Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  CHAPTER

  4

  Picardy

  I. Albert

  THE SOMME. THE mere mention of that river has sent generations of writers to their desks, eager to churn out something elegiac or haunting, a descriptive passage to be read in a whisper on the BBC. It’s a convention of sorts—the rain in your eyes, the wind in your face, the empty, now silent, forever silent, fields. For the British, there is no more ironic landscape on the European continent. Put in the “S” word and everything becomes ominous, a reference to massacre, to horror and pain. The sun set over the Somme. The train headed east, toward the Somme. Near the Somme flowers bloomed. The Somme awaited them, tranquil and inevitable. However bland these sentences, they all possess, as some like to say, a subtext. They bespeak death, waste, doom, or folly. Somme suggests the fey, in the Scottish sense of one fated to perish soon. To get the same effect, American English might replace Somme with Little Bighorn, or perhaps My Lai, but these equivalents do not measure up to the psychic caesura implied in the word Somme. Much more so than Passchendaele, the lone syllable of the Somme sounds a death knell. For an era, a way of life, a certain optimism, an empire, a world. Somme is short form for Armageddon.

  It is fitting that the Battle of the Somme occurred near a town called Albert. Although the town, initially known as Ancre, was renamed for its seventeenth-century owner, Charles d’Albert, the Duke of Luynes, Albert also happens to be the name of Queen Victoria’s German consort. Prince Albert—in full, Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—was the man whose death at age forty-two, in 1861, made the black trim of perpetual mourning a badge of social virtue in the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century Britain. Although originally a steady, old-fashioned, bandstand-in-the-park kind of name, Albert eventually came to mean something else. From the Albert Memorial to Albert on the Somme, from the German person to the French place, from mourning to massacre, Albert came to mean British death.

  In his Missing of the Somme, a meditation on British remembrance, author Geoff Dyer states that “every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning.” There has always been, Dyer points out, a cult of posterity surrounding the First World War, even as it was taking place. Perhaps that is true only of Britain — in my experience, the urge to eulogize the calamity of the Great War had sputtered into nothingness long before I reached maturity. Nostalgia for empire had also vanished. Even while encouraging second-graders in Calgary to go marching to Pretoria, our music teacher neglected to remind us that we were growing up in the province of Alberta, & name that fairly drips with black crepe and stale crumpets. The teacher had overlooked the secret meaning of her surroundings; we, her eager charges, would never care to know of its existence. If we now cast about for benchmarks, for before-and-after moments, for the markers of our mental landscape at midlife, we may talk about Hiroshima, 1945, or Dallas, 1963, or the moon, 1969, or O J. on the freeway, 1994. But the Somme?

  THE DINING ROOM of my hotel in Albert proves that it is possible to eat badly in France. Perhaps this is because of the town’s British connection. On my plate a lonely fillet has swum bravely through the doughy chop of a white sauce, only to end up marooned on a shoal of cold rice. I pout for a moment, then tear at a piece of bread with my teeth, knowing that the theatrics of self-pity usually make me feel better. I chew, mollified, and become aware that the room is humming. Everywhere there is the low murmur of grazing Brits.

  Eavesdropping reveals that there is serious war buffery abroad in Albert tonight. In the far corner, a tour group of elderly people engages in a respectful give-and-take with a man whom I guess to be Martin Middlebrook, the former Lincolnshire chicken farmer who, after first visiting the area on a whim in the late 1960s, became the consummate expert on the battlefields around Albert. His historical work, The First Day on the Somme, and his guidebook, The Somme Battlefields (compiled with his wife, Mary), are staggering in their detail and painstaking research. The group gets up and leaves the room as one.

  Adjacent to my table sit a man and a woman in their late twenties who also seem to be advanced bellicists. I can hear their subdued argument.

  “No, dear,” the man says, “the Minenwerfer was called the Jack Johnson/’

  “Not the whizz-bang, then?”

  “That was something else. More like our trench mortar.”

  “A coal box?”

  That’ s it.

  “Are you sure?”

  “‘Course I am!”

  I learn that these artillery duelists are on their honeymoon. He’s a Great War nut, and she, as she confides over rice pudding, was “cracked” enough to marry him.

  “You’ll like Verdun,” he tells me, describing how taken they had been with the piles of bones on view at the mass grave at Douaumont. “Very impressive. A hundred and thirty thousand skulls.” She nods and smiles encouragement at me.

  The lull doesn’t last long. Another squabble over firepower flares up as soon as the new bride ventures an opinion about the caliber of the field guns they saw in a fort near Reims.

  “But they were seventy-five millimeter! They had to be!” he says, exasperated. “The most famous artillery pieces of the war!”

  “I don’t think that they were—”

  “They wouldn’t bloody well display German cannon, would they?!”

  I leave them, honeymooners happy to reenact the guns of August.

  ALBERT TONIGHT LOOKS much different from my first glimpse of it on a winter evening. Then, flushed and frozen from a December day spent in the fields, where I had discovered the white scar of the Western Front, my companion and I entered the silent town just as its streetlights flickered into life. It had been a peculiar day of somber exhilaration and private imagining. I realized that history existed in space as well as time, that it did not take place in the classroom or on the tube or in the stacks of a library but in places like these, on the chalky downlands and hedgeless fields between the Somme and Ancre Rivers.

  My companion, the Ohio Boomer with a love of maps, traced our route on a pizza that night: La Boisselle, Contalmaison, Fricourt, Mametz, then back to his fork, embedded in a cheesy fold at Albert. I listened and watched, amused by his irreverence yet dimly aware that these names once spelled oceanic grief for people now silenced by the passing of years. They also must have meant, paradoxically, life, in its most extreme and self-conscious manifestation. “France,” Vera Brittain wrote in Testament of Youth, “was the scene of titanic, illimitable death, and for this very reason it had become the heart of the fiercest living ever known to any generation.” Such a notion was hard to credit in this deserted town. Albert looked stolidly inert under a cobalt sky on that cold December night, its Addams Family town hall and railway station improbable reminders of its haunted hinterland. We felt no presences in the streets, no sign of that fierce living that Brittain spoke of—only the deep slumber of small-town France.

  Now I’m hoping that the town might disclose a few of its secrets. I’ve been waiting for this reunion ever since leaving the shores of the North Sea at Nieuport. The childlike petulance with which I viewed much of Flanders, my adolescent revulsion on the heights of Vimy—all seem to be a necessary apprenticeship for this encounter with the soul of the Western Front. Surely I will feel some kinship, after having spent weeks treading a metaphor, with the presences who once made history here.

  I slip out into the warm evening air and wander down the main street to Notre Dame de Brebieres, the redbrick pilgrim church that once displayed one of the Great War’s most celebrated travesties. Its tall steeple is crowned by a peculiar statue of Madonna and Child: Mary stands, holding the baby Jesus above her head, like a soccer player about to throw the ball in from the sidelines. An ideal target for bored German artillerymen, the statue, through successive bombardments in 1914 and 1915, gradually leaned farther and farther forward until it was perching precariously below the perpendicular. To put it another way: If upr
ight mother and upraised child began the war standing at twelve o’clock, they soon teetered over the void at four o’clock, ready at any moment to topple into the street far below. The two figures stayed that way for most of the war, defying gravity if not belief. It was only in the spring of 1918, when the Germans were occupying the ruins of the town, that a stray British shell brought down the Golden Virgin of Albert.

  The restored statue remains funny-looking. Mother, now glowing in the last rays of sunset, still seems ready to chuck her burnished babe into the air. Her posture is supposedly one of presentation, as the child is shown to the shepherds, but resembles more a moment of separation, of abandonment, a tearing asunder of generations. The latter makes me think of the grandfathers I never knew, Daniel O’Shea and Bartholomew Conlon, and how their generation must remain a stranger to mine. My grandfathers must have glimpsed this strange sight too. What did they make of it? The statue, perched high atop its steeple, was visible from the British and German trenches to the east of town, especially at sunset, when the dying rays of the day picked out the gold of the statue and etched a fiery silhouette against the horizon. Who knows what they thought, Daniel and Bartholomew, as they tromped through these streets like so many hundreds of thousands in the British army? Daniel, who spent the entire war in the trenches, suffered a shrapnel wound in the leg at the Somme that was to bother him for the rest of his life. Later he would lose his left eye to the war.

  Unlike Daniel, Bartholomew Conlon, my mother’s father, had been a draftee. Not many in Britain and Ireland would escape the war’s voracious demand for manpower. He had been working in Scotland when the conscription law was passed in 1916. Rebellion had also broken out in his beloved Dublin on Easter Monday of that same year—the day that Yeats’s “terrible beauty” was born — but Bartholomew, like so many thousands of his countrymen, soon found himself clad in a British uniform. The ambiguities of being Irish were perhaps never clearer than at that moment. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” ran the newly coined Republican byword, yet countless Irishmen endured the hard, murderous slog in the mud of the Somme and the Salient. Bartholomew was fortunate enough to survive the great German Picardy offensive of 1918. He was interned in a POW camp following the Battle of Saint Quentin.

  After the war, both young men returned home, Daniel to tailoring in Tralee, County Kerry, Bartholomew to drawing pints in a Dublin pub. The two were discreet to the point of pathological about what they had seen and heard in their years in France, and no amount of wishful thinking on my part can make it otherwise. The Kerryman died in 1940, the Dubliner in 1955, before I arrived on the scene, and long before I got it into my head to spend my spare time visiting the sites of their silenced youth. Here, in Albert, it has begun to dawn on me that the spottiness of memory and of transmitted experience can be put down not only to the willed timelessness of my generation but also to the deliberate forgetfulness of theirs. They did not want to talk, neither did we wish to listen. Emigration and the passing of a lifetime did the rest. In Michael Ignatieff’s phrase, we survivors can “mark the spot” of their vanished experience, and not much else.

  I walk away from Notre Dame des Brebieres, disappointed now with the weird Madonna on high. At least for the moment, I have stopped trying to wring affinities out of the unevocative streets of modern Albert. In the central square opposite the town hall, helping me to get my mind off my failure, a reassuringly loud small-town carnival is being held. The Albertins are out in force. At one booth a large and unhappy goose is being raffled off in aid of an agricultural charity; at another, a bullet-headed fellow sells sausage by what appears to be the kilometer. Ever the voyeur, I go to watch the local teens on the bumper cars and see them enact their concussive country foreplay: I like you, I give you whiplash, let’s go neck. Inevitably, “Papa Don’t Preach” blares from an unseen speaker.

  At the counter of a cafe-bar called Chez Ginette, I am welcomed into a circle of camaraderie presided over by Patrick and his leather-laced girlfriend, Marie-Claude. My out-of-town exoticism calls for an immediate round of watery beer, and my status as a plenipotentiary of the Anglo-Saxon world automatically qualifies me as an expert on music of the sixties and seventies. Patrick, a thirty-four-year-old roofer disdainful of the present, asks me in quick succession if I like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Three nods from me set off yet another explosion of hospitality, and two chasers of cognac are set up in front of us. “They don’t know what music is,” Patrick says conspiratorially, gesturing to a group of youngsters lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke near the back of the cafe. “All the good music is in the past.” My objections are overruled as Patrick plays Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner on an air guitar while wailing out the tune through twisted lips.

  About half an hour later, when the conversation has stalled somewhere between Procol Harum and The Who and Patrick has retreated to the men’s room, a girlfriend of Marie-Claude’s looks up at me and asks, “Why did you come to Albert?”

  “Nineteen-sixteen,” I reply, gamely.

  She looks at Marie-Claude in alarm.

  “The Great War,” I add.

  She turns back to me and says incredulously, “The war of ‘fourteen? The English, out there? The dead?!” Her hand sweeps toward the entrance of the bar.

  I nod, embarrassed. Marie-Claude steals a glance at her friend, impressed by her erudition. The friend is shaking her head in an eternal gesture of womanly condescension. I don’t even try to explain. I could have mentioned the little boy’s bike on the trenches and craters of La Boisselle, but I don’t. Not now.

  Patrick returns, humming the song “Venus.”

  NINETEEN-SIXTEEN, I should have told her, marked the turning point. Before that year, the intelligent and sensitive might have seen a reason for the war, might have had confidence in their country’s leadership, might have placed faith in the army hierarchy. Afterward, that was impossible. It was the year that finally polished off the certainties of the nineteenth century, that made hope laughable, that sent God reeling in the minds of the ordinary man and woman. Before that time, poets could write about the nobility of sacrifice, parsons about the divinity of the cause, and propagandists about the imminence of victory, with a fairly reasonable expectation that their readerships would believe them. After 1916, skepticism and cynicism emerged triumphant. Nineteen-sixteen was the year that Fitzgerald’s “great gust of high-explosive love” blew one last time across the continent of Europe. Thereafter, it was just the explosives.

  The year began in the usual Great War manner. Joffre’s general staff, seeing that no good had come of their costly offensives of 1915, decided to repeat their mistakes. The British, chastened by catastrophe at Gallipoli, agreed to follow Joffre’s lead and concentrate all their efforts on the Western Front. A Loos-like operation would be tried again, on a larger scale. Thus, the Allies planned to launch massed attacks on fortified German positions and suffer astronomical casualties in the hope of pushing the invaders back a few miles. A poor, pathetic, inept, murderous strategy, but it was all that they had.

  Falkenhayn, chief of the German war machine, produced a far more diabolical variant of Haig and Joffre’s dreary offensive credo. He wanted neither to advance nor to retreat—he simply wanted to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, thereby demoralizing his opponents and forcing them to come to terms at the negotiating table. To his credit, Falkenhayn planned on sparing the lives of his own soldiers, a revolutionary concept among the spendthrift generals who commanded the millions in the trenches. In order, as he blithely put it, “to bleed France white,” Falkenhayn chose to attack the point of the Western Front that he guessed the French would move heaven and earth to defend: the hills above Verdun. The story of 1916 thus shifts away from Picardy, east to Lorraine. As a symbol of French territorial integrity, the northeastern city of Verdun, the age-old divide between Latins and Germans, was peerless. Falkenhayn had no intention of taking Verdun; he just wanted the French to die in front o
f it. Attrition, a nice, inoffensive Latinate word derived from the idea of wearing down through rubbing, is the term used to cover this horrendous reality.

  On February 21, the German army took the initiative away from the Allies for 1916. After an unexpected stream of explosive metal had rained down on the exposed French trenches, the Germans raced across the snowy hills to finish off the stunned survivors in the front line. French conscripts fell back in confused retreat, outmanned and outgunned. Verdun was in danger. Would the French fight back to protect it?

  That question is not as stupid as it seems. The sad truth was that the town of Verdun and its fortifications served no appreciable military purpose in trench warfare—and the French generals knew this. The fate of Belgium’s forts in 1914, isolation and then encirclement, had shown French military planners that their forts to the north of Verdun were more of a death trap than a defense. But Falkenhayn gambled that the French would throw good sense to the winds and perish in droves in defense of a symbol.

  The assumption was correct. Pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night for the only time during the entire four and a half years of war, Joffre was ordered by Prime Minister Aristide Briand of France to hold Verdun, no matter what the cost. The French would fight for a trope. Almost 400,000 would die. The French decision to take back every sorry shell crater north of the city represents the most grotesque example of style winning out over substance in modern history. Not surprisingly, it has been held responsible for many of the ills that beset France in the decades that followed. The French collapse of 1940 and the subsequent disgraceful adherence to Petain’s brand of fascism have been rightly laid on Verdun’s doorstep. From there, it is but a small step to see Verdun at the root of an immature political culture that elevated another general to the status of godhead and still prefers fanciful pronouncement to factual achievement. Verdun was the original lie of France in the twentieth century, and the biggest lie of a war whose sheer volume of untruths ended up shaking the beliefs of all but the most benighted.