a small force of the British army fought the advancing Germans at Mons, Belgium. It was the first time
the British had fought in Europe since defeating Napoleon at nearby Waterloo, ninety-nine years previously. Although ludicrously
outnumbered, since neither the French nor the British command had yet figured out that the main German offensive was coming
through Belgium, they held off their attackers for a full day before beating a tactical retreat. The engagement, minor in
comparison to the suicidal French maneuvers in Lorraine, nonetheless loomed large in the collective imagination of the British
Isles. My favorite of the many Mons stories concerns the preparations for the first battle by a British sergeant, as related
in oral historian Lyn Macdonald's
1914.
Ordered to post four lookouts to warn of an eventual German attack on the town, the officer sets up only three and is later
forced to explain his negligence to an enraged superior officer: "I'm sorry, Sir. I didn't think it necessary to post one.
The enemy would hardly come from that direction. It's private property, Sir."

This quaint attitude, straight out of a Galsworthy novel, would change radically in the following weeks, becoming scarcely
contained panic. The British and the French fell back in desperation as the size of the German onslaught coming from the north
dawned at last on the dim minds sharing dinner with Joffre. The French commander, unflappable as ever, ordered a full-scale
retreat so that his shattered armies could regroup and finally do something other than die in futile assaults in the east
of the country. In the meantime, the Germans continued their march south and came closer and closer to Paris. When Alexander
von Kluck, the commander of the now tired 350,000-man corps on the extreme right of the German lines, elected to go east rather
than west of the French capital and cross the River Marne, the reinforced Allied legions wheeled about and attacked. The Battle
of the Marne raged from September 6 to 9, and involved more than two million men. The Kaiser's armies, overextended and far
from their supply lines, blinked first.

The giant German attacking force then retreated northward, to the heights overlooking the next major river: the Aisne, in
Champagne. There they dug trenches, set up machine-gun nests, and mowed down waves of infantrymen foolishly ordered to take
a run at the German lines. They could not be budged. It was late September 1914. Realizing, temporarily, that the best way
to defeat a dug-in army was not to attack it head-on, the Allied generals had their exhausted troops attempt flanking movements—that
is, they tried to swing around and attack their opponents from the side. This led to a series of fierce battles up through
northern France and eventually back into Belgium, as each adversary frantically tried to encircle the other. It came to be
known as "the Race to the Sea," but was more akin to a zipper closing. With each failed flanking movement, the armies dug
in, extended the miles of trenches, and moved farther north to attack again.

In Flanders they hit the sea. It was the end of October. The German high command sensed that, at Ypres, the ragged British
lines that were just forming could be easily smashed. It was their last chance to thwart
Stellungskrieg,
or the war of position that the framer of the Schlieffen Plan had so single-mindedly striven to avoid. The Kaiser came to
watch. His officers, anticipating the Aryan prose of a German army a generation later, issued the following message to their
troops on October 30, 1914:

The breakthrough will be of decisive importance. We must and therefore will conquer, settle forever the centuries-long struggle,
end the war, and strike the decisive blow against our most detested enemy. We will finish the British, Indians, Canadians,
Moroccans, and other trash, feeble adversaries, who surrender in great numbers if they are attacked with vigor.

They did not succeed, but only by a hair-breadth. In one particularly dramatic moment during the murderous melee, a British
commander rounded up a squadron of cooks to plug a gaping hole in the lines to the east of Ypres; in another, a major launched
a foolhardy counterattack because he had not enough men left alive to mount a credible defense. Both tactics worked, stalling
the German assaults at a critical juncture and thus thwarting their plans for a rout. There would be no breakthrough, ever.

It was late November 1914. The digging started in earnest from Nieuport to Switzerland. The Western Front went underground,
as did an unimaginable number of young men killed in the three-month-old war. British propagandists, stunned by the near extermination
of the 100,000-man force sent across the Channel in August, searched for a symbol to keep civilian enthusiasm at a fever pitch.
They found one in Ypres. It would have to pass for the infantry's apotheosis, a sort of Anglo Alamo in the muddy slough of
Flanders. Only here the fort would not be overrun, the enemy would not get through the gates. No matter what the cost, Ypres
would not be surrendered.

Thus was born the Salient, the death trap into which the English general staff would place its citizen army. A German officer
remarked that British soldiers were "lions led by donkeys."

4. Ypres

Ypres. leper. Eee-pruh.

The problem with Ypres is its name. A place name, especially one connected with war, should have enough syllables to withstand
constant barroom repetition. Wounded Knee, Normandy, Nagasaki, Waterloo: all words that easily roll off the tongue and into
memory. Not so this little Belgian city. Ypres's recent history is not only unspeakable, it is unpronounceable, which may
explain why the town's epoch-making role has faded to almost total obscurity. The British soldiers of the time obviated the
problem altogether by calling the place "Wipers."

Not that the Great War made the city's name. As with all places along the Western Front, there was life here before 1914.
The city's fame once rested on its reputation as a wealthy cloth-making center during the High Middle Ages, when it was the
rival of nearby Ghent and Bruges. Ypres, or leper, its Flemish name, has supposedly given us the word "diaper,"derived from
tissu dleper.
Its later notoriety, connected with the other extreme of life, finds expression in the rare word "yperite," which reappeared
in newspapers of the 1980s as stories reached the Western press of poison gas being used against the Kurds of Iraq. Yperite
is dichlorethyl sulfide, a variant of the mustard gas that in 1917 began wafting regularly over the Salient. The people of
Ypres live with that suffocating legacy, just as the people of Lynchburg, Virginia, can now profess a belief in due process
of law without the slightest trace of self-consciousness.

Far pinker than I was a few days ago in Nieuport, I wander toward the center of town in search of a local who can point me
to a cheap hotel. A saintly gent, on realizing that I speak no Flemish, puts his bag of groceries down on the sidewalk and
mimes a series of directions that lead me to the impressive main square of Ypres. I enter it in the shadow of the reconstructed
Cloth Hall, a faithful replica of the original fourteenth-century edifice destroyed in the Great War. One hundred twenty-five
yards in length, the great gray building once sheltered the stalls of prosperous burghers who sold their linens for export
throughout Europe. In its spiky Gothic majesty, the hall looks more like a parliament building—like the old label on HP steak
sauce, in fact—than a garment district warehouse. A soaring bell tower, two hundred feet tall, rises from its roof and overlooks
the cafés and beer terraces in the wide embrace of the square.

In the tourist office I read that stuffed cat toys are thrown from the top of the bell tower during the city's riotous little
Kattestoet,
a spring festival said to date all the way back to the year 962. Live cats used to go splatting down onto the cobblestones
until the festival of 1817, when squeamish town fathers forbade such gory mediaeval exuberance. Now ersatz cats are hurled
from on high. Either option sounds more amusing than hanging out with skinheads at the base of the IJzertoren.

A pleasant feeling of disorientation steals over me. After reading at length about Ypres in the First World War, I half expect
the place to have disappeared. Such a vanishing act happened once before. At war's end the city was a heap of rubble, and
some wished it to remain that way. Churchill, never at a loss for memorable rhetoric, said of Ypres, "A more sacred place
for the British race does not exist in the world," and then went on to suggest that it continue to be nonexistent. He and
other proponents of object lessons saw in the ruins of Ypres a permanent theme park, where visitors would come to admire the
destructiveness of modern warfare.

In the same spirit, the Michelin tire company shrewdly produced touring manuals to the regions devastated by the Great War,
complete with "before" and "after" pictures of architectural marvels leveled by bombardments. This tsk-tsk tourism became
very popular immediately after the armistice and ensured the success of the fledgling Michelin guides. The 1919 edition for
Flanders, entitled
Ypres: un guide, un
panorama, une histoire,
teases the reader with its pictures and detailed descriptions of buildings and artworks that could no longer be seen. Page
after page contrasts prewar and postwar snapshots: here a church, there an empty lot; here a charming village street, there
a road bordered with tree stumps; here an imposing chateau and its garden, there a dusty expanse filled with rusting sheets
of corrugated metal. Even more jarring are the pictures of the countryside. Invariably, a jalopy is shown driving through
a moonscape devoid of any distinguishing feature save for a rough wooden sign indicating where some village used to be. When
the Western Front was still fresh in everyone's memory, it fascinated more for what it had destroyed than for what it had
created.

Eventually, 1919's screaming swath of nothingness was silenced by new construction. When the civilians of Flanders returned
to where their homes had been, there was no debate over whether the province should be left as a Churchillian war wonderland.
Reconstructing a distant past was deemed the best way to blot out the recent past. Along with the Cloth Hall (which was finished
only in 1964), a new old cathedral rose from the rubble, the tomb of the influential prelate Cornelius Jansen dusted off and
displayed once more for admirers of his Catholic version of Calvinism. Architects studied the "before" pictures—like those
in the Michelin guides—and set to rebuilding along the main arteries of the town. Where preexisting buildings were found wanting
in historical cachet, their newer versions came with a few more gables, or turrets, or whatever. In the process of re-creating
a world, exactness mattered less than effect. The Flemings even had the Germans pay for rebuilding the town's seventeenth-century
fortifications — even though the Germans had just shown the great walls to be useless in defending the city. The place became
virtual.

The British saw Ypres as a mausoleum. The stupendous profligacy with which those in command had wasted lives in the defense
of this Belgian backwater called for an extravagant peacetime riposte. Well before the armistice, the authorities in London
ordered elaborate and expensive plans drawn up for commemorations, graveyards, statuary, and the like. A new sacredness, a
civic religion, would have to be invented to ward off mounting nihilism—all the suffering had to be made legitimate so that
those in power would not be blamed. Thus was born the modern war memorial, a mix of accountancy exactitude and the notion
of universal victimhood. Determine the correct tally of the dead, etch their names in stone, and avoid the sticky question
of responsibility by implying that such a regrettable calamity occurred independently of human agency. At Ypres, the British
invented the twentieth-century response to war. By commissioning a stone ledger of the lost, the State, through its very punctiliousness,
can be absolved. Visitors to the Vietnam memorial in Washington will recognize the device.

Not only was Ypres a mausoleum for hundreds of thousands — there are more than 150 British graveyards within walking distance
of town — it also came to be viewed, paradoxically, as the last outpost of the pre-1914 era. Between the two world wars, Ypres
was filled with pubs and chip shops and chapels catering to veterans and relatives, nurses and clergymen, teachers and schoolboys.
Now that Anglo aspect of the town is as dusty and distant as the Vietnam memorial will be a couple of generations hence. As
I look around the main square, I'm disappointed that there are no buskers playing "Tipperary" on penny whistles, and that
there are no corny old
estaminets
—the Great War word for soldiers' taverns — in sight. What can be seen, off to the east in a gap in the reconstructed city
ramparts, is an archway known as the Menin Gate. It is one of two enormous monuments the British erected on the Western Front;
the other towers over Thiepval, in the Somme. Under the long marble vault of the gate, which resounds with the thunder of
passing traffic, are the names of 54,896 soldiers of Britain and its empire who disappeared in the mud around here between
August 1914 and August 1917, and whose bodies were never found. As for the rest of the war—September 1917 to November 1918
— the official tally of those Britons and colonials with no known grave in the Salient is 34,984. Their names are inscribed
on panels at the Tyne Cot cemetery near Passchendaele.