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by Stephen O'Shea


  Nineteen-sixteen thundered on. As if obeying some dadaist urge, German commanders eventually wandered into the same bog of irrationality. Falkenhayn’s original strategy of attrition was abandoned. The armies of the Kaiser were ordered to take Verdun. The result: 400,000 Germans dead for a militarily insignificant goal, and Verdun remained in French hands.

  As France and Germany sank deeper into this pit of pointless self-destruction during the spring of 1916, the other major player of the Western Front, Great Britain, remained unscathed. This would change with a vengeance. Joffre, his armies bleeding for a metaphor, called on Haig to launch the great joint Allied offensive originally planned for early in the year. The Somme, a difficult terrain over which to attack, was selected because it was the region where the British lines hooked up with the French. Even if, given the mess at Verdun, there wasn’t going to be a large French contingent involved, the need for a show of Allied unity overrode any strategic considerations. Appearances, the curse of 1916 and of an Old World gone senile, had to be maintained.

  The initial attack took place on July 1, at 7:30 A.M. Subsequent waves of soldiers were ordered over the top throughout the morning. It was the biggest fiasco in British military history. No amount of apologetic casuistry can ever absolve its authors, Generals Henry Rawlinson and the ever-reliable Douglas Haig. Within a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, 40,000 British soldiers had been wounded and 21,000 killed, many of them within sight of their own trenches. No fighting force on the Western Front would ever lose so many so quickly, and for so little. Eighty years of ever-increasing detachment now separates us from that astounding morning, yet it still beggars understanding that the murderous boobs in charge of the British army were allowed to go unpunished. The war crime of Passchendaele still remained fifteen months in the future, yet the result of Rawlinson’s and Haig’s willful ignorance of trench warfare, even after the disaster at Loos, was plain to see. By noon, all along the narrow swath of no-man’s-land from Gommecourt and Hébuterne to the River Somme, 60,000 young men lay wounded, dying, or dead, a carpet of bloodied khaki that writhed and moaned in the sullen sunlight. Optimism began to drain from a culture that had conquered a world.

  In many ways, the Somme was like the Kindermord at Langemarck two years earlier. There, the men mowed down by machine guns had been student volunteers; here, they were eager recruits who had signed up with their friends at the behest of Lord Kitchener and his famous mustachioed face on the recruitment poster reading, “Your Country Needs YOU.” Much of the huge British army at the Somme were Pals Battalions, civilians from a village, a workplace, a town who joined the army en masse on the condition that they could go to war together. For John Keegan, whose Face of Battle remains the most stimulating book of military history available to the nonspecialist, the nationwide enthusiasm for the Pals movement showed “the inarticulate elitism of an imperial power’s working class.”

  The Pals of the Somme trained, often without so much as a rifle between them, throughout 1915 and the beginning of 1916. They were marched and drilled incessantly. Such parade-ground training would come in handy for their suicidal foray into no-man’s-land; orders called for them to march in regular formations, at a slow and orderly pace, toward the German trenches. The professionals of the British army judged its citizen soldiers too dim-witted to do anything else.

  The planners of the fiasco assumed that the artillery barrage prior to the attack would obliterate all opponents. The Germans survived because they had dug into the welcoming chalk of the Somme a network of subterranean shelters—in some places more than forty feet deep—and thus had sat out the seven days of deafening detonation. There was, in fact, less artillery per meter of front attacked than at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle a year earlier. This was known at headquarters, but General Rawlinson quashed all suggestions that the effects of his artillery campaign should be gauged. No one on his staff checked to see if it had, indeed, worked. Instead, Rawlinson sent tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers walking into no-man’s-land. The terrible midday scene of July i was the outcome.

  It might be thought that the wastefulness ended there, but that would be underestimating the wretched excess of 1916. Death rattles are violent, and the First World War’s destruction of nineteenth-century verities would require much more than just the few bad months that lay in between the French decision of late February and the British debacle of early July. There was still the summer and autumn. It was as if tight-laced, tight-lipped imperial Europe had become a roaring lush seeking oblivion. French and German commands continued the bloodletting at Verdun, while British military leaders had the insane temerity to proclaim that progress had been made on the Somme. The “push” would therefore continue, as if the towering losses of that first day constituted a proof of victory. The magnitude of the screwup led the British brass to persevere in the hope that future achievement might erase present calamity.

  Nothing of the sort occurred, of course. Generals pushed their men forward in assaults that rivaled each other as exercises in meaninglessness. “A battle fought from July to November 1916,” historian Denis Winter succinctly notes in defining the Somme, “saw the British and German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties between them in an area just seven miles square.” It took months for the British to reach objectives originally intended to be captured on the first day. Dominion troops—South Africans at Longueval, Canadians at Courcelette, Australians at Pozièes—got sucked into the maelstrom, ordered to attack or hold flattened villages that had no other military merit than that of occupying a spot on Haig’s map. According to Australian historian Peter Charlton, the senseless attacks ordered of the Aussies in the summer of 1916 brought to fruition the sentiment that had germinated at Gallipoli. Charlton, quoted in Richard Holmes’s Fatal Avenue, writes: “If Australians wish to trace their modern suspicion and resentment of the British to a date and a place, then July-August 1916 and the ruined village of Pozieres are useful points of departure. Australia was never the same again.”

  By the last murderous push at the end of November, the same might be said of the entire army. Ever the weather vane of future sentiment, the gifted generation of British soldier poets now celebrated squalor and decried futile suffering. No one emulated the noble sentiments of Rupert Brooke any longer. The acid acuity of Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfrid Owen became the Zeitgeist—and not just among the British. The French and the Germans, whose vicious struggle at Verdun ended in the late autumn, were just as shell-shocked and embittered. By November 1916, enthusiasm had vanished, idealism had crumbled, and mistrust prevailed. Rosenberg, a brilliant Londoner who would die in battle during the spring of 1918, captured the mood of nihilistic resignation in an arresting poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches.” Gone are appeals to patriotism or high-flown ideals. Instead, the soldier talks to a rat:

  The darkness crumbles away—

  It is the same old druid Time as ever.

  Only a live thing leaps my hand—

  A queer sardonic rat—

  As I pull the parapet’s poppy

  To stick behind my ear.

  Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

  Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

  Now you have touched this English hand

  You will do the same to a German —

  Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

  To cross the sleeping green between.

  It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

  Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes

  Less chanced than you for life,

  Bonds to the whims of murder,

  Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

  The torn fields of France.

  What do you see in our eyes

  At the shrieking iron and flame

  Hurled through still heavens?

  What quaver—what heart aghast?

  Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

  Drop, and ar
e ever dropping;

  But mine in my ear is safe,

  Just a little white with the dust.

  2. Beaumont Hamel to Thiepval to Guillemont

  The Somme. The wind in my hair, the sun in my face, the silent fields. Hackneyed, but true. My bicycle, rented for the day from a suspicious local merchant through the intercession of Patrick and Marie-Claude, wings me north of Albert, downhill toward the River Ancre. I plan on making a great clockwise loop of the battlefield, a Tour de Somme. Throughout the furious fights of 1916, the British lines slowly bulged forward, by increments of about seventy-five yards a day, so that the swath of destruction broadened like a stain over the rolling Picard countryside. The lunar scene created by war eventually reverted to a mix of farmland and open-air exhibition of the monument maker’s art.

  The surroundings are varied. The Ancre flows south to meet the River Somme near Albert, the two meandering waterways having cut marshy valleys in the chalky plateaus and escarpments to the east of town. On the heights above these converging river depressions, little peekaboo pleats in the land form finger valleys, charming now, deadly then. In between occasional stands of trees, large fields of wheat alternate with sugar beet, forming what resembles a motley flag that is just settling unevenly on the ground. The biggest “crease” in this flag is a narrow crest of land, reminiscent of the ridge at Ypres, that runs southeast for a few miles from the village of Pozieres to just beyond the hamlet of Guillemont. This long lozenge of high ground was the center of the battlefield, which I hope to reach before saddle sores or spells of callow inattentiveness make me turn my bike back toward Albert.

  In the morning, I coast down toward the northern reaches of the 1916 Front, where the disaster of July 1 was unredeemed by any gain in ground, however minuscule. The Ancre, a lethargic little river hemmed in by reedy flats and a couple of characterless campgrounds backing out onto a railroad track, does not look the part of world-historical awfulness. A young boy and girl float by in an inflated inner tube, the picture of pacific childhood. At Hamel, a mile or so farther on, things begin to look more congruously squalid. The village, which sat on the British front line, consists of two filthy streets permeated with the essence of pig. The stench is remarkable.

  I pedal harder to escape it, past the dual rows of mud-spattered redbrick houses and uphill toward the fields of no-man’s-land, a few hundred yards away. Near the crest of the ridge a military bus, its gunmetal green grill smiling maliciously, appears suddenly at a blind turn and barrels down on me. A horn blares; I skedaddle sideways into the ditch and wipe out. A close call. I wrench myself around to yell out a curse but see instead a flapping banner hung on the rear window of the bus. In red letters is the slogan Versöhnung über den Gräbern—Arbeit fur den Frieden (Reconciliation over the Tombs—Work for Peace). This juggernaut’s passengers, I realize, are students who spend their summer vacation sprucing up the German graveyards of the Western Front. I wonder how many of the living they take out with their big fat bus on the tiny country lanes of France.

  They have just come from a visit to one of the most remarkable battlefield sites on the entire Western Front: the Newfoundland Memorial Park. A rectangular parcel of land located between the villages of Hamel, Beaumont, and Auchonvillers (or “Ocean Villas,” as it was wittily called by the British), the park has been left in its wartime state. Trenches snake across the now grassy land, and shell craters pockmark the ground. The story of the Newfoundland battalion that met its doom here on July 1, 1916, is movingly told in David Macfarlane’s The Danger Tree, a masterly account of one family’s experience of the First World War. Blindly ordered to try again where the initial attack had utterly failed, the 752 men of the battalion climbed out of a support trench—the communication trenches leading forward were too clogged with the dead and the wounded—and walked three hundred yards above ground toward their front line. They were alone up there—no artillery shells flew overhead to cover them, and no other units on either side of their position joined in their attack. There was no protection whatsoever. Many of the attackers never even made it to no-man’s-land. Some of the German machine gunners, complacently watching the exposed advance coming closer, held their deadly fire until the Newfoundlanders bunched up to file through the gaps in their own barbed wire. Then the bullets flew fast and thick. The few who managed to get free slogged on the last three hundred yards toward the German trenches. According to one eyewitness cited by Macfarlane, “Instinctively, they tucked their chins into an advanced shoulder, as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard in some little outport in far-off Newfoundland.” Some 91 percent of the men — 684 of 752—were wounded or killed. It was a shocking waste, and a devastating heartbreak for a small island community. When Newfoundland became a part of Canada in 1949, the crudest irony of all ensured that the islanders’ new national holiday—July 1 is also Canada Day—coincided with the anniversary of their bleakest collective memory.

  Today a statue of a caribou overlooks the scene. On the perimeter, trees and bushes native to Newfoundland have been planted. The place is not only a stranger in time but also a foreigner in space. Nothing here looks like the surrounding countryside. The visitor to this park feels like some lunatic suburban surveyor crossing a particularly misbehaved lawn, but eventually the fading scars in the ground work their quiet effect. For me, a pilgrim of the invisible, the park offers a tantalizing moment of tangibility. This is the Western Front unimagined, in its dotage, seventy or eighty years on. On either side of this plot of land, the invisible Front takes over again, a pulverized band of ditches and craters hidden under farmers’ fields and village streets, stretching from the sea to the mountains. Here, the Front has come out into the bright light of day.

  Last week it was Vimy, now it’s Beaumont Hamel. It is odd that Canada specializes in caretaking these battlefields of the First World War, that a country with so much space should make a point of preserving a few forlorn acres in France. For other countries, memorials in stone suffice. Canada tries to keep its imprint in the earth itself, as if that were somehow a more durable way to glorify its dead. Yet the passage of time softens even the worst scores in the land. Deep craters grow more dimplelike, and once jagged, saw-toothed trenches become shallow, indistinct depressions. The protean earth pushes up, a great leveler in the literal sense, and the furrowed record of sorrow becomes an even plane again. The canvas is blank, the slate is clean. In the Newfoundland park, this slow leveling is well under way, the progress of the flattening inspiring an irresistible parallel to the workings of memory. The land of the Front, if left alone by farmers and custodians and others of their ilk, will eventually forget, just as surely as we who are now alive have—and will be, in our turn — forgotten.

  Beyond the park I walk across a farmer’s field to look at a mine crater. The explosives underneath a German position known as the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt were blown at 7:20 on the morning of July 1, one of the eleven mines that went up a few minutes before the 66,000 attackers in the first wave scrambled up their ladders and out of the trenches. I’m here out of televisual duty—of all the things that I have read or heard about the Great War, this explosion is the only one I’ve actually seen take place. It was on TV, therefore it exists. A motion picture camera caught the mine as it went up, and the image, a great shower of loose earth flying upward in the grainy light of early cinema, has become the signature documentary footage of the Somme, if not the entire war. Middle-aged men addicted to war specials on cable TV have probably seen the Hawthorn cloud of debris so often as to have absorbed it as a childhood memory.

  As is usually the case with life, reality is a letdown. The once dramatic crater looks like an overgrown rookery. Shrubs and brushwood hide the lip of the pit, and careful plowing all around has made the surroundings as innocuous-looking as any farm field in France. In the nearby hollow leading to the village of Serre, an enormous graveyard attests to how far from innocuous this countryside is. The indispensable Martin Midd
lebrook, in his First Day on the Somme, cites at length one Karl Blenk, a German infantryman who was manning the trenches in front of the village at 7:30 that morning:

  When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as though they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. I could see them everywhere; there were hundreds. The officers were in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing, we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run, they would have overwhelmed us.

  The hundreds who fell were buried in the Serre Road Cemetery Number 2, which would later become improbably useful for something other than the expression of grief. During the Second World War, the cemetery’s toolshed was used as a hiding place for Allied flyers who had been shot down over France and were being smuggled back to safety by the Resistance. Thirty-two airmen stopped for shelter this way, concealed by their deceased predecessors. The cemetery was, in effect, recycled and made into an underground railway station.

  On my way back to the Newfoundland park, I stoop down to pluck an old bullet from between two chalk pebbles. I look carefully around me —pieces of rusted barbed wire lie innocently on the ground two furrows away. The field, freshly plowed, is yielding its usual harvest of scrap metal from the war. From the air it must exhibit the chalk scar of my imagined no-man’s-land. A few hundred yards away from where I stand the great British humorist Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote his misanthropic little gems under the pen name of Saki, once walked and talked in the trenches that cut through this field. In the cold mists of the morning of November 14, 1916, as he and his men rested in a shell hole, Saki was mortally wounded by a sniper. Seconds before that moment, his last, irritated utterance had been “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

 

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