Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  I stand on the firestep and look out over the river and fields beyond it. There is scarcely a sound, except the odd plop of a fish in the water. Imagining the Front is difficult, if not impossible, even here in an old trench. A British officer, quoted in historian Martin Gilbert’s First World War, wrote to his friend Winston Churchill in 1914 about a place like the Dodengang, in which “crouch lines of men, in brown or grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven hollow-eyed with the continual strain, unable to reply to the everlasting run of shells hurled at them from three, four, five or more miles away …” The officer also described for Churchill the Western Front in its infancy:

  Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves; in which farms, villages and cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by shells and disfigured by dead horses, cattle, sheep and goats, scattered in every attitude of repulsive distortion and dismemberment.

  The writer was a Fleming, but not of the Flanders variety. A British MP and a major in the army, Valentine Fleming died in battle in 1917, leaving behind a nine-year-old son, Ian, who would in turn bequeath James Bond to the world. The father, in his description of the Front, gives us the sad scene that would haunt the imagination of his peers until the end of their lives. Although immune to the glamour of violence, they would nonetheless encourage their children to go to war when the time came. The Dodengang stretches well into the twentieth century.

  2. Dixmude

  The main square of Dixmude is surrounded by a Germanic gingerbread of gabled houses. Its central Grote Markt, awash in a sea of parked cars, holds scrupulously maintained monuments to a Belgian general and to the man in the moon. The square’s cobblestones are well scrubbed, uniform, obedient. The flowers in the flower boxes are petunias, the cafe tables are rigid plastic forms, and the radiating streets are lined with cookie-cutter redbrick rowhouses straight out of a British suburban sitcom. If Dixmude were a person, it would wear socks with sandals.

  At the tourist office on the square, posters suggest that Dixmude is “The Heart of the Flat Country.” Once my turn at the counter comes, I ask, in French, whether there are any vacant hotel rooms in town. After a pause, the blond hostess replies that everything is booked solid.

  “What, nothing?”

  “That’s right,” she says briskly, “nothing at all.”

  I ask her if there are any hotels in neighboring towns, whether I could get a bus to them. My French must have faltered, for she looks me in the eye and says, “Are you Belgian?”

  When I tell her no, a transformation takes place. The wall of indifference vanishes. Concerned and motherly now, she leads me by the arm to a seat by her desk and asks me to wait a few moments. Of course we can find you a place to stay the night; Dixmude is crowded for the holiday weekend but we can phone around. Please, make yourself comfortable, m’sieur.

  Thus I learn the dangers of addressing a Fleming in Belgium’s other official language, without so much as an excuse-my-French. This proof of animosity between Belgium’s Flemish-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons gives me a guilty little thrill—having grown up a Canadian, I feel at home whenever I encounter bickering over language. The French speakers of Belgium used to have the upper hand in business, finance, politics, and the arts of the nation, but now demographic trends and economic changes have tilted in favor of the Flemish speakers, who are tired of being portrayed as oafs by the Walloons. That age-old habit of derision has long since spread south to France, where the telling of Belgian jokes is now a national pastime. These are often enjoyably stupid, as in the story of the public address system at Paris’s Gare du Nord: “The train for London departs at 8:15; the train for Berlin departs at 9:15; and the train for Brussels departs when the little hand is on the ten … “

  Such jokes don’t go down too well in Flanders, especially if told by a Walloon. Understandably, militant Flemings want respect; unfortunately, their loudest voice is the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block), the kind of truly repulsive party of racist xenophobes that European political culture excels at producing. In Dixmude, the Great War plays a leading role in the Blok’s theater of ethnic rage. What, from a distance, I took to be an enormous water tower wavering in the heat haze turns out to be a twenty-seven-story-tall memorial to the First World War that doubles as a shrine for the extreme Right. The IJzertoren (Yser Tower), a great brown truncheon rising out of the plain, looks the part.

  Originally erected to honor Belgian soldiers who died on the Yser, the tower gradually became a rallying point for local patriots. Flemish veterans of the First World War claimed that their fallen comrades had been wantonly sacrificed by the Belgian army’s French-speaking officer class. Thus the Yser war monument automatically became a symbol of aggrieved nationhood. This was especially true after March 15, 1946, when the original IJzertoren was unceremoniously blown up, allegedly by anti-Flemish dynamite. The spectacular act of vandalism, spurred by indignation over the pro-Nazi sympathies of many Flemish nationalists during the Second World War, naturally engendered more resentment. Using the masonry from the original tower, the people of Dixmude constructed on the site a modest peace arch. Beside that the massive new IJzertoren rose, inaugurated in 1962 by a bevy of bishops and old soldiers. On its side is an acrostic:

  This stands for Alles voor Vlaandereny Vlaanderen voor Christus (All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ), a mix of Musketeer and Crusader sentiment that pushes the correct reactionary buttons for the extremists who hold rallies here. They are sometimes joined by like-minded fellows from France, Britain, and Germany in gatherings at the foot of the tower where, presumably, everyone compares skull tattoos and trades Adolf and Benito bubble-gum cards.

  I feel distinctly queasy as I pay my money to ascend the IJzertoren. Here in Dixmude, the Old World seems incurably steeped in old ways, and the contemplation of the past reserved for people bearing grudges. I have barely begun my journey and already I find myself wondering whether visiting the Western Front merely adds another small brick to the edifice of Reaction. Perhaps it’s better to ignore history, for history is too often used as a defense of the ignoble. The know-nothing ugly American exists, but so too does the do-nothing ugly European, who constantly invokes the past as an excuse for his present. We’ve always done it this way, so it must be right; we’ve never had your kind living amongst us, so we can’t allow you to stay; my father hated your father, so I hate you.

  I share the elevator ride with a small boy and his parents. We are enclosed in the heart—the dark heart—of the flat country. The problem of history and hate continues to nag. When the cult of the past involves a war, the freedom to speculate shrinks, for the more destructive the activity, it seems, the more zealous its curators. Even far from the battlefield in North America, remembrance of wars past regularly brings out the thought police. Veterans’ groups act as self-appointed censors of large swaths of history, shrieking like outraged virgins whenever the record is challenged. In Canada in 1992, veterans tried to quash a TV documentary about the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War. In 1995 the Smithsonian Institution canceled its Enola Gay exhibit under similar pressure. Intolerance came disguised as warrior virtue.

  The museum at the top of the tower, organized around the central shaft and composed of mementos evoking life in the trenches, is dusty and deserted. The Fleming family and I head for the windows to look out over a patchwork of green meadows and redbrick villages lying far below. Guy de Maupassant once said that he liked the view from the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place in the city from which he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, of the prospect from the IJzertoren. To the north is the blue blanket of the sea. To the south are the first timid signs of relief in the Flanders plain. A modest, wooded ridge rises beyond the distant spires of a large town. The
scene is disingenuously ordinary, for the town, Ypres, and its surroundings form one of the most terrible landscapes of the twentieth century.

  I take the elevator down. The distasteful connotations of the tower have faded, as have visions of aiding the mastodons of conservatism by pursuing this journey. War, French Premier Georges Clemenceau is supposed to have said in the wake of a battlefield debacle, is too important a matter to be left to the generals. The same could be said of the past. It needn’t be surrendered to the nostalgic and the intolerant, to the ugly European, to the frat boys of neofascism, or to the antidemocratic mullahs of military memory. The past belongs to everyone. It’s too important to be left to the professionals.

  3. Dixmude to Ypres

  Strange popping noises punctuate my walk out of the village of Nord-schoote on the road to Ypres. Pfft! Pfft!

  Silence.

  I take a few more steps, then hear them again: Pfft! Pfft! The detonations are loud but slightly muffled, as if coming from a great distance. Is it hunting season? Murder month? Has some well-armed cuckold come home too early?

  I squint into the flat afternoon light, searching for a better explanation out in the pale green mantle that unfurls to the horizon. My bewilderment is noticed and misinterpreted as telescopic lechery. A couple of girls bent over double at some vague agricultural task straighten up and wave at me from the middle of a field. I wave back, embarrassed.

  Pfft! Pfft!

  The usual parallel about distant echoes is now inescapable. What had been a silent landscape now rings with this faint cannonade, like a far-off and feeble remnant of one of the most deafening dins in all of history. With every step southward, toward the villages of Zuidschoote and Boezinge, I walk toward what was once known as the Ypres Salient, a great C-shaped curve in the Western Front. Seldom, if ever, has any place on earth been rocked by so many millions of pounds of whizzing steel and high explosives.

  For four years the Germans held the low ridge to the east of Ypres. Their lines were on the outside of the C. Inside that letter, bulging out toward them, were the British and their allies, an entire army of sitting ducks. They could be fired on from the front and from either side by an enemy who had the distinct advantage of holding the higher ground.

  Pfft! Pfft! The sound seems to be growing louder the farther south I go.

  The Ypres Salient was a remarkable shooting gallery. Both sides took part in hellish artillery duels that tore up the waterlogged ground and transformed it into a foul seething swamp. The Salient’s defining moment was the week of July 25 to July 31, 1917, when the British army fired off 4,283,550 shells (or 107,000 tons of metal) along a front twelve miles wide, then had its infantry try to wade through—in the rain — the ensuing soupy morass in the face of sustained machine-gun fire. Defining, because this place is one of the three or four on the Western Front, along with Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, and the Somme, where the criminal stupidity of the First World War still seems manifest, even after the passing of eighty years.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, in more ways than one. I sit down by the road outside Boezinge and massage my feet. A squadron of mosquitoes arrives from a nearby puddle to keep me company. The mysterious pops continue fitfully, farm dogs bark, cars whoosh past, the bugs start biting. What am I doing here?

  No, that’s the wrong question. What were the British and the Germans doing here?

  PFFT! PFFT!

  Two shots were fired at 10:34 A.M., on June 28, 1914, in front of Schiller’s Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb holding the gun, mortally wounded Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Sophie. When they died, about half an hour after Princip had blasted away at point-blank range, the nineteenth century entered its death throes. The event was a fluke: The archduke’s driver made a wrong turn onto Appel Quay and had to back up, right into the sights of the scrawny Serb student with the world-historical mission. But for the chauffeur’sinept driving, the continent-wide car wreck of the next four years might have been avoided.

  Earlier in the morning of that June 28, the victims had been celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary. Since Sophie’s soon-to-be-spilt blood was not blue enough—she did not have the requisite degrees, or quartiers, of nobility—to be accorded formal honors at the Viennese court, her doting archduke of a husband made a point of going to places where she could be given royal treatment. Sarajevo was just such a city. As every protocol martinet in central Europe knew, when Franz Ferdinand acted in a military capacity, in this instance as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army on a tour of the Bosnian capital’s garrison, he—and his wife—had to be given the full panoply of feathered deference, decorous bowing, and stylized scraping that Habsburg vanity required. Franz loved his wife, and the cream-puff perquisites of his office.

  Princip loved his cause. June 28,1914, was also the 525th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the resounding defeat that Serbs still perversely celebrate as their nation’s brush with greatness and respectability. Today they might mark the occasion by gunning down demonstrators—as they did in Sarajevo, to open the latest bout of barbarity in Bosnia; in Princip’sday the anniversary usually called for beetle-browed acts of sedition against foreign overlords. In this the Bosnian Serbs were helped, surreptitiously, by their brethren in Belgrade, who had enjoyed independence in a sovereign Serbia (or “Servia,” as it was often called) ever since an earlier conflict had wrested their territory from the control of the Ottoman Turks. And everyone in Europe, then as now, got excited when real estate changed hands.

  In fact, all five of the Great Powers—Britain, France, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany—were talking Turkey. The Divan, as the Ottoman court was known, had once controlled the Balkans, but Turkey was now the so-called “Sick Man of Europe,” a tottering empire no longer able to restrain its restive peoples. As outsiders greedily looked on, insiders weakened the Ottoman presence in Europe. A vocal, dissident faction, impatient with the dotty despots in the Topkapi Palace, agitated for modernization under the name of the Young Turks, a term that entered turn-of-the-century English to describe any collection of lean and hungry hotheads.

  This Balkan cocktail of Young Turks (many of whom were Bosnian Muslims), angry Serbs, and smitten Habsburgs was the brew that sent the Old World on its self-destructive bender of 1914-18. Even though Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had famously adjudged the Balkans undeserving of “the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,“and every political commentator worth his postprandial cigar had pointed out that, pace the English humorist Saki, the benighted region produced more politics than could be consumed locally, it was indeed the mountainous, hidebound, backward Balkans that ushered in—and would later usher out—the twentieth century.

  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 w
ith 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.