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.
THE 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.
I reach Messines. Its unsightly church stands out like a black eye in the blameless blue sky. The original, ruined church was the subject of sketches by Corporal Adolf Hitler, who spent much of the war in the trenches on this ridge. I pause in a cafe to make notes and put my feet up on a wicker chair. A chain-smoking twelve-year-old wordlessly serves me a coffee, holds out his hand, then pockets my coins, all without once meeting my eyes. This must be the Paris of Flanders.
The land drops off suddenly south of Messines into a succession of golden fields. The scene seems anonymously pastoral, but this stretch of land is anything but nameless. In the valley lies a still-active western front of Europe, this one far more enduring than that dug by the ghosts of 1914. Here the tiny River Douve separates the Flemish province of West-Vlaanderen (West Flanders) from an enclave of the Walloon province of Hainaut. On one side of the stream is Germanic turf; on the other, Latin. This linguistic front runs through Belgium and Luxembourg, separates Alsace from Lorraine, then meanders through the Swiss and Italian Alps before finally confronting another line, that of the Slavs, in the Balkans. In western Europe, the Latin-Germanic divide was lastingly established when Charlemagne’s heirs sliced up the pie between Salic Goths and Ostrogoths in A.D. 843. The treaty giving rise to this age-old western front was signed—where else? — in Verdun.
As I cross the small bridge spanning the Douve, I’m stepping on both een brug and un pont. Ahead are un arbre and une ferme behind, een boom and een boerderij. Birds wheel back and forth, becoming oiseaux or vogels in turn; clouds overhead change from Flemish wolken to French nuages. Not that much else changes, even if I do expect to see more gold chains and fewer spiky haircuts as a result of crossing the cultural divide. I am reminded of going from Ontario to Quebec over the Ottawa River, except that here in Flanders it is the French-speaking side that holds out the promise of greater familiarity. Although Flemish may be English’s first cousin (or cousin germain, as French so aptly puts it), I feel more at home with my north Latin in-laws, having spent a dutiful Trudeau-led boyhood in quest of French-English bilingualism. The next time I’ll cross this line, at the only other point of intersection between the two fronts, is eight weeks away in the Vosges Mountains, where the French spoken on the western slopes gives way to the Alsatian on the eastern.
Almost immediately on leaving Belgium’s linguistic divide of the Douve, I enter the trees of Ploegsteert Wood and encounter the monuments that mark the southern extremity of the Ypres Salient. Two large stone lions sit before a rotunda on which the memorial makers, once again seeking absolution through accountancy, have etched another long list of young men whose bodies were never found. The proud felines, I assume, were placed there to cloak the grisly proceedings with imperial grandeur. The trick may have worked once, in the glory days when the sun never set on either gin or tonic, but it doesn’t any longer. Now the reference to a defunct empire, here in a Belgian grove, seems pathetic. The lions’ time had passed even when they were being sculpted—it was precisely because of the Great War that the dominions of the Empire distanced themselves from Britain. There remained, of course, links between crown and former colonies, some of which survived as tenacious throwbacks well past the mid-century mark. I need only think of my second-grade teacher teaching us Boer War songs in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
An elderly New Zealander couple befriends me in the neighboring Hyde Park Corner Cemetery. Our acquaintance doesn’t start off well, as conversation quickly bogs down in Commonwealth cross-purposes. The man, fearful that a Yank like myself will mistake them for Australians, insists on telling me several times that he and his wife are Kiwis. Fortunately, she interrupts him.
“Look at that,” she says, pointing down at what seems a standard headstone. “It’s disgraceful.”
I read: “A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God,” the euphemism coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe an unidentifiable body. It’sa phrase etched on countless headstones along the Western Front. I’dalways thought it rather elegant.”
And over there,” she continues, gesturing to another row of headstones.
Her husband walks a few paces, squats down, and starts to weed the grass. I begin to understand.“They’ve really let the side down. In France, they’ve done a lovely job, but here …” At the thought of imperfect gardening her voice trails off in disgust.
This is the couple’s third trip to the old battlefields. Each time, they have tried to keep the groundskeepers of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission “on their toes.” It’s a hobby.
Messines, they go on to tell me, was the scene of a heroic New Zealand action in 1917, and is thus a well-known name in the antipodes. Ploesteert Wood, in which we stand, is famous for two things. It once held the house where Churchill did his brief tour of duty in 1915, and it still holds a gigantic unexploded mine from the 1917 offensive. It used to hold two, but one exploded in 1955, apparently detonated by a stray thunderbolt striking a tree. The remaining mine has yet to go off, and no one has volunteered to go digging for it.
The New Zealanders climb back in their car and drive off north to give the gardeners of the Salient graveyards a hard time. I strike out south for France, setting a fast pace for these last few level miles. Once out of the woods I head through the vill
age of Ploegsteert, where a woman with a sad smile hands me a pamphlet protesting a proposed hazardous waste depot in the area. First a time bomb, now a toxic dump—this is not a blessed corner of creation.
Half an hour later, border bars and discount shops begin to thicken along the roadside. Le Bizet, once a dormitory town for Belgian laborers who toiled in the brickworks across the way in France, now lives off a few French bargain hunters and day-trippers. At the border crossing, my status as disheveled pedestrian is immediately noticed and judged suspect. I’m waved over into a French customs office where, of the five young men in uniform, only one is not playing with a lighter, reading the paper, or listening intently to AM radio.
My arrival in the shed creates a stir. The backpack is emptied, and the search for illegal drugs almost instantly abandoned once the nature of my belongings is seen. My silver hip flask earns admiring wolf whistles. The linguist of the five correctly guesses it contains Irish whiskey, given the “O” in my last name. This inspires two others to crouch before me for a mock scrum—France and Ireland play every year in the Five Nations rugby tournament—that is interrupted by a shout of”Putain!” One of the boys has found on my maps the obscure border post where he is to be transferred. Just the other day he was trying to tell the others about it, and they didn’t know where it was.
His explanations are cut short. A dignified man enters the shed. He has swept-back gray hair and is wearing an understated blue suit. He greets each officer individually, then turns to me, unsure of what to do next. He glances down at my boxer shorts on the table, which seem to help him come to a decision. He shakes my hand, utters a perfunctory “bonjour,“then turns on his heel and walks out.
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