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Authors: Stephen O'Shea

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Predictably, a curtain of lead met the students as they neared the enemy lines, and the Wandervogel songs were suddenly silenced.
Wave after wave of volunteers followed, only to be mowed down methodically by British machine gunners, some of whom later
voiced dismay over the scale of the carnage. Rarely would there be a more grotesque example of lambs being led to slaughter.
If the Great War was the unhappy childhood of the twentieth century, then the Kindermord was the infant century's unanswered
scream in the night. More than 150,000 German soldiers died that month. The story of the sacrificed youth of the Wandervogel,
like the "lost generation" in British culture and
la generation creuse,
or hollow generation, in French thought, gradually took root in the German mind as news of the Kindermord and other senseless
battles filtered home through the haze of official lying. Walter Flex's
Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (A
Wanderer between Two Worlds), a
novella about a Wandervogel youth killed early in the war, has been popular in Germany since its publication in 1917, the
year the author died on a Baltic battlefield.

G
ASSING, THE KINDERMORD
—the associations of these hours spent in the orbit of Langemarck are depressing. Despite foreboding
about what lies lies ahead this afternoon, I break into a smile when the village of Poelkapelle finally appears. At its central
crossroads there stands an unusual statue of a stork in full flight. The monument honors French flying ace Georges Guynemer,
whose plane was shot down in the skies above Poelkapelle on September 11, 1917. However strange the stork looks, in perpetual
mid-flap twenty feet above a traffic circle, the inscription on the base of the memorial seems even more bizarre. The language
of outdated chauvinism, a specialty of French war memorials, now amuses more than it inspires. An excerpt:

Héros Légendaire Tombé en

Plein del de Gloire après Trois

Ans de Lutte Ardente Restera Le

Plus Pur Symbole des Qualitis

De La Race: Tenacite Indomptable

Energie Farouche Courage Sublime

Anime De La Foi La Plus Inebranlable

Dans La Victoire . . .

(The Legendary Hero Fallen in the

Full Glory of Flight after Three

Years of Fiery Combat Will Remain

The Purest Symbol of The Strengths

of His Race: Indomitable Tenacity

Fierce Energy Sublime Bravery

Inspired by the Most Unshakeable Faith

in Victory . . .

It's likely that Guynemer, a twenty-three-year-old daredevil who had already been shot down seven times before his fatal encounter
over Poelkapelle, might find this epitaph too pompous to describe his accelerated, exhilarating life span. Like other successful
airmen, Guynemer reveled in scarcely credible risks—although for sheer combat mania few could match Frank Luke, an American
ace who died at the age of twenty-one after making an emergency landing behind enemy lines. Luke emptied his pistol at the
admiring German infantrymen on their way to take him prisoner; naturally, they forgot their admiration and fired back.

Poelkapelle is made less lugubrious by its stork. The air force was the only murderous innovation of the Great War to have
received good publicity. The ballet of aerial battle—English Sopwith Camels and French Spads rat-tat-tatting through the skies
against German Fokkers —enchanted minds starved for a coherent narrative. The dogfight suggested a life-and-death contest
in which the individual had some say. The conflict on the ground, with its machine guns, artillery, and mortars, was viewed
as an industrial abattoir; the conflict in the skies, with its attendant legends of dashing chaps buzzing about in aeroplanes,
silk scarves snapping in the breeze, came to be seen as the acme of glamour.

The glamour of war, destroyed when the horseman left the field to be replaced by the troglodyte in the trench, was a mystique
badly in need of novelty. The aces, a new breed of warriors for the new aerial battlefield, met the modernist need perfectly.
Before a peacetime aviator, Charles Lindbergh, appeared on the scene to establish his preeminence as celebrity airman of the
new century, the names of Great War aces were well known to an adoring public, as was their tally of kills: the American Rickenbacker
(23), the Canadian Bishop (72), the Frenchmen Fonck (75) and Guynemer (53), the Britons Mannock (73) and Collishaw (60). The
one who has survived the longest in the public mind, thanks to Charles Schulz and Snoopy, is the German Manfred von Richthofen
who, as the Red Knight (or the Red Baron) commanding his Flying Circus of aviators, was responsible for 80 kills. Richthofen
was shot down over the Somme on April 21, 1918, either by Canadian pilot Roy Brown or by an Australian machine-gunner on the
ground.

F
ROM THE SKY
to the pits. The rest of today's walk will bring me to the worst of the Salient's imaginative landscape. Few
places along the Western Front have witnessed such destruction as the countryside beyond Langemarck and Poelkapelle. In the
windows of some farmhouses, displayed like religious statuary, are decorative arrangements of brass shells and steel shrapnel,
burnished to brilliance and battered into domestic objets d'art. Munitions are this region's marble, a mineral resource that
is available in limitless quantities. One house is sandwiched between two bomb craters, its garden shed a crumbling concrete
structure with tapered apertures designed for the barrels of machine guns. A road sign nearby points to the southeast, indicating
a destination two and one-half miles distant: Passendale. In English, the spelling is Passchendaele, and the meaning ranges
far beyond the simple Dale of the Passion or, less literally, Valley of the Crucifixion. For the first generations of the
twentieth century living in Britain and its Commonwealth, Passchendaele was a word that signified the abominable and the inhuman;
in the sad, sickened middle age of that century, only one other word, Holocaust, would surpass it in the lexicon of horror.

The sun makes an unexpected appearance overhead, its warmth inviting me to snap out of my anachronistic funk. Yet it is difficult
to contemplate Passchendaele without feeling anger, no matter how absurd that emotion may be. I know, for example, that every
step I take in the next few hours cost thirty-five lives in October 1917. No other battle of the Western Front was fought
under such appalling conditions. Worse yet, pig-headed incompetence was the cause of it all—and the man responsible still,
inexplicably, has his statue and place of honor in London's Whitehall, while the deserters from this and other heinous battles
were denied a posthumous pardon as recently as 1992. Thus Passchendaele also means iniquity. As I leave Poelkapelle and take
a narrow farm track down into the valley, I know that here, more than ever, I am treading on metaphor.

What happened can be stated baldly: an army was forced by its own generals to drown in the mud. There are two oft-cited
mots
relating to the battle. One is an ordinary soldier's lament, taken up by Siegfried Sassoon: "We died in hell, they called
it Passchendaele." The other is supposed to have been inspired by the improbably named Launcelot Kiggell, a British senior
staff officer. Unwilling to venture near the Front during the fighting and just as unwilling to believe reports of conditions
on the ground, Kiggell finally visited the oozing landscape of blood and mud after the guns had been stilled. He is said to
have burst into tears and exclaimed: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" His companion replied calmly, "It's
worse further up." Passchendaele was a prolonged, futile massacre conceived by an inept military mind unmoved by suffering.
The mind belonged to Douglas Haig, the commander in chief of British forces, and the debacle is officially known as the Third
Battle of Ypres.

The campaign opened on July 31, 1917, with the aim of smashing the German position in the Salient and advancing more than
twenty-five miles to capture the North Sea ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. This plan, a breakthrough followed by a dash to
the sea, sounds a lot like the scheme that led to the Kindermord, except for one crucial difference: the Kindermord occurred
when the war was three months old; Passchendaele, when it was three years old. Thirty-six months of trench warfare had taught
Haig nothing. In 1916, the year before Passchendaele, more than a million men had died at Verdun and on the Somme, and the
ground gained by either side had been negligible. Yet Haig, a handsome mediocrity whose friendship with King George V had
done wonders for his career, spoke of racing across whole provinces in a single week. Eerily immune to experience, he even
foresaw the cavalry galloping across open fields to the sea, as if the machine gun had yet to be invented and the years 1914,
1915, and 1916 had never happened. The tactics to be used, masses of men trudging across no-man's-land in the hope that the
enemy'sbarbed-wire defenses had been wiped out by shellfire, were identical to those employed in past fiascoes, except for
one difference: more artillery would fire more shells than at any other time in history. This, Haig believed, was the decisive
innovation that would carry the day.

The million British soldiers who had been sitting in Flanders for three years knew otherwise. Anyone who had spent time in
the trenches saw that heavy shelling turned the earth around Ypres into a glutinous bog, where large pools of groundwater
alternated with expanses of viscous mud. In peacetime, an elaborate system of canals and polders had been used by farmers
to keep the ground dry, but much of that drainage network was destroyed during the first three years of the war. The Salient
was notorious on both sides of no-man's-land for its rat-infested, impassable muck. Yet this is where Haig chose to stage
his magnificent artillery barrage. As one commander, quoted in Leon Wolff's classic account of the campaign,
In
Flanders Fields,
wrote of Haig's choice: "To anyone familiar with the terrain in Flanders it was almost inconceivable that this part of the
line should have been selected. If a careful search had been made from the English Channel to Switzerland, no more unsuitable
spot could have been discovered." Moreover, as all mud-splashed soldiers realized, the early-autumn rains in Flanders usually
turned the Salient into a swamp.

Objections were overruled, and Haig, a dangerously stupid man, prepared his offensive. Charts drawn up by junior officers
to warn where large lakes of water would appear in the aftermath of artillery bombardments were sent back from headquarters
with the annotation, "Send us no more of these ridiculous maps." Talk from Haig of cavalry charges, as germane to trench warfare
as the crossbow, unnerved senior officers so much that they shared their misgivings with David Lloyd George, the British prime
minister. Lloyd George, already heartily sickened by the Somme, received assurances from Haig that if the number of casualties
climbed too high and the number of square miles gained stayed too low, the offensive would be stopped—before it became a colossal
suicide. That was Haig's promise, and he broke it in so many different ways, with such devastating effects on so many individual
lives, that my grandfathers' legacy of a reflexive hatred of the military seems entirely reasonable. How anyone who knows
the history of the Great War can choose a career in the army remains a mystery.

On July 24, 1917, the British lined up thousands of guns along a fifteen-mile front, one every six yards, and sent eastward
a solid, unrelenting rain of metal that lasted a week. The sound was a deafening, indiscriminate roar that the German soldiers,
huddled within their many concrete fortifications, found a word to describe:
Trommelfeuer,
or drumfire. The earth, shattered and smashed, soon became sodden, as subterranean water welled to the surface and torrential
rain began to fall. At 5:27 in the morning of July 31, when 120,000 British troops left their trenches, they were faced with
a landscape of gray, milky mud. Contrary to Haig'sexpectations, if no one else's, not all the German first- and second-line
forces had been annihilated. Machine guns were quickly set up and the classic First World War slaughter scenario reenacted.

The plan called for an advance of five miles in one day with minimum casualties. By the end of the second day, the attackers
had gone only about half a mile, and 35,000 of their troops had been killed or wounded. Haig was urged to call the whole thing
off, strike elsewhere, use surprise. Nothing doing. Elated by the advance, he ordered fresh troops into the Salient. New attacks
were launched: August 9, 13, 16, 24, 27. Another 40,000 men lost, another mile gained, the ruins of Langemarck retaken. While
Lloyd George raged impotently in London, Haig planned another massive attack for September, along a front half as wide so
that the storm of steel would be twice as violent. The soldiers went over the top on September 20, gaining 900 yards and losing
22,000 of their fellows. On September 26, 1,000 more yards, 17,000 men lost. On October 4, 700 yards, 26,000 casualties. The
armies had reached the outskirts of Poelkapelle, the land was a lunar bog, the rain came pouring down. Worse was yet to come.

I
N THE VALLEY
below Passchendaele today, there is a tall stand of trees beside a narrow irrigation channel that I hop over
on my way toward the village on the ridge. In October 1917, the channel was fifty yards wide, a porridge-like pool snaking
across a valley of mud craters. This was no-man's-land. The area behind the British lines, the few acres between Langemarck
and Poelkapelle captured at such great expense, was so soupy that it took reinforcements heading up to the Front an hour to
walk just 400 yards. Because of the swamp created by millions of shells, the hapless soldiers had to stay on the duckboards—narrow
paths made of wooden planking—which, to worsen matters, the German artillery targeted at all times of day and night. Slipping
off the boards sometimes spelled death. Infantrymen, stretcher bearers, gunners, pack mules, and horses—hundreds of unfortunates
drowned in the darkness because of one false step. Once at the Front, newly arrived soldiers squelched through the muck in
search of a crater rim, a dry spot, a hollow, a place to hide. Bloated rats feasted on bodies everywhere.

BOOK: Back to the Front
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