Back to the Front (8 page)

On October 5, 1917, the day after the British entered Poelkapelle, everyone knew that the 200,000 casualties of the past few
months had been suffered for no good reason. Even in Britain, the smoke screen of misinformation in the press could not offset
the stories being brought back by the wounded. In Flanders, the rain was now lashing down, the army was covered in mud from
head to toe, infection was rampant, and men were cracking under the strain. Haig, undeterred, declared that Passchendaele
was too important an objective to be left in German hands. Capturing the ports was long forgotten—if they could take the height
of Passchendaele, all would be well on the Western Front. Criminally blind to the end, Haig ordered another attack.

The rest is almost too sad to recount. On October 9, an army slogged into the dawn light, some units near exhaustion after
having struggled all night through the muddy blackness to get up to the front line. This time the artillery barrage had petered
out into insignificance. Field guns got lost in the swampy universe, the recoil from their discharge burying their barrels
deep in the mud. Heavy shells, fired from miles away, had gone through the ground as if it were Jell-O, exploding harmlessly
below the soggy surface of the earth. The German defenders of Passchendaele were practically untouched. They opened fire at
the thousands wading into view. Men jumped into shell holes, hid under corpses, cowered in the mud as all day long they were
strafed by machine guns. The slopes became a charnel house, the wounded slowly dying as their strength gave out and they slid
deeper into the pools of slimy water at the bottom of every crater. The few pillboxes that had been captured overflowed with
the dead and wounded. Thousands were stuck in no-man's-land, drowning, crying, left to a horrible fate.

Near the bottom of the vale some resourceful farmer has made a duck pond out of a giant shell hole. There is a swing set beside
it. The grass looks preternaturally green, even in this bright sunlight. I begin the gentle climb up to the village, only
too aware of what happened here.
Even after October 9, Haig refused to give up. Repeated attacks were ordered throughout the month. After the British came
the Australians and then the New Zealanders, who lost 13,000 soldiers, killed or wounded, in a single murderous morning. The
attackers' line inched forward in pathetically small increments as the rains continued and the mud grew fouler and the stench
from the dead became unbearable.
Finally, a contingent of Canadian soldiers entered the obliterated village of Passchendaele on November 6, 1917. The supposedly
all-important position, for which so many had died in an amphibian nightmare, was later abandoned on Haig's order. Passchendaele
was too exposed, a salient sticking out of the Salient. More than half a million men had been killed or wounded for nothing.

I stroll through a side street in the silent, treeless village. From the height of the little ridge, the fields I have just
crossed look pastoral, inviting, as if one could almost imagine living in a place such as this. War cemeteries can be discerned
in the distance, as can the spires of neighboring village churches. St. Aurodorus, an ungainly faux-Romanesque church built
after the war, squats on a bend in the main road. A man in a black leather jacket nails a notice to its front door, then hurries
off.
Intrigued, I cross the street to read: "Passendale Moto-Cross." This definitely calls for a speculoos.

As I sit on a bench waiting for the bus back to town, an ice cream truck rounds the corner, bells ringing. The children of
Passendale step out of doorways and run for their treats. There is shouting in the streets. The rays of the late-afternoon
sun catch the hair of one boy, sending a sudden shower of gold down the barren thoroughfare that curves through the village
and out along the crest of the ridge. My bus arrives. I get on and go back the seven miles to Ypres.

6. The Menin Road

I start out early one morning and stride through the Menin Gate. I go straight along the main road, east, my eyes smarting
in the dusty wash of transport trailers as they growl their way out of town. On either side of the road are rowhouses, shuttered
tight, gritty with exhaust.

I'm on the straight Roman road that leads from Ypres to the town of Menin (or Menen, in Flemish). This was the main drag of
the Salient, the Ho Chi Minh Trail for British soldiers as they straggled up to the trenches in a night made lurid with flares
and fiery explosions. Anyone who has glanced at the contemporaneous paintings of British artist Paul Nash will have an idea
of this road's appearance in 1914-18: a flat, muddy track, littered with burned-out carts and carriages and bordered by a
few forlorn spikes that were once shade trees. Now, I conclude too quickly, the Menin Road looks like any other secondary
highway in Western Europe as it approaches a provincial market town. Faded billboards advertise warehouse discount outlets
and a few subdivisions hunker down in a leaden suburban landscape.

It's only after the housing thins that I first notice the jarring sights in the tableau. There are too many signs in English,
German, and French, too many crumbling concrete structures in the fields, too many weird stone road markers with helmets atop
them. What should be an ordinary crossroads is announced, in English, as Hellfire Corner. The white directional signs for
distant villages of the living are outnumbered by green arrows pointing to settlements of the dead: Sanctuary Wood Cemetery,
Hill
6i
Cemetery, Tyne Cot Cemetery. After my day around Passchendaele, none of these sights is welcome.

Fortunately, a giant purple mascot comes to my rescue. Off to my left, according to my 1919 Michelin guide, there should be
a tank graveyard—a field where seventeen tanks were taken out by one German pillbox during the Third Ypres campaign. Instead,
a purple creature stands there, directing wayward cars into a parking lot. A multicolored sign above an entrance gate states
"Bellewaerde." Beyond that there are roller coasters, Ferris wheels, giant slides. Garish posters advertise "Florida Water
Show," "Boomerang," "Pirates' Castle." I hear squeals of fright carried on the wind. Buccaneers are blasting a hole in time,
racing over terrain with no other story to tell than the one remembered by the spectators. The Belgians have done more than
build an amusement park here, they have fully reclaimed their land. This place is not for poppy tourists like myself.

I dodge a truck trundling up the grade past Bellewaerde to Geluveld and the vanishing point of this infamous ridge. The Menin
Road, I decide, is too busy for the absent-minded pedestrian. I take a tree-lined road south, past golden fields into Sanctuary
Wood. On its fringe is a ramshackle building, with Coke signs and dud munitions standing on guard at the door. I've heard
about this place—a privately owned museum with a preserved stretch of trench behind it. The latter, a much reconstructed ditch
snaking through the forest floor, looks as if it has never been completely dry. Soggy, unsightly, and, for purists about such
things, unconvincing, the trench has nonetheless been the livelihood of three generations of the Schier family, on whose land
the armies descended in 1914 to destroy everything in sight. Gradually the family's weapons and knickknack collections grew
to strange and interesting proportions. When the German army came calling again in 1940, the clan of trench-keepers sealed
off all their goodies in the cellar. Some of the bric-a-brac made from shell casings is now displayed in the museum's flyblown
cafe, which resembles a garage sale of items from some Muscovite granny's sitting room. Mugs, ashtrays, trophies, picture
frames, statuettes, plaques, planters, clocks, coasters, plates, devotional items — the variety of junk impresses by its sheer
volume. Within the museum, aside from a dank and musty room given over to rusted weapons, is a collection of war porn.

A central table in the Sanctuary Wood Museum holds ten or so wooden viewing devices that allow the war buff to study hundreds
of revolting pictures of the carnage in the trenches. Ever since Matthew Brady popularized photos of dead soldiers during
the American Civil War, the line between ghoulish prurience and graphic pacifism has been difficult to draw. I sense its presence
every time I write about the history of this war, and hope not to overstep it. Deploring something at length is sometimes
a useful disguise for wallowing in it, and there can be no doubt that the barbarity of the Great War has led to a culture
of celebrating its sheer awfulness. In an otherwise sober guide to the battlefields I read the following about Sanctuary Wood's
collection of gruesome pictures:

They are a
must.
Each one has different glass slides that when viewed with persistence focus dramatically into sharp 3 dimensions. Here in
this atmospheric environment is the true horror of war—dead horses, bodies in trees, heads and legs in trenches and, everywhere,
mud, mud, mud.

The mud I understand.

I don't have the sensibility of a Brady, or a Weegee for that matter, so I avoid the war porn display in the Sanctuary Wood
Museum. The Devotees of Salient Gore is not a club I wish to join. That people spend time poring over these distressing pictures
is repulsive enough. As at Dixmude, I'm uneasy about the company I'm keeping. First it was the far Right, now it's the voyeurs.
Again, I paraphrase Clemenceau: History is too important to be left to the geeks.

I leave Sanctuary Wood and head directly out into a farmer's field. Beyond is a bigger wood, then more fields. Since I'm so
hung up on time, maybe I should lighten up on space. I intend to get lost. The bad feelings about the war porn display linger.
Perhaps I wanted to see the atrocious photos and just wouldn't admit it.

The sunlight does nothing to dispel my gloom. An hour or two is spent zigging and zagging at random, crossing country roads,
stealing around villages, jumping over ditches until I'm finally brought up short in front of a crazily deformed hill. Sheep
are grazing in shell holes and mine craters, geese can be heard cackling from behind a fence. This is Hill 60, in which lie
the bodies of scores of German and Australian tunnelers. There is no bicycle here, as at La Boisselle on the Somme, affirming
the primacy of life.

As I pull out my map to get my bearings and find the shortest route back to town, a man appears from behind the hill. He has
been cutting grass somewhere. He wears black shoes, black pants, and a black T-shirt. Over his right shoulder, he carries
a scythe. He smiles as he passes me.

7.
Messines to Armentieres

A beer bottle goes whistling past my ear. I duck, far too late to dodge it if the thrower had had better aim. By the time
I straighten up, the Toyota full of rowdies has swerved down the road out of sight. It is nine o'clock in the morning, and
I have been persuaded to stop singing.

I ascend a gradual slope to the village of Wijtschate, or "White Sheet," as it was referred to in the British trenches. The
slope, part of the modest but murderous highland that ringed the British positions, is known to history as the Messines Ridge,
so called because the town of that name, south of Wijtschate, was at the centerpoint of an offensive. This time the operation
was a British success, for the simple reason that the attackers blew the German lines to smithereens. The surprise lay in
nineteen gigantic underground bombs. Miners brought over from the collieries of Britain, and from New Zealand and Canada,
had spent almost two years digging under no-man's-land to the German trenches, sometimes more than half a mile away. As if
that task were not grim enough, they then had to spend weeks hauling great loads of unstable ammonal explosive through the
dark, suffocating tunnels to set the trap.

At 3:10 A.M. on June 7, 1917, the mines were blown, several million pounds of explosives in all. The blast was clearly heard
in London, the windows in several tony Belgravia drawing rooms, it is said, nearly shattering as the shock wave from Belgium
buffeted the southern counties of Britain. First World War histories are fond of stating, with a sly kind of pride, that the
Messines operation produced the largest man-made, non-nuclear explosion in history.

Whatever its rank in the percussive pecking order, the blast obliterated hundreds of young Germans outright and left the survivors
in the front line deafened, dazed, and terrified, unmanned by the telluric forces that had swallowed up their comrades. The
British artillery then began shelling the German lines, and the troops advancing through the fiery light show of the predawn
hours met little resistance. The lines shifted two to three miles in a single morning—the British captured the shattered ridge—before
the customary stalemate once again took hold. Haig, thrilled by this modest gain but forgetting that it had required two years
of painstaking spadework, was emboldened for the next stage of his offensive, which culminated in the Passchendaele debacle.

T
HE LANDSCAPE BEGINS
to change as the shallow basin around Ypres gets left farther behind. Past Wijtschate rows of mature
trees stand out in the middle distance. Away to the west a few wooded hills, some more than 350 feet tall, are clearly visible
in the plain. Mont Kemmel is the nearest prominence, home to hiking trails, campgrounds, and a French mass grave. Nothing
in this countryside is innocent of Great War associations. In the gentle undulations between Mont Kemmel and Wijtschate, aside
from the bleached dominoes of Commonwealth gravestones, lie the giant craters from that 1917 blast, which are now used as
swimming holes and fish hatcheries. The largest of the lot, called Spanbroekmolen, or the Pool of Peace, has been left to
the elements as a sort of perpetual conversation piece. Bushes now grow around its perimeter and visitors are invited to contemplate
the stagnant murk of the water's surface. Nearby, behind a prosperous-looking farmyard, is the small Lone Tree Cemetery. On
the night of the big boom, Spanbroekmolen detonated a quarter of a minute later than its eighteen fellows. Several hundred
unlucky Irishmen were already up and over the top when the rain of debris from this 91,000pound explosion fell from the sky.
Hence the cemetery, which holds eighty-eight graves.