Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  It did. In October of 1914, when the chances for a breakthrough in the Race to the Sea were slipping away, the German general staff sent thousands of untrained student volunteers to these fields as part of a last-ditch offensive. The British positions were to be smashed and the triumphant German army would scramble across country to the vital Channel ports. The military command spoke of “feeble adversaries” and “trash”; for the Wandervogel youths, their nationalist fiber stirred by the presence of the Kaiser, exaltation and eagerness were the real marching orders of the day. To find a modern-day equivalent, the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s must again be cited, when whole divisions of Iranian martyrs flung themselves, lemming-like in their fundamentalist enthusiasm, at fortified positions near Basra. In 1914, much the same thing occurred. Whereas elsewhere in the Salient battle-hardened German troops nearly broke the British and Belgian lines, no such close call occurred wherever the student soldiers attacked. British war memoirs describe groups of massed teenagers, arms linked and voices raised in song, walking across the fields as if on a Sunday outing. The power of purity, presumably, would sweep away all that lay before it.

  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.

  GASSING, 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.

  FROM 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 ventu
re 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.

  IN 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.

  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 strengt
h 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.