Back to the Front (6 page)

Every evening at eight o'clock, the traffic is halted at the Menin Gate while members of the Ypres Fire Department play "The
Last Post." I have attended the brief ceremony three times. There were usually about six to ten of us at the monument, milling
about awkwardly in anticipation of the Belgian bugle boys. Once I looked up at the sea of inscriptions and saw a group of
names that were distinctly non-European: the missing soldiers from a regiment raised in Bhopal, India. The Salient that gave
the world poison gas honors the ancestors of its recent victims. On another occasion, I exchanged quizzical glances with a
young woman who was clutching to her breast Siegfried Sassoon's
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
(Sassoon's work and Robert Graves's
Good-bye to All That
were the most popular of the thousands of British war memoirs). Her male friend gripped her waist tightly. The last time,
nothing occurred. My mind wandered, and I thought of the mussels I was going to have for dinner.

Ceremonies of this sort, with their pathos of unfocused mourning, often leave participants with a twinge of guilt for feeling
unmoved. Yet it is faintly ridiculous for later generations to murmur stock phrases about sacrifice and suffering as if we
knew what they originally meant. Many of those who experienced the Great War were just as uncomfortable with such ritual utterances
and performances. My paternal grandfather, Daniel, who saw Ypres in flames as an Irishman in the British army, hardly ever
spoke of his Great War experience, even though he had spent four years in the trenches, lost an eye to a sniper's bullet,
and sustained a shrapnel wound in the leg from which he never fully recovered. He died, prematurely, in 1940, unwilling to
divulge his war stories to his children. Words did not suffice.

T
HE KNOWLEDGE OF
Daniel's silence makes St. George's Memorial Church, a small officers' chapel built opposite the Ypres cathedral,
look all the more peculiar to me. Raised by private subscription in the 1920s, mainly from the alumni of Eton (on whose playing
fields, according to the Duke of Wellington, the Napoleonic wars were supposed to have been won), the sanctuary is an odd
blend of thin-lipped High Anglican grief and fetish-house ostentation. Its sober redbrick exterior gives no hint of the totemic
wordiness within. Everywhere in St. George's there are inscriptions—on brass plaques, carved pews, stained-glass windows,
statues, busts, flags, banners, wood panels, fonts, railings, handles, floor tiles, radiators, gratings—as if a flow of words,
a permanent logorrhea, could somehow offset the reality of slaughter. To dry eyes at the dawn of the twenty-first century,
the sanctuary resembles an AIDS quilt as a tool of memory.

Like the Menin Gate, however, St. George's is now a museum of mourning, no longer moored to any direct human experience. Almost
all of the people who composed the wordy tributes on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the church are no longer alive to appreciate
or explain their significance. We can only guess at the depth of feeling behind each phrase. What, if anything, would we have
written on the walls of a place dedicated to the disappearance of our peers? How would we distinguish, in a telling phrase,
one twenty-year-old from another? "Played a mean guitar." "Had a problem with authority." "Awesome hang-glider.""Headed for
med school." The sample I scribbled down seems almost contemporary, until the tag at the end:

THE SANCTUARY STEPS AND PAVEMENT

ARE GIVEN BY NANCYQ RADCLIFFE

PLATT IN EVER LOVING AND PROUD

REMEMBRANCE OF HER BROTHER

JOHN ROCKHURST PLATT

LIEUT RFA(T) KILLED IN ACTION

AT ZILLEBEKE MARCH 27, 1916

CAPTAIN OF THE OPPIDANS

ETON COLLEGE 1909

SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE

A pamphlet picked up in the Cloth Hall's Salient Museum reports that some in the grieving English upper classes went so far
as to invoke King Arthur in their search for spiritual solace. In Vera Brittain's once avidly read
Testament of Youth,
she writes of losing her fiance, her brother, and two friends — her entire coterie of male companionship — in the war. That
type of wholesale trauma was too great to be handled by the Anglican Militant style alone. Whereas many visitors to Ypres
took out their Ouija boards, others resorted to mysticism concerning their nation's founding, just as the French developed
a full-blown fixation with Joan of Arc.

According to legend Joseph of Arimathaea, the fellow who took Christ's body down from the cross, brought the Holy Grail to
Britain, and from the wooden staff Joseph carried with him a thorny shrub had sprouted in Glastonbury, which is the English
town, as every well-read pot-head used to know, with the strongest claims to having been Camelot. It was a shoot from this
growth in Glastonbury that some distressed English patriots had seen fit to bring to Ypres and plant near St. George'sin the
1930s. If true—the story of planting a shrub in Ypres, that is, not the Grail — the tale says more about the shock of the
Great War than any description of memorials or inscriptions. Going back to Arthur and company is more than a reach. It's grasping
at supernatural straws in an attempt to lend dignity to cataclysm.

As with all good illustrative stories, this one should not be confirmed. Nonetheless I spend a Monty Pythonesque hour poking
around the neighborhood of St. George's in a quest for Arthurian shrubbery. As is only fitting to a seeker of an object akin
to the Grail, I come up empty-handed, even after trespassing into the defunct schoolyard adjacent to the church and knocking
loudly on every door in sight. I find neither guide nor guardian, and am, in the end, pleased to leave legend undisturbed.
As I cross the street in the evening air to head back to the cafés in the main square, I notice another sign of the English
presence in Belgium. A Ladbrokes turf accountant—i.e., off-track betting shop—looks out onto a little corner it shares with
St. George's. Solemnity has its limits, even for British pilgrims to Ypres.

I close the door in my hotel room and see one last inscription from this city of words. Finally, a message in Ypres that makes
me smile:

To our Guests,

We wish to inform you about the fact, that each Saturday, there is a PARKPROHIBITION from 0 A.M. till 1 P.M., on the Marketsquare,
because of the weekly saturdaymarket.

If you are by car, we ask you to take account of this prohibition, to avoid that the police will drag your car away.

    With our greetings

    for a joyfull stay

    The Direction

5.
Langemarck to Passchendaele

The cashier at the supermarket drums her fingers on the conveyor belt as I fish for coins. I'm stocking up on speculoos, the
Belgian ginger snaps that have warded off hunger during my hikes around Ypres. In the past few days I've been staring out
over fields that look as if they need a good ironing, so subtly and unnaturally uneven are their surfaces. The woods tell
the same secret story. Once off the shaded bridle paths, I come up against the bracken of rusted barbed wire and spent bullets.
Memorials, both public and private, stand alongside every country lane; from any viewpoint the observant visitor can easily
pick out at least one or two links in the long chain of monuments and graveyards, a sinister gap-toothed smile against the
dark green countryside. I inspect the inscriptions, pop a speculoos, then sit on the ground and lean against the cool stone
surfaces to powder my shrinking blisters. The heavy hiking boots have been temporarily jettisoned for black Keds, the khaki
canvas backpack abandoned in the hotel room, the red woolen socks left bleeding in the sink. Above, a great gray cloud bank
glowers over the Salient.

The aptly named speculoos accompanies me in my idle conjectures. How many thousands of stories connected to this land have
been lost? What can I possibly be looking at, when I look at this stela, this column, this marker? Has the experience of so
many millions been reduced to some overgrown granite headstone in a farmer's muddy field? It occurs to me, as I glimpse the
russet town of Passchendaele on a far-off ridge, that the First World War took place in color, not in the black and white
of the photos in history books. That this wet sponge of a sky was their sky, that this sweet bird song was the same as the
one they heard in their muddy ditches. Yet a speculoos, for all its other qualities, is hardly a madeleine. Memories do not
come flooding back to someone trained to disregard the past. More frequently, the cares of the moment crowd in to assert their
rightful place in the consciousness.

Like right now, as I fumble with my Belgian francs in a supermarket of the village of Langemarck. The farmers' wives waiting
in line behind me look on tolerantly, a conservatory of faded floral prints allowing a radish-faced man into their midst for
the morning. Outside, in the parking lot, the women's endomorphic menfolk sit somnolent behind steering wheels, secure in
the knowledge that shopping is beyond their ken and beneath their station. Clearly, in my eagerness for speculoos, I have
transgressed.

In this countryside, however, just being alive, in good health and good spirits, seems to be a transgression. The few miles
I covered this morning, northeast from Ypres to Langemarck, confirmed that impression. A knot of busy roads leading to an
expressway eventually gave way to sloping fields, scrawny woodlands, and a windmill standing alone in a meadow. Here it was,
inevitably, the "Windmill of Death," a much-bombed observation post in the war. Signs along the way indicating Cheddar Farm
and Oxford Road, former British strongholds, alternated with barns and farmhouses built on the concrete remains of old pillboxes,
the curious name given to fortified firing positions. A well-tended corner garden near the hamlet of St. Juliaan turned out
to be a memorial for more than 2,000 Canadian war dead. A column depicting a soldier, his arms crossed and his eyes downcast,
stands beside evergreen bushes trimmed to look like artillery shells. In old trench maps, this area was known as "Vancouver."

The Canadians, along with their Algerian, Breton, and Belgian allies, took the brunt of a surprise poison gas attack around
St. Juliaan, the first of its kind on the Western Front. At about five in the afternoon of April 22, 1915, spotters noticed
a ten-foot-tall wall of yellowish-green mist floating down toward them over these fields. The technicians of the German
Stinkpioniere
units had uncocked their deadly cylinders. Choking and coughing, the French colonials and Canadians stood in their trenches
without gas masks, their lungs turning into wheezing, scorching sacks of pain. Men clambered above ground in the lethal fog
and ran for daylight, terrified, pumping the gas already inhaled into their bloodstreams. By nightfall, thousands of youths
lay gasping and dying in farmyards behind the lines, many of them in Boezinge, the shaded village in which I'd paused on my
way into Ypres from the coast. Half the Canadians who survived the attack had to be sent home. Most of them would be permanent
invalids.

Small wonder, then, that Langemarck is a dark place, even in the light of midday. The atrocity of 1915, however, was preceded
by the tragedy of 1914. Once out of the supermarket, I walk past the redbrick facades on the main street and head to the town's
principal attraction: a graveyard. For Germans, Langemarck marks the spot where
der Kindermord von
Ypern,
the Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres, took place in 1914. The German war cemetery in the middle of town, unlike its Commonwealth
counterparts in the countryside, is planted with large oak trees and resembles a shaded pasture suitable for a lovers' picnic.
The grass grows long, and only a few headstones, roughly sculpted basalt crosses aligned in groups of five, are scattered
about the enclosure. More than 44,000 bodies are interred in the Langemarck cemetery, the majority in mass graves. A pavilion
at the entrance opens out onto a small plaza bordered by somber oaken panels listing the dead student volunteers buried here.
As at the Menin Gate, the procession of names looks endless.

In the land between Langemarck and the village of Poelkapelle runs a straight and featureless road, just as it did during
the days of the Kindermord. The massacre took place on either side of this road. The innocents in question were university
students who had flocked to enlist in August of 1914. Before the war, many German youths had been sweetly idealistic, organizing
themselves into hiking and nature groups known as
Wandervogel.
Their motto was
rein bleiben und reif werden
(to stay pure is to mature); their favorite activity, camping trips during which they would dance around bonfires, sing folksongs,
and declaim poetry, hoping to establish a temporary community divorced from the demands of adult life, in much the same way
as the far sillier men's movement of today aims for transcendence through a retreat into sweatlodges. The youths of the Wandervogel
chafed at the constraints of custom and were understandably impatient with the discipline imposed by the bewhiskered patriarchs
of Wilhetmine Germany. So when war came, thousands of Teutonic Rupert Brookes saw it as an adventure that would allow an escape
from a craven social order and an opportunity, at last, to act with heroic selflessness.

It did. In October of 1914, when the chances for a breakthrough in the Race to the Sea were slipping away, the German general
staff sent thousands of untrained student volunteers to these fields as part of a last-ditch offensive. The British positions
were to be smashed and the triumphant German army would scramble across country to the vital Channel ports. The military command
spoke of "feeble adversaries" and "trash"; for the Wandervogel youths, their nationalist fiber stirred by the presence of
the Kaiser, exaltation and eagerness were the real marching orders of the day. To find a modern-day equivalent, the Iraq-Iran
war of the 1980s must again be cited, when whole divisions of Iranian martyrs flung themselves, lemming-like in their fundamentalist
enthusiasm, at fortified positions near Basra. In 1914, much the same thing occurred. Whereas elsewhere in the Salient battle-hardened
German troops nearly broke the British and Belgian lines, no such close call occurred wherever the student soldiers attacked.
British war memoirs describe groups of massed teen-agers, arms linked and voices raised in song, walking across the fields
as if on a Sunday outing. The power of purity, presumably, would sweep away all that lay before it.