Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  In the tourist office I read that stuffed cat toys are thrown from the top of the bell tower during the city’s riotous little Kattestoet, a spring festival said to date all the way back to the year 962. Live cats used to go splatting down onto the cobblestones until the festival of 1817, when squeamish town fathers forbade such gory mediaeval exuberance. Now ersatz cats are hurled from on high. Either option sounds more amusing than hanging out with skinheads at the base of the IJzertoren.

  A pleasant feeling of disorientation steals over me. After reading at length about Ypres in the First World War, I half expect the place to have disappeared. Such a vanishing act happened once before. At war’s end the city was a heap of rubble, and some wished it to remain that way. Churchill, never at a loss for memorable rhetoric, said of Ypres, “A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world,” and then went on to suggest that it continue to be nonexistent. He and other proponents of object lessons saw in the ruins of Ypres a permanent theme park, where visitors would come to admire the destructiveness of modern warfare.

  In the same spirit, the Michelin tire company shrewdly produced touring manuals to the regions devastated by the Great War, complete with “before” and “after” pictures of architectural marvels leveled by bombardments. This tsk-tsk tourism became very popular immediately after the armistice and ensured the success of the fledgling Michelin guides. The 1919 edition for Flanders, entitled Ypres: un guide, un panorama, une histoire, teases the reader with its pictures and detailed descriptions of buildings and artworks that could no longer be seen. Page after page contrasts prewar and postwar snapshots: here a church, there an empty lot; here a charming village street, there a road bordered with tree stumps; here an imposing chateau and its garden, there a dusty expanse filled with rusting sheets of corrugated metal. Even more jarring are the pictures of the countryside. Invariably, a jalopy is shown driving through a moonscape devoid of any distinguishing feature save for a rough wooden sign indicating where some village used to be. When the Western Front was still fresh in everyone’s memory, it fascinated more for what it had destroyed than for what it had created.

  Eventually, 1919’s screaming swath of nothingness was silenced by new construction. When the civilians of Flanders returned to where their homes had been, there was no debate over whether the province should be left as a Churchillian war wonderland. Reconstructing a distant past was deemed the best way to blot out the recent past. Along with the Cloth Hall (which was finished only in 1964), a new old cathedral rose from the rubble, the tomb of the influential prelate Cornelius Jansen dusted off and displayed once more for admirers of his Catholic version of Calvinism. Architects studied the “before” pictures—like those in the Michelin guides—and set to rebuilding along the main arteries of the town. Where preexisting buildings were found wanting in historical cachet, their newer versions came with a few more gables, or turrets, or whatever. In the process of re-creating a world, exactness mattered less than effect. The Flemings even had the Germans pay for rebuilding the town’s seventeenth-century fortifications — even though the Germans had just shown the great walls to be useless in defending the city. The place became virtual.

  The British saw Ypres as a mausoleum. The stupendous profligacy with which those in command had wasted lives in the defense of this Belgian backwater called for an extravagant peacetime riposte. Well before the armistice, the authorities in London ordered elaborate and expensive plans drawn up for commemorations, graveyards, statuary, and the like. A new sacredness, a civic religion, would have to be invented to ward off mounting nihilism—all the suffering had to be made legitimate so that those in power would not be blamed. Thus was born the modern war memorial, a mix of accountancy exactitude and the notion of universal victimhood. Determine the correct tally of the dead, etch their names in stone, and avoid the sticky question of responsibility by implying that such a regrettable calamity occurred independently of human agency. At Ypres, the British invented the twentieth-century response to war. By commissioning a stone ledger of the lost, the State, through its very punctiliousness, can be absolved. Visitors to the Vietnam memorial in Washington will recognize the device.

  Not only was Ypres a mausoleum for hundreds of thousands — there are more than 150 British graveyards within walking distance of town — it also came to be viewed, paradoxically, as the last outpost of the pre-1914 era. Between the two world wars, Ypres was filled with pubs and chip shops and chapels catering to veterans and relatives, nurses and clergymen, teachers and schoolboys. Now that Anglo aspect of the town is as dusty and distant as the Vietnam memorial will be a couple of generations hence. As I look around the main square, I’m disappointed that there are no buskers playing “Tipperary” on penny whistles, and that there are no corny old estaminets—the Great War word for soldiers’ taverns — in sight. What can be seen, off to the east in a gap in the reconstructed city ramparts, is an archway known as the Menin Gate. It is one of two enormous monuments the British erected on the Western Front; the other towers over Thiepval, in the Somme. Under the long marble vault of the gate, which resounds with the thunder of passing traffic, are the names of 54,896 soldiers of Britain and its empire who disappeared in the mud around here between August 1914 and August 1917, and whose bodies were never found. As for the rest of the war—September 1917 to November 1918 — the official tally of those Britons and colonials with no known grave in the Salient is 34,984. Their names are inscribed on panels at the Tyne Cot cemetery near Passchendaele.

  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 Goodbye 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.

  THE 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.