Seeing my puzzled face, a customs officer explains: “Maire adjoint. Socialiste.”
ON THE WAY into the deputy mayor’s town, Armentieres, I see a directional road sign pointing to nearby Bailleul. During the Race to the Sea in 1914, the townspeople of Bailleul fled in terror, and the retreating German army let the inmates of an insane asylum run free in the deserted streets. This incident, which inspired film director Philippe de Broca’sclassic pacifist farce, King of Hearts, is not difficult to dredge up from memory after spending time in the Bizet customs post. Inmates still run a few asylums in French Flanders.
I walk into the large town square of Armentieres, a paved expanse used as a parking lot. Somewhere a reconstructed belfry chimes out the time. A few cafés give out onto the square, the clings and clangs of their pinball machines adding to the late-afternoon carillon. The city, once famous as a party town for British troops, was leveled in the fighting of 1918 and hastily reconstructed afterward. A song, ” Mademoiselle from Armentiéres, ” became an anthem for soldiers in this sector, its countless verses — raunchy or polite, depending on the audience—always concluding with the chorus, ” Hinky-dinky (or ” Inky pinky”) parlay-voo. ” There are worse ways to end a visit to Flanders:
“Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlay-voo?
Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlay-voo?
Your eggs and frites, they give us the squits.
Hinky-dinky parlay-voo.
••••• author’s route
CHAPTER
3
Artois
i. Lille to Aubers to Neuve Chapelle
THE RAIN FALLS. Armentieres becomes a puddle in search of the hole in my shoe. I take a commuter train to the capital of French Flanders, Lille, and put off for a day my journey south to the slag heaps of Artois. I bring a book with me, Pride and Prejudice, and read it in a restaurant. Elizabeth tells Darcy to take a hike just as it’s time for me to go back to the Front and do the same. I forget to look at Lille.
Ten years later Lille will be an aspiring Europolis, a showcase of shiny technology parks and shopping centres. The high-speed train that goes under the Channel will stop at a glitzy, glassy station in the middle of town. Lille as a satellite of Brussels, a suburb of London, a city in eastern Kent—all notions that would cause its most famous son, Charles de Gaulle, to turn over in his tank. Expressways and express rail lines stream west of Lille toward England. The tiny cemeteries and memorials in the fields near Armentieres, St. Omer, Bailleul, and Hazebrouck flash past the windows of the TGV trains like places not really seen. The very speed of passage mocks the unmoving behemoth that once lay over the countryside. No-man’s-land is crossed in seconds, as coffee is poured and another Eurobun buttered. The Chunnel shall one day fog the British memory of war, for much of their national myth-making is tied up with going abroad to fight, with sailing out to meet the foe. What meaning “fair stood the wind for France” or “there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England,” when making the once fateful trip takes less time than crossing London on the Underground? The notion of France will have been rendered domestic. Wogs no longer start at Calais, Wogs ‘R’ Us.
Somewhere in this land rich in anachronistic borders and fronts is yet another invisible line, the shared boundary of Flanders and Artois. The current departements are Nord and Pas de Calais, but the long-standing regional names serve the purposes of this account better, for they conjure up a history, a sense of the past. Roughly speaking, Artois is the upland separating the forests of Picardy and the basin of Ile-de-France from the great northern European plain beginning in Flanders and continuing through the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. Yet the boundary that matters most, I tell myself as I study my maps in puzzlement, is the line of the Front. To be more precise: the Front as it was in 1916, the year of utter stalemate, the Front I have set out to see. In 1917 and 1918 the lines moved considerably in northern France, making any retrospective hike down no-man’s-land an event for a zigzagger of Olympian stamina. With that in mind, a few miles south of Armentieres I declare myself to be in Artois.
In fact, I have just entered a different type of buffer zone: suburbia. A landscape of bungalows lies ahead. On the road surface are speed bumps or, as French highway slang has it, “sleeping policemen.” Somehow it’s more satisfying to drive over them that way. I assume that the residents of this subdivision work in Lille, the big city, and not Armentieres, the small town, because the dogs I encounter here are quivering little neurotics, more fashion accessories than faithful companions. Thus the preemptive tactic I’ve been using to confuse charging farm dogs—I bark first—fails miserably. These inbred suburbanites obey only their nerves. One toy-sized beast barrels out of a front gate, unimpressed by my bared incisors, and lets off a volley of yaps that drills deep into my inner ear. The two of us stand our ground in the narrow street, snarling theatrically at each other. I finally let loose a howl and lunge forward. The beast skitters back through the gate, its barking all the more furious for having given way to a bigger opponent. I move on, but not before glimpsing the curtains of the bungalow’s front room fall back into place. So I’m not good with dogs, lady.
The tract housing thins and the cemeteries start cropping up again. The land is riddled with roads and tracks laid out in a grid pattern. There are far more people living here than in the countryside of Belgian Flanders. Farmhouses have been gentrified, rowhouses decorated, and a few garden sheds left in artful disarray. I pass several abandoned brickworks, testament to a once thriving industry. Catholicism’s taste for the big gesture also appears. The crossroads around here are just that—roads with crosses. At several junctions, there are man-sized crucifixes on which are nailed extravagantly suffering Christs, like butterflies under glass. They look down at me as I sweat in the morning sun.
At a hamlet called Fromelles I pass a roadside Calvary that’s not on my map. Kitty-corner from Christ there’s a country cafe, which I enter to ask directions. Behind the counter a woman in a blue paisley smock watches bugs affix themselves to a long strip of flypaper. She glances up as I close the door behind me.
“Are you looking for a job? Because there aren’t any to be found around here.”
I think briefly about the King of Hearts, then shake my head. I tell her I’m looking for the road to Aubers.
This doesn’t cut it as a ploy to change the subject. She tells me that unemployment has hit the area hard. Her daughter can’t find a job and “might even have to go to Lille.” I point out that Lille is only a dozen miles away. The cafe lady is not interested in geography. She tells me that unemployment is a scourge for young people today.
A man of about seventy comes in the door, smiling and ready to engage in debate. I like him instantly. He’s wearing a gray tweed cap, a blue and white zip-up sweater, and navy-blue polyester bell-bottoms. He greets the cafe owner deferentially, as if he’s conferring a prize on her, then fires a question at me that I can’t quite understand. The French language streams out of his mouth, in a singsong accent I’ve never heard before. This is the legacy of the chti (pronounced “shtee”), the patois of northern France. The old man is what’s called a chti’mi: He speaks French the way a Welsh auctioneer would speak English. On the third time around I understand what he’s saying.
“Vous etes oisif msieu?”
He’s asking me if I’m idle. I look at him, then at the cafe lady, suspecting that they’re some sort of non sequitur tag team.
When I admit to loafing, I learn that today is a wonderful day for the idle—and that the old man has a wonderfully idle life. His wife in the city, his children gone, no one around the house, he can go and relax in the fields with his newspaper. Sometimes he sits up and reads it, sometimes he just lies down and covers his face with it. You can never be too careful with the sun. Especially at this time of the year. If you’re not careful, you can get sunstroke. That would be unfortunate, for then you couldn’t read the paper, could you?
He stops for a breath.
>
The three of us spend an enjoyable Socratic moment together, the old man posing questions then running away with the answers. When it’s time for me to resume hiking, my two companions, satisfied that I’m idle but not looking for a job, direct me to a cow track leading to the village of Aubers. I promise, nodding my way out the door, to stay in the shade as much as I can, to avoid sunstroke, to enjoy idleness, to take a bus if I get tired, to profit from my youth.
AUBERS, WHICH CAN be made out in the distance, sits on a slight rise in this transitional area between Flanders and Artois. In May of 1915, the British tried to storm the rise, to prove to their French allies that they were willing to take casualties. In that respect the attack was a success. They were mowed down by machine guns, and about 12,000 men were lost. At Fromelles, in 1916, it was the Australians’ turn. Advancing without reinforcements, they stormed the German trenches, then were cut off, surrounded, and massacred. In some Australian battalions, more than 80 percent of the men were killed.
The pastures between Fromelles and Aubers are dotted with the crumbling remains of pillboxes. Beside one of them, as if just placed there, is a bouquet of fresh flowers. There is no card.
The flowers in the field hint at the profusion of blossoms in the handsome red village of Aubers. Despite the old man’s opinion, his is not a village of the indolent. The houses, neatly rebuilt from the heaps of broken brick that were left after the armies had moved off in 1918, look well maintained and welcoming. The Front, a strip of Europe where nothing is old, where most things were reconstructed on the cheap in the 1920s and 1930s, has thus far been a succession of sad villages and soulless towns. Aubers seems determined to shake off the past, or at least cover it up with flowers.
At a fork in the road below Aubers, signs indicate the way to “Salome” and “Lorgies.” Both destinations sound like a good time, but my route lies elsewhere, down a gentle grade to the southwest, toward the village of Neuve Chapelle, another name in the annals of folly. The British made a successful surprise attack here in 1915. It was a surprise despite themselves—they did not have enough shells to launch a long preliminary bombardment and thereby give away their intentions. In one morning, they took the town and even managed to break through into the countryside beyond it. The 1,400 Germans holding the lines at Neuve Chapelle could not withstand the onslaught. They were outnumbered thirty-five to one.
Then the British stopped, as a result of the indescribable confusion reigning in the command structure. Reinforcements were sent up far too late, officers in adjacent units did not answer to the same commanders, and communication became a tangle of orders and counterorders. For most of the afternoon of March 10, 1915, there was a gaping hole in the German lines, but it was not exploited. Tens of thousands of men sat on the ground smoking, waiting to be told to go forward. The generals, as can only be expected of Great War stories, ordered the attacks renewed long after the Germans had had the time to shore up their defenses. Slaughter ensued. The Germans counterattacked and regained much of the yardage they had lost.
This did not play well in Britain, where expectations had been raised by reports of early success. The war, rejoiced the editorialists, was almost won. A scapegoat was needed for the reversal of fortune. Since the generals, John French and Douglas Haig, could not very well blame themselves and didn’t dare blame the thousands they had just sent to their deaths, it was thought best to lay the whole thing at the doorstep of the British worker. There had not been enough artillery shells, army spokesmen declared, because the British worker was a shirker who spent all his time getting drunk. That was why Neuve Chapelle had been a disaster. The civilian government dutifully ordered British pubs to lock up in the afternoons, a law that remained on the books until 1989, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided that the threat to the war effort was over.
OUTSIDE NEUVE CHAPELLE, in a quiet semi-suburban street near the ruins of a lethal fortification known as the Quadrilateral, the locals appear to have launched a lawn gnome war. Dwarfs, trolls, and schtroumpfs—smurfs, in English—stand in competitive quantities before a row of recently built houses that coincides with the farthest advance of the British line. Aside from the gnomes, the only statuary of note is in the village itself. At a bend in the road is yet another Christ in agony, a replacement for a more famous fellow sufferer. The Portuguese, who held this part of the Front in 1918, were so surprised by a German attack during the spring of that year that they fled Neuve Chapelle without the legless crucifixion scene they had been lugging around with them for good luck. Happily, this so-called “Christ of the Trenches” was found after the war and restored to them. The villagers had to settle for a new Christ, which they erected at an unmissable spot on the highway leading out of town to Armentieres.
That Christ is not, however, at Neuve Chapelle’s most striking crossroads. Just west of the village, on the way to the town of Bethune, is an unprepossessing old inn called the Auberge de la Bombe. The name is just a coincidence, the owner tells me in the parking lot. I’m not convinced but say nothing—our immediate surroundings are too distracting. Near la Bombe is a Portuguese military graveyard, a reminder of the 1918 surprise German attack. Beside it, dominating the junction, stands a large memorial with gray granite tigers and lotus blossoms rising up from the dusty fields. Delicate stone latticework and Sanskrit lettering run down the side of twin pavilions. This is the principal Indian memorial of the Western Front. Troops from India were in the vanguard of the Neuve Chapelle fiasco of 1915, betrayed by the incompetence of their colonial overseers. I try to get a closer look at the structure. Wherever there are large stone felines, I’ve noticed, there is usually a British embarrassment. The louder the roar, the emptier the tribute. The gate is locked.
I get a lift into Bethune from the innkeeper of the Bombe, a man in his forties. Signs for cemeteries in Festubert and Givenchy, outposts of no-man’s-land, flash by on the roadside. I ask him what he thinks of Indians and Portuguese coming to die in his grandfather’s backyard.
He whistles and says, “Unbelievable. This place is still unbelievable.”
2. Béthune to Loos to Lens
Béthune, explains the driver giving me a lift in from the strange crossroads at Neuve Chapelle, is a ville bourgeoise. Lens, the other big town in the area, is a villepopulaire. Which means that the one houses the owners, and the other, the workers. Which also means that you can’t have fun in Bethune.
I tell him that during the First World War there was a famous brothel in Bethune, called the Red Lantern.
He looks at me and says that if it’s still there, he hasn’t found it.
I’m let off in the central square, an improbable collection of skinny shop facades and bunkerlike bank fronts. A medieval belfry, reconstructed after the Great War, stretches skyward over a midsummer crowd sucking down colorful drinks. The tall tower is the town’s pride, a symbol of the city’s freedom from feudal obligations. In the Middle Ages, the burghers of Flanders and Artois erected belfries to cock a snook in stone at churchmen and nobles.
Times have changed, and the burghers have become bourgeois. My lift-giver was right about this being an uptight place. Along the sides of the square files a procession of baise-beige couples out for a stroll before dinner. Baise-beige (“fuck wanly”) is the rude recent permutation of bcbg, a slang term about social climbing that stands for bon chic bon genre (roughly, “preppy and presentable”). To be baise-beige is to exude clean-cut smugness, to look askance at anything that tradition has not consecrated, to ignore rather than inquire. Fortunately for Bethune’s soul, the town’s well-scrubbed decorum is easily breached. Every now and then a wreck of a car from the mining district south of town guns its way through the main square, music blaring and sports pennants trailing in the breeze. The strolling window-shoppers, as if obeying an unspoken agreement, affect not to notice these intrusions, preferring to continue comparing accessories and offspring, even if the effort entails raising their voices. The arrangement seems to suit everyone c
oncerned, both the baise-beige on the sidewalks and the working-class heroes in their cars.
TIME TO FOLLOW those heroes. I look at the map: I am heading out of Béthune, a town 130 miles directly north of Paris. I’m walking southeast to Lens, along a road that runs straight as a geometer’s dream, through a gray, treeless plain punctuated by conical slag heaps and brooding redbrick villages. In the distance, the skeletal remnants of machinery at a pithead stand out against a metallic sky. The town of Vermelles appears, its streets a succession of cherry-colored corons, the compact rowhouses once home to black-lunged miners. This is Germinal country, Zola in the provinces. Successive generations of families lived and died on this bleak Artesian plain, their menfolk going deep underground to extract coal for the heavy industries of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix. The factories and foundries have long since closed, as have most of the mines. Their great dark mounds of spoil now shoulder an unlikely mantle of weeds that shifts and shudders in the wind. The plain is silent.
Except for this roadway. Trucks, buses, cars hurtle over the blacktop; capricious clouds of dust whirl in their wake. I scan the horizon for the first signs of Lens. Eyes sting, ears ring. If there are any other pedestrians on this stretch of road, they must be out of their minds. I bend my head and walk on, the hot breath of diesel never absent for more than a minute. Every time I glance upward, it seems that I’m looking at the word “Fruehauf,” rubbery and dirty, on the rear tire mudguards of onrushing transport trailers. Occasionally I glimpse a signpost for an incongruously named British cemetery: Quality Street, Philosophe. The landscape is such that only graveyards provide levity. For the next few miles, the past will be more interesting than the present.
THE YEAR 1915 started well enough. The spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914, during which soldiers on opposing sides clambered into no-man’s land to exchange gifts and compare family mementos, seemed an augury of decency on the Western Front, even if the skies conspired to make the winter one of the most execrable in living memory. In northern France, from October 25, 1914, to March 10, 1915, there were only eighteen days without rain. The misery of millions of men, standing in cold and muddy ditches for months on end, can only be imagined.
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