Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  I pocket the bullet and head back to my bike.

  THE OTHER BANK of the Ancre slopes up toward the heart of the Somme battlefield. In a large wood just above the river, I poke around tentatively to get a look at the crazy upheaval of heavily shelled land. There is really nothing more evocative of the war than this frozen violence. All of the woods in this region have the same obscene, unnatural floors—no one thought it useful, or wise, to plow under the traces of the fighting when, immediately after the war, these copses were just random patches of blackened stumps. Here at Thiepval Wood, the remnant of the British front-line trench can still be clearly traced, bracken-covered and humpbacked, swimming its way through the trees like some slow-moving sea monster.

  This countryside cannot let the past escape. Above the lane leading to the village of Thiepval looms the massive British memorial to the Somme. Aside from the fanciful accounts produced by historians paid to get the British military command off the hook, this structure is the official response to the catastrophe. It is an eye-opener. The closer you get to the oft-glimpsed edifice, the more repulsive it becomes in its Lego-like gigantism. One hundred and forty-one feet tall, the multiarched redbrick structure, designed by Edwin Lutyens and inaugurated in 1934, must have been intended as an eyesore, a Cyclopean blight on an already blighted landscape. If not, that is definitely the purpose it serves now—and the honesty is refreshing. From most points on the battlefield, its profile slouches on the horizon, or rears up above the treetops, or spoils a perspective. The mammoth block of stone and brick is an in-your-face reminder that something hideous occurred in the vicinity. There is no nationalism here, as at Vimy, or any of the faintly ridiculous stone lions found padding around other British monuments. Just ungainly mass and unforgiving volume.

  As I approach the Thiepval arch over a putting-green lawn, it occurs to me that the thing looks like a huge horseshoe magnet, held forever to the earth by the attraction of a million skeletons. (It is now estimated that there were 1,300,000 Allied and German casualties on the Somme in 1916.) In its central arch and numerous bays, there is the familiar sight of names upon names upon names, the ledgers of vertigo drawn up by a shamefaced establishment. Here, the stone letters spell out the names of the doomed soldiers of the British and South African armies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, and India built their own monuments to the missing) who died on the Somme in the years 1915-17 and whose bodies were never recovered or identified. There are 73,412 of them. The memorial’s inscription reads, “The Missing of the Somme”; it could just as well say the sum of the missing. The magnitude of the number is too large to comprehend, just as at the Menin Gate. Like there too, the trick of absolution through accountancy is attempted—only here it works. The spectator, alone and vulnerable on the Thiepval ridge, feels oppressed by the weight of the engraved stone, as if it got there through some insensate natural force, ordained by an unkind universe rather than by the blunders of the powerful.

  The first time I saw this monument, on my winter visit to the Somme, I thought these names were like cuneiform, the indecipherable scratchings of a dimly remembered civilization. Today is different. Both the detachment I felt at the fetish-house interior of Ypres’s St. George’s Memorial Church and the anti-imperial scorn that came over me in Ploegsteert Wood have vanished. They have been replaced by an uneasy urge to connect. I try summoning up my grandfathers, Daniel and Bartholomew, who are, in a sense, just names to me. They were the contemporaries of these names at Thiepval; perhaps they knew or soldiered alongside some of them. As was the case in front of the Madonna of Albert, the speculation leads nowhere, to a failed seance at the foot of a monument. My grandfathers are now among the missing. I return instead to Private Cadogan, my man in Flanders, a fleeting, occasional presence beside me during this past month walking down the Front. Surely he can help me understand this place. Or Musketier Leopold Aronsohn, the man from La Targette. But they too remain maddeningly out of reach. Weary and defeated, I walk out of the grounds of the memorial and set off to the crossroads outside the village.

  The defeat is not total. I coast around a BMW with British plates parked by the corner and almost run into a couple snapping off a roll of pictures. In front of them is a sign that reads Reconstruction d’un Boyau (Trench Replica). Inside the trench their two sons play an irreverent game they call over-the-top, which, as far as I can gather, consists of pelting each other with dried sheep droppings. There don’t appear to be any rules.

  The woman turns toward me with an ivory grin of complicity, then holds out the camera. Her husband, recognizing a fellow Somme buff, points out the essential elements of the replica: parapet, firestep, transverse cuts, communication trench, dugout, duckboards, sandbags, and sap. On the corrugated metal sheet protecting the sap someone has chalked helpfully, for the benefit of cross-Channel visitors, WAR WAR WAR.

  Inside their car sits a disgusted daughter, bored out of her wits, reading a comic book. It takes some coaxing but she’s eventually persuaded out into the sunlight to pose for the family portrait. The shutter catches the five of them beaming up from the trench. I move the camera to the left. A bicycle, one wheel still slowly turning over the edge of the parapet, comes into view. With a start, I realize that this time the bicycle in no-man’s-land is mine. This family and I are the levelers now, giving new meanings to old landscapes. We’re like the Belgians at Bellewaerde, steamrolling an earlier generation into oblivion. The bike and the smiles are just gentler ways of doing it.

  “ICI ON PISSE dehors!”

  The waitress in the cafe near Longueval, a village on the Pozieres ridge, has pointed me to the great outdoor toilet that is Picardy. “There’s lots of room out there,” she adds, to the delight of two farmhands standing at the counter. They echo her words to my back as I sheepishly head outside.

  I look at an abandoned factory standing out in a field in the middle distance, its windows shattered, its walls buckling, at last a monumental structure that has nothing to do with the war. There are more than 250 military cemeteries and dozens of private memorials on the Somme, the great majority of them lovingly maintained. The villages of the living are a different story. The dark redbrick and black-slate houses have now settled into a permanent ugly slumber. The hamlets I’ve passed through since Thiepval—Pozieres, Martinpuich, Bazentin, Courcelette—have been tightly shuttered, perhaps to block out the old tales told by their surroundings.

  Here at Longueval, to take an example, two woods on either side of the town hold the usual dreadful secrets. The one on the highest ground, logically called High Wood, was the scene of a successful nighttime attack by the British on July 14, 1916, followed the next day by a cavalry charge that was supposed to break out into the open country behind the German lines. This, the essence of Haig’s tactics, was suicide. One moment, there were lances glinting in the sunshine and magnificent caparisoned animals galloping across open country. The next, the shallow cough of the machine gun sent the thundering anachronism crashing to the earth.

  The wood on the other side of town is Delville Wood, which is the property of the Republic of South Africa. From July 15 to July 20, 1916, troops from South Africa fought for every yard of ground in Delville. All but one tree, it is said, were destroyed by the blizzard of bullets—most of them were sawed off just above ground level by the streams of red-hot metal. Of the 3,150 South Africans to have gone into Delville, only 778 could reply “present” to roll call five days later.

  In the village of Guillemont, I brake to look at the Celtic cross erected in front of the church. A couple of British motorcylists speed past me and take the turning back to Albert, as if showing me what to do. I decide to follow, suddenly impatient with monuments and memorials and ready, rather crassly, for a good dinner. The Guillemont road rises as it leaves town, passing yet another cemetery on its way to high ground crowned by a wood. Despite my newfound hurry, I stop and get off the bike to take in a beautiful view. I scribble a hurried description in my journal: “Le
t’s make a movie: to the immediate right [of me], the black pointed spires of Guillemont and Longueval piercing the level of the trees. Far to the upper right, along a rolling quilt of green and yellow, the town of Bazentin, and further still, on the limit of the horizon, the hazy behemoth at Thiepval. In front, a road skirting a dark green wood pouring down the slope toward a little cemetery. To the left, fields upon fields of wheat, interrupted only by a small spur on the Montauban-Carnoy road.” I set off again, determined to return the bike to Albert on time. On passing the wood, I glimpse a memorial to a rifle brigade, inscribed with the strange words “The Greatest Thing in the World.” Later I will see a picture of the view I have just described — mud everywhere, not even the hint of any feature on the land. The only distinguishing characteristics are injured and dying men in a shell hole.

  The road leads across the ridge to a rose-covered house in Montauban, someone’s solitary attempt at beautifying the village. A further couple of miles to Carnoy, past the stretch of no-man’s-land where a certain Captain Nevill handed out four soccer balls to his platoons and had them dribble their way toward the German trenches at zero hour on July 1. One platoon wrote on its ball:

  The Great European Cup

  The Final

  East Surreys v. Bavarians

  KickOff at Zero

  Elsewhere on the Somme, a public schools’ Pals battalion kicked a rugby ball ahead of its leading wave of attackers.

  I turn at Carnoy to breeze past the villages of Mametz and Fricourt. The rising land beside the sunken road still looks as if some furious giant had ripped it apart. Soon the odd Madonna is ahead of me, silhouetted against a reddening sky.

  3. Vaux to Chaulnes

  Yesterday’s mobility has spoiled me. Out of Albert after an early breakfast, I hope to thumb a ride to Maricourt, where the Front fords the River Somme and heads straight southward across the plain of the Santerre. But to hitch in Picardy, I conclude, is to intrude on the animal privacy of drivers in their cars. Not only do they not want to pick up a hitchhiker, they do not want him to be there at all, littering their field of vision and souring their sweet solitude. The icy glares turn the summer morning cold; the animosity is almost palpable. I check to see if I’ve inadvertently been brandishing a bloodstained ax or lewdly fondling a statue of Joan of Arc—how else could I have possibly offended all of these people?

  One reason must be war. Not just the Great War, but every war. This fertile swath of France has known the tramp of armies since its forests were first cleared by the farmers of Gaul. The morning’s route, for example, was not only the trace of the trenches — it also carried Henry IVs men to nearby Agincourt in 1415, and who knows how many other wild-eyed armies on their way to binges of the id. In this, Picardy is eminently European, a province awash in past violence and insult. Such a legacy must seep down into some murky collective well, from which people instinctively draw when confronted with the unfamiliar. Here, at the Somme, that well must be bottomless.

  The other reason for the glowering faces, I know from long residence in France, is the automobile. An occasional outlet for aggression in all cultures, the car turns many French people nearly autistic in their relation to society. Anyone who has traveled French expressways and secondary roads knows this generalization to be true—it is never Dr. Jekyll at the wheel of that Peugeot, but always Mr. Hyde. The central, soul-bending pretense at the core of cultivated French behavior—feigning indifference to strangers whom you’ve been trained to despise—can be safely jettisoned once within the insulated confines of the car, and all of that stifled malevolence can at last be expended. Thus, the respectable matron on foot may become the classic snarling harpy in a car; the well-mannered, obsequious notary, a nose-picking speed demon delighted with his last road kill; and the mildly hostile shopkeeper, an Attila of the autoroute. If in America the car has turned into a prosthetic device in the service of mobility, in France it remains a form of therapy for the strain of moral hypocrisy. Putting a hitchhiker in front of most French drivers is like waving a red flag before an already dyspeptic bull. The wonder is that they don’t swerve to hit him.

  It should be apparent by now that I do not get a ride.

  THE WALK DOWN to the river from the village of Vaux gives a commanding view over the Somme to the east. Land and water bleach together into one wan pastel under a milky August sky. The Somme here carves not so much a valley as a wide ravine, guarded above and below by spinneys of sentinel poplars. The road descends gradually through the trees to the marshes and pools formed by the stream’s meanders. Near the grassy hamlet of Eclusier, at the bottom, scores of fishermen sit in small, fenced-off plots, not letting anyone or anything venture onto their sacred patch of shady riverbank. A few have managed to squeeze undersized camping trailers in between the fenceposts. They try to land their catch unseen, their fishing rods sticking out of the side doors of their trailers. The scene looks slightly less convivial than the cemeteries I have been visiting.

  A lunch of fresh eel, no doubt caught by one of these introverted sportsmen, helps to dispel any lingering lack of pedestrian enthusiasm. I powder my feet and start up a steep incline, leaving the riverbank of compartmentalized fishermen behind me. At the top of the rise, an enclosed pasture fans out from the edge of a bluff. In a far corner, as if afraid of the commanding view, a couple of old draft horses huddle close together, their enormous brown and white backsides the only landmark I can see on what appears to be a blank, flat plain. This is the plateau of Santerre, from the Latin sana terra, or good land. It is so boring as to be almost painful to behold. The sun has gone in, turning everything a uniform gray. Harvested crops stretch out in unbroken monotony to the village of Dompierre-Becquincourt. I sing “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” to kill the time and continue to put one foot in front of the other, a speck in motion from one map coordinate to the next, a lone pedestrian in this wilderness of mechanized agriculture. The miles pass, slowly.

  At Dompierre my arrival creates a stir. I suspect that anything would, given the vapor of ennui in the air. As if on cue, a buxom young woman comes out from behind a mournful gray fence to stroll aimlessly about the village square. She casts three backward glances as she walks, then rounds a corner. Gone. A group of boys on bicycles swarms about me at a respectful distance, hoping that somehow I’ll amuse them. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll ask for directions, or fall over, or explode. Even a few of the local pre-apéritif crowd waver in the doorway of the square’s spare, echo-chamber café. The black roofs and dark red bricks, the blazon of Picard towns, do not look welcoming, so I set out across the shorn fields in the direction of Fay and Estrees, the next settlements in no-man’s-land. A hint of relief to the right—a long and narrow wood standing over what was the French front line in 1916—makes this stretch of the walk more tolerable than the last.

  As I cross the main highway, which leads straight as an arrow from Amiens to St. Quentin, a teeming cloud of black birds rises from the wood and heads east. I am surprised when I realize that they are ravens. If they continue their route for a few miles, past the beet sugar mill, the tacky roadside hotel, and the expressway cloverleaf, they will reach Belloy-en-Santerre, a “disputed barricade” in the Battle of the Somme. The phrase belongs to the first verse of a once-admired poem:

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  At some disputed barricade,

  When Spring comes back with rustling shade

  And apple-blossoms fill the air —

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

  Its author, Alan Seeger, an American in the French Foreign Legion, attacked across the fields between Estrees and Belloy on the last day of his life. By dying in battle, he posthumously captured the imagination of his countrymen as they weighed their decision to go to war. A sometime poet and full-time bohemian on graduating from Harvard in 1910, the handsome Seeger had sought a life of dash and valor that his circle of literary friends in New York’s Gree
nwich Village could not provide. Aimless in Europe when the shots rang out in Sarajevo, Seeger marched with the first band of American volunteers through the streets of Paris in 1914. Others emulated him, the most famous being the young American pilots who formed the Lafayette Squadron of the French air force. By 1916, it was still possible for an American to be idealistic about the war, given his country’s clean hands and unbloodied hearths. Seeger’s rhymes roused many to clamor for an end to what they viewed as national cowardice in a time of world crisis. Taste in poetry would change once American casualty lists grew.

  Seeger marked a messianistic, ail-American moment—he was still writing about apple blossoms and destiny while the battle-worn Rosenberg and his peers were composing apostrophes to rats. When Seeger raced to his death across the Santerre, he came not only as the older, rasher brother of the literary Lost Generation but also as the harbinger of the new American century. It was not his fault that his successors might be more self-interested or levelheaded; Seeger set an idealistic, macho standard that would come to grief a few generations later in Southeast Asia. Unlike the soon-to-be-disabused patriots who volunteered for Vietnam, he was not “born on the Fourth of July.” Alan Seeger died on the Fourth of July. It was in 1916, and he must have been happy.

  I HAVE WALKED too far today, and see no end in sight. The land south of Estrees has been a succession of dusty villages and barking dogs. At the German and French cemeteries that punctuate this limitless battlefield, the friable soil of the flatland has whipped up and begun to eddy around the graves. Not that I care—it is nearly seven o’clock, and my feet ache. Animal discomfort can easily overwhelm the duties of the observant traveler.