We’re here because we’re here
Because we’re here
Because we’re here
We’re here because we’re here
Because we’re here
Because we’re here.
Sing it to yourself, and you’ll see what a satisfying explanation it is. There were, of course, official reasons.
WHEN THE AUTHORITIES in Vienna learned of Franz Ferdinand’s murder, they saw a golden opportunity to squelch the upstart on their southern border. Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, the man most at fault for the ensuing debacle, issued the Serbian government a blisteringly severe ultimatum, the terms of which were tantamount to surrendering sovereignty. The advisers of Serbia’s King Peter, suitably cowed by the Habsburg tantrum, agreed to comply with all of the demands contained in von Berchtold’s ultimatum save one — the order giving Austrian police a free hand on Serbian soil. Rather like an old man buying a red sports car, the Austro-Hungarian empire then declared war on Serbia. By telegram, in French. It was 1:00 P.M., July 28, 1914.
The story now leaves the precincts of south-central Europe to involve the rest of the continent. Over the years a system of alliances had developed to transform international affairs into a shifting, intrigue-ridden round of diplomatic skirmishing that gave a civilized veneer to the cutthroat commercial rivalries of the time. Crises in Morocco and the Balkans came and went in the first decade of the century, causing mustaches to moisten and horses to snort, but large-scale wars had always been averted. The game of diplomacy was wonderful and glamorous and cosmopolitan and aristocratic, but in the summer of 1914 it fell apart. The well-bred grandees in the chancelleries and foreign offices drafted their customary cables and issued their usual exquisitely worded warnings, all to no avail. In its final, prewar stages, diplomacy slipped out of civilian control to fall in step with the implacable logic of military timetables. When that happened, the traditional ruling classes of Europe became history, in the Boomer sense of the word. They had delivered their citizenry into the maw of the industrial battlefield. At war’s end, they would not be forgiven.
The road to the Western Front began in the east. Austria’s bullying of Serbia induced Russia to order the mobilization of its troops. Pan-Slavic nationalists in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called) viewed the Slavs of the Balkans as their proteges. The armies of Czar Nicholas II headed by the millions toward the western borders of Russia. Germany, the industrial and military powerhouse under the somewhat loopy leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was aghast. The government in Berlin had foolishly given its ally Austria a ”blank check” — that is, a guarantee of assistance no matter what the outcome of its saber-rattling policy toward the Serbs. Now, panic-stricken at the results, Germany demanded that Russia stop its mobilization.
This was easier demanded than done. Mobilization was a machine years in the planning that required massive resources to effect quickly, so you couldn’t just stop it halfway and run all the troop trains backward—unless you were willing to leave yourself defenseless in the ensuing chaos. Naturally, Russia refused to do this.
Not that getting your army up to strength and poised on your borders necessarily meant you were going to war. When France, an ally of Russia at the time, began mobilizing in the last days of July, it was preparing for hostilities, not starting them. Likewise Austria-Hungary, Russia, Serbia, Great Britain, and Turkey. This may seem like hairsplitting, but it’s not—there’s a big difference between pointing a pistol at someone and actually shooting him. In only one country was this distinction not made: Germany.
In the 1890s a Prussian military planner, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, had rightly surmised that Germany might one day have to face hostile armies in both the east and the west. He, like all German policy makers, feared Einkreisung, or encirclement. Positing that his country could not wage a victorious war on two fronts at once, Schlieffen masterminded a scheme whereby the Kaiser’s armies would deliver a knockout blow to France, then race over the rails to deal with the Russians. Speed was of the essence for the Schlieffen Plan. When German fighting forces mobilized they would automatically blast their way into France. And, to get there, they would surprise everyone by marching through neutral Belgium. So what if this bald violation of treaties brought in Britain against them? As a German military planner had once said of the prospect of the British sending their small professional army to the Continent: “If the British land, we’ll arrest them.”
THE TOWN OF Ypres draws nearer, both in this narrative of 1914 and on this day in 1986. The spires of churches and civic buildings are now clearly visible to the south, pointing skyward in artificial medieval splendor.
Pfft! Pfft!
The detonations are too loud to ignore. I make one last detour off the road to plumb the mystery of the Salient pops. A small, boxlike object lying a few paces away emits a deafening Pfft! Pfft! as I approach. How humiliating. The source of my World War I blasts is a scarecrow speaker, placed in the ground to startle birds away from freshly seeded fields. Do the people of Flanders like playing mind games with obsessed hikers? First the Dodengang bar; now this. I return to the roadway, convinced the pops are beginning to sound derisive.
Still, the Flanders I’ve come to see has not entirely disappeared. Beside the Ypres-Yser Canal, almost in the shadow of a traffic cloverleaf, another weirdly immaculate British cemetery awaits inspection. A plaque informs the traveler that this is the Essex Farm Cemetery, where John McCrae visited the makeshift grave of a friend on May 3,1915, noticed some poppy blooms blowing in the breeze, and then became inspired to write “In Flanders Fields.” In so doing the doctor from Guelph, Ontario, made this spot emblematic of the Great War for a large part of the English-speaking world. Originally published in Punch to great acclaim, the poem is now pointedly unloved by literary critics and anthology compilers. Of the final stanza’s famous exhortation, which begins “Take up our quarrel with the foe,” Paul Fussell, in his peerless The Great War and Modern Memory, has written: “We finally see — and with a shock—what the last six lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace.”
Despite the critical abuse, the sentimental old poem has shown great staying power in popular culture. It, along with the songs “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Over There” and Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, may be said to form the final fading pages in the scrapbook of First World War cliche. As such, the Essex Farm Cemetery, its beribboned wreaths shivering in the wake of onrushing afternoon traffic, now doubles as a shrine to a vanished syllabus. The cannons of the Salient have long been silenced, as has its canon.
THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN laid out the route of attack. The bulk of the German army—its right wing—would swing through Belgium, skirt the Atlantic coast, pass west and then south of Paris. By doing this it could eventually encircle the French armies that, Schlieffen had once again correctly surmised, would be busy throwing themselves at well-fortified defensive lines to regain Alsace and Lorraine. Indeed, since the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France had lost Alsace and Lorraine, the general staff of its army had thought of little else but recovering the two provinces from the Germans. Out of this keen sense of injured pride came a military doctrine that elevated the attack to an almost quasi-mystical status. Attacking a outrance (to the utmost), no matter what the terrain or the strength of the opposition, entailed wearing the dashing but conspicuous red trousers and blue coat of the infantryman and running directly at enemy machine-gun fire, presumably protected from injury by one’s warrior insouciance, or elan. Such were the pitifully inadequate tactics taught at elite French military academies. Their strategic thinking, which had been dignified by the name of “Plan XVII,” called for remorseless, predictable, frontal attacks into Alsace and Lorraine. As in 1870 and 1940, in August 1914 the French were hopelessly outsmarted by the Germans.
Under the command of Joseph Jacqu
es Cesaire Joffre, an avuncular officer with a seemingly boundless appetite for casualties, the French army went to the slaughter, launching attack after attack a outrance until entire battalions were annihilated. In the summer and fall of 1914, France lost as many men on the battlefield as the American army would in all of the twentieth century. Their conscript army was thrown away by incompetent generalship. In the month of August alone, more than 210,000 Frenchmen died in the headlong offensives of Plan XVII. The bloodbath was more than appalling, it was absurd.
Joffre blamed his subordinates. He demoted dozens of generals and sent them to the city of Limoges for reassignment: whence the French verb limoger for any high-profile firing. According to many accounts, Joffre’s imperturbable demeanor in the face of horrific losses sometimes reassured but more often repelled. The sacredness of the general’s stomach—Joffre always had two well-cooked, uninterrupted feasts a day, no matter how dire the military situation — contrasted dramatically with his callow disregard for the lives of his soldiers.
While Joffre minded his digestion and sent tens of thousands to their doom in the east, 750,000 Germans were walking toward France from the north. As the Kaiser’s armies advanced through Belgium, they carried out a highly publicized policy of Schrecklichkeit, or “Frightfulness,” meant to discourage any attempts at civilian resistance. Hostages were taken and shot, and cities were burned, a brutal overture for the total war to come. The Belgians became a nation of refugees, crowding the roads south to France and the boats over to England. Of the hundred thousand or so who reached Britain, the most famous of the lot never really landed there at all because he was, in point of fact, fictional. Like his unfortunate compatriots, Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s sleuth, was chased from his homeland by Schrecklichkeit. (Why else would a Belgian detective be living in London?)
The Belgian refugees were welcomed as heroes. In Britain enthusiasm for the war ran high. Shopkeepers with German surnames had their businesses patriotically looted, and, in just the first month of a recruiting drive for a volunteer army, half a million young Britons rushed to sign up to avenge what was called “poor little Belgium.” It is difficult to imagine the naivete of expectations, the trust in one’s country, the excitement of being young in that summer of 1914. Rupert Brooke, genteel England’sundisputed golden boy for both his godlike looks and his felicitous way with words, came to symbolize the vaguely homoerotic ideal of youth in arms. Previously he had been the athletic, intelligent, effortlessly irresistible upper-crust Brit, a sort of ur-Calvin Klein male; now he was a noble Galahad off to grapple with the awful Hun. The opening to the first of Brooke’s “1914” sonnets, once committed to memory by a nation swooning over his early death (in 1915), then subsequently ignored out of embarrassment at the work’s politically incorrect martial ardor, deserves to be cited at least one more time before it no longer catches the heart. The end of the nineteenth century is speaking directly to us when Brooke limpidly writes of August 1914:
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.
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