Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  The German supreme commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, one of the few farsighted generals of the war, saw that total victory was now impossible, given the failure of the daring Schlieffen Plan. Falkenhayn concentrated his main offensives on the Eastern Front, hoping to knock the Russians out of the war and force the French and English into a negotiated peace. On their Western Front—for it is to the west of Germany, after all—the armies of the Kaiser dug deeper into the earth, poured concrete, and got ready for a long siege.

  The French, under Joffre, thought differently about the coming year. Or rather, they didn’t think, they just attacked, again and again and again. The carnage of 1914 repeated itself, only this time the action didn’t take place principally in the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but in the newly occupied regions of Champagne and Artois. Behind their ever-strengthening defenses, the German army controlled some of the major industrial centers of the north—Tourcoing, Roubaix, Lille, Lens, Douai, Cambrai—as well as 90 percent of France’s iron ore production, 80 percent of its steel, and 40 percent of its coal. There could be no respite as long as troops of the Kaiser stayed on French soil. This pressure to act, understandable in light of the national emergency, was unfortunately matched with abysmal leadership. With the exception of a few enlightened instances, the tactic of head-on, massive assault was maintained, as if no lessons could be drawn from the 454,000 French battlefield deaths of the previous year. Joffre, ever imperturbable, seemed not to care.

  The French army attacked across the freezing, open spaces of Champagne in February of 1915. Perhaps a mile was gained, and 50,000 French soldiers killed. In March, the British, eager to show their battle willingness despite their smaller numbers, attacked at Neuve Chapelle. In April, the Germans opened their gas canisters for the first time, at St. Juliaan in Flanders, and won a few acres of the Salient.

  The following month the French readied another grand offensive. Undaunted by the Champagne debacle, the general staff drew up a plan of attack for Artois. The plan called for storming the heights of Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette and then rushing over the plain of Artois to the city of Douai. The result was predictable: a couple of miles gained, four ruined villages recaptured, and 102,500 French soldiers killed in forty days. The injured and maimed numbered three or four times that. The extent of the carnage, let alone its horror, is nauseating to contemplate.

  The conscript pool was deep. After a summer spent licking its wounds, the French army went on the offensive once again. In September, October, and November 1915, Joffre ordered repeated assaults, in precisely the same regions where his tactics had proved so futile in the spring. One needn’t possess hindsight to recognize the work of a dunderhead. Predictably, the same prodigious bloodletting resulted, but this time only a few hundred yards of wasteland were the reward. In Champagne, a whole swath of villages were destroyed so utterly that after the war they were never rebuilt, and the scarred land around them was turned into firing ranges for the French army.

  In Artois, the British attacked to the north of the French positions. They lost 60,000 men, killed or wounded, around the town of Loos, in an offensive that briefly became a byword for butchery. The German defenders called one scene Das Leichenfeld von Loos—the Corpse-Field of Loos. Machine gunners had a wide-open shooting gallery as masses of men were ordered to walk toward them over the plain. Of 10,000 sent over the top on the second day, fewer than 2,000 survived. The Germans, who, as their regimental history has it, “fired till their barrels burst,” felt so bad for their foe that they unilaterally imposed a truce to let the hordes of injured British soldiers crawl back to their lines. Yet this battle’s ignominy has faded, at least from a short list of remembered debacles, simply because the disasters of 1915 pale in comparison to those of 1916 and 1917. In the Great War, there was an escalation in command incompetence.

  IN MY JOURNEY to Loos over that same Leichenfeld, the road from Bethune to Lens has calmed somewhat since the morning, now that the sacred lunch hour has descended on the land. My Fruehauf-waving tormentors have entered their routier restaurants, ready for the thumping big meal that French truckers habitually down at midday. The remaining cars on the highway, rusty and in need of paint, rush past at irregular intervals, many of their drivers wide-eyed at the sight of a plodding pedestrian. At a rise in the road, I duck into the Loos British Cemetery and Memorial, ascend a few stone steps in the visitors’ pavilion, and come out onto a rooftop platform. From here I have an unobstructed view of the battlefield.

  To the north is the plain of Gohelle, its name apt in its last syllable. It stretches for eight or so miles toward the town of La Bassee, featureless, flat, empty, ringed with slag heaps. There are no villages on the plain, and the crops, whatever they were, have been harvested. The prospect is of endless vegetal stubble stretching to a horizon crowned with distant pimples of dirt. At a military cemetery in its center is the terrain where the British, in a famous incident of the Battle of Loos, gassed themselves blind. New to the vagaries of what was euphemistically termed the “accessory” and impatient with the unhelpful readings of army anemometers, the generals behind the lines ordered the gas released against the wind. The toxic cloud filled the British front and support trenches, so the attackers went forward, wheezing and dying. Nearer to my vantage point is the spot where a youth named Peter Laidlaw, in a fairly unbelievable act of bravery, jumped up into no-man’s-land, ripped off his gas mask, and marched back and forth across the front line, playing the bagpipes to rally his fellow Scots. The kilted young men rose up from their ditches and rushed to their deaths in the green fog.

  To the southwest, in a hollow a mile and a half down the main road to Lens, is the small town of Loos. From my viewing platform in the cemetery Loos looks like the gateway to Mordor. Two mountainous heaps of coal dirt loom behind it, identical twins several hundred feet tall. They are pitch-black, perfect cones, their silhouettes uncannily regular. This landmark is the Double Crassier—the double slag heap, a touch of the apocalyptic in an already inhuman landscape. On September 25, 1915, members of the London Regiment ran at full speed down the hill from where I now stand toward that crassier. It was a paradigmatic moment of the Great War. Despite the bullets, gas, and barbed wire, they advanced joyfully—because they were chasing a soccer ball. It is estimated that 1,200 of them fell, dead or wounded, within the first hour.

  Robert Graves tells another tale of the Battle of Loos that has entered the canon of Great War lore. The poet, then a twenty-year-old officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, came to the front lines as exhausted troops streamed back from no-man’s-land, gassed, injured, and shell-shocked. In an oft-cited passage of his memoir Goodbye to All That, he tells of one story he heard from a survivor:

  When his platoon had run about twenty yards he signalled them to lie down and open covering fire. The din was tremendous. He saw the platoon on the left flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed to hear. He jumped up from his shell-hole and waved and signalled “Forward.” Nobody stirred. He shouted: “You bloody cowards, are you leaving me to go alone?” His platoon-sergeant, groaning with a broken shoulder, gasped out: “Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they’re all f—g dead.” The Pope’s Nose machine gun traversing had caught them as they rose to the whistle.

  Not all the gruesomeness of 1915 occurred on the Western Front. At sea, the British liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, and the American lives lost (128 of the 1,198 drowned) did no good for the Kaiser’s image in the eyes of the giant neutral democracy. By the end of 1915 American capital had begun to bankroll the British and French war efforts, and the tide of public opinion swelled in favor of intervention at about the same rate as Allied indebtedness grew. The other German propaganda blunder of the year was the execution in Belgium of the forty-nine-year-old British nurse Edith Cavell. Having freely confessed her crime—helping Allied soldiers get out of German-occupied Belgium —she was shot in the early-morning hours of October 12, 1915, despite a l
ong and loud campaign for clemency by American and Spanish diplomats in Brussels. So great was the international outcry, from neutrals and belligerents alike, that a startled German military command ordered all further executions of women civilians commuted or postponed. Two years and three days later, it would be the turn of Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, to face a French firing squad. There was no outcry this time, just the beginning of a sultry legend. Aged forty-one at the time of her execution, the dancer and spy for the Germans eventually eclipsed Cavell as the most celebrated woman of the First World War, which may be taken as a comment on the relative glamour of their respective professions.

  Although the other fronts are beyond the scope of this journey, it’s worth noting that 1915 was also the year of Gallipoli. In an attempt to open another front, the British hatched a scheme whereby a landing in Turkey would lead their troops to Istanbul and beyond. Badly planned, atrociously executed, and needlessly prolonged, the Gallipoli campaign was another of the war’s great foul-ups, a particularly graphic example of lost opportunities and wrong decisions made at the wrong time. Gallipoli’s legacy, the memory of thousands of volunteers from Australia and New Zealand—known by their army corps’ acronym, ANZAC—trapped on a narrow shoreline throughout a sweltering summer and fall, served as fillip to the anti-imperial nationalism down under. When Australia eventually becomes a republic, its Bunker Hill will be recognized as ANZAC Beach in Turkey.

  As for the beach’s defenders, 1915 marked the full flowering of the Young Turks movement. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern secular Turkey, was among the gunners on the heights above Gallipoli. The year would thus be a glorious one for the Young Turks, were it not for the other event that took place in their homeland. In 1915, the authorities in Istanbul began the wholesale slaughter of the country’s Armenian population. Genocide ushered in the twentieth century.

  Now IT IS the past that has become intolerable to contemplate. I turn away from slag heap and cemetery and walk through Loos into Lens. Despite its name, Lens is not photogenic. The place was obliterated in the war, then rebuilt with no pretensions to coherence. Here, the squat corons of Germinal were eventually outnumbered by the high-rise cites of immigration, the suburban housing projects in which the misery of modern France is hidden.

  Saturday night, however, knows no frowns. The young are out in force downtown, showing a regard for come-hither fashion that would make a Parisian blush. I sit in a cafe and put my feet up, content to forget the truly awful pizza I’ve just ingested by watching the passing parade of tanned rondeurs. This is a serious scene. Oh, to give up walking and own a cosmetics counter in Lens—I could retire on the memories. A movie theater empties a wave of adolescent hipsters onto the sidewalk, and soon the air fills with the electric crackle of a French crowd exchanging quadruple social kisses. Souped-up subcompacts roar out of parking lots, voices rise and fall as car radios pass within earshot. From one, I hear the familiar drone of “Papa Don’t Preach.” Only then do I remember where I am. The Western Front.

  3. Vimy to La Targette

  Un vétement qui dort

  Est un vetement mort

  (Clothing asleep

  Is clothing dead)

  Poetry stares out at me from the window of a Lens dry cleaner’s. It is a white, flat morning, and the road out of town leads past a row of corons with doors open wide to let out the beery funk of Saturday night. In the redbrick thresholds hang slim strips of grimy plastic that feebly suggest villa life in some sunnier land. The strips sway slightly in the exhaust that wafts into living rooms from the main road.

  I skip into a backyard and begin my shortcut to Vimy Ridge. A heap of workings from an abandoned mine must first be climbed before gaining the greener slopes. The black dirt shifts and subsides under my boots —it’s like climbing a granular sand dune that has been treated with tar. Even the local dogs think I’m demented, their barks ceasing abruptly once I take to the black hill. On the map it looked so simple.

  By the time I reach the main square of the village of Givenchy-enGohelle, my once pristine Front-walking outfit—green sweatshirt, gray denim trousers, tan leather hiking boots—has become a sooty mess. I look ready for a minstrel show. At a riding school on the very edge of the battlefield, a young lady on horseback glances over at me in horror. Somehow this is not how I pictured my visit to Vimy Ridge.

  DIFFICULT AS IT may be for older Canadians to believe, most of their younger compatriots grew up not knowing what Vimy Ridge represented. Carving soap crosses and wearing red poppies were somehow related to The Longest Day, not to a place called Vimy. Granted, there was a Vimy Street in every Canadian town, but that coincidence could always be shrugged off as some archaic phenomenon needing no investigation.

  Long after making this hike, I called a Paris-bound friend in Toronto and asked her to bring me Pierre Berton’s Vimy, a lively account of the 1917 battle.

  “What was the name again?” she asked.

  “Vimy. Like Vimy Ridge.”

  “Vinny?”

  “No, Vimy, for Chrissakes!”

  “Pierre Berton wrote a book called Vinny?”

  And so on. The memory has been washed away far more thoroughly than any similar effacement of the words “Somme” or “Verdun.” This is all the more peculiar since both of those battles represent decay and decline. The Somme spelled the end of the British century, and Verdun broke the French for the century that followed. Vimy, on the other hand, is a positive concept, the foundation myth of a country. Vimy was the Canadian Lexington, the moment of a national coming of age. Monuments were thrown up all over Canada in honor of Vimy Ridge and the troops of the Great War. The national government building in Ottawa has a “Peace Tower” in front of it, a tall, mock-Gothic belfry erected to commemorate the 65,000 Canadian dead of the Great War. The memory of Vimy thus informs the symbolic architecture of the Canadian confederation. The Parliament—the totem of national unity—is a mausoleum.

  What happened on the heights of Vimy was quite simple, and quite bloody. One hundred thousand Canadian soldiers successfully stormed a heavily fortified German ridge on the snowy Easter Monday of 1917. The place was thought to be impregnable, but overwhelming artillery barrages and meticulously rehearsed attack tactics had been ordered by Arthur Currie, the British Columbia real estate agent and sometime embezzler in command of the Canadian troops. Currie’s methods combined to dislodge the Germans from a height that they had successfully defended against all comers in previous battles. Flushed with victory, the Canadians tried to press on beyond the ridge but were cut down by German reinforcements rushed in from Douai with machine guns and artillery. The capture of Vimy was the sole tactical success in a two-pronged Allied offensive that would come to grief around the Scarpe River in southern Artois and end in utter catastrophe on the hills of Champagne.

  Today the place is a showpiece of Canadian nationalism in the middle of an unlovely corner of France. An enormous two-tined Dalmatian marble monument rises up from a vast lawn. Into these two pylons and their base Walter Seymour Allward sculpted a score of larger-than-life allegorical figures to represent attributes of the nation and the emotions of its citizens. Grief is the figure most photographed. She looks over a commanding view of the plain to the east, with its slag heaps marching away at regular intervals to the industrial complexes of Douai. The perspective is surprisingly panoramic, as if one had climbed a tall mountain in the company of Grief. The Canadian soldier at the time must have felt the same way.

  Behind the well-tended lawn is a well-tended battlefield, several acres of mine craters, shell holes, and trenches having been preserved under a soothing cover of greenery. Signs direct visitors to keep off the grass, which most do. Yet the frozen bedlam of the site only serves to excite small boys into aggression. As I head to the men’s room to wash off my Givenchy grime, a child jumps from a trench and squeals, “Coucou, je vous attaque!” (“Look out, you’re under attack!”) I cringe, much to his enjoyment.<
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  Underneath the battlefield, a Canadian college student leads visitors through one of the tunnels that formed the subterranean city the attackers inhabited before their assault. There are rail lines, dormitories, casualty clearing stations — and everywhere a dank odor of damp rock and old fear, mixed in with a trace of moldering cloth uniforms. I will later recognize this as the lingering smell of the Great War. The throat catches and the chest constricts. This subtle scent in the troglodyte part of the ridge seems truer to the memory of the Front than the fresh air of the battlefield park. Once back outside in no-man’s-land, I pick up a Canadian government handout about Vimy at the information kiosk. My eyes fall on a phrase describing the Great War as “very costly in terms of lives and wounds.”

  When I reach the pines planted on the park’s perimeter, I turn to look at the trenches and monument one last time. Vimy surprises me. It departs from the discretion usually associated with Canada. The nationalism displeases but is inevitable given the imaginative importance of this spot for earlier generations. As a theater of memory, however, the setting is peerless. I don’t leave proud to be a Canadian; I leave even more wary of anyone in a uniform.

  THE LAND SOUTH of Vimy, although reclaimed from the war, exhibits its scars through its abundance of cemeteries. Outside the village of Neuville St. Vaast, the jumping-off point for many of the Canadian troops in 1917, there is a hamlet called La Targette. The name is fitting. Two cemeteries sit side by side: French, from the offensive of 1915, and British, from that of 1917. Across the road is an inn with a mural on its outer wall evoking Napoleonic exploits. Whereas the British graveyard is gardenlike and domestic, the French resembles a parade ground of crosses and serial numbers. Despite these national differences, the evocation of waste is the same.