I must be trudging quite tragically, for the unbelievable occurs. A man on a moto-scooter pulls over on the roadway and hollers across the field at me. At first I take him to be a tetchy farmer, then I realize that he is offering me a lift. I can’t believe my luck as I move across the dry earth toward him — I have been spotted by the only person in the entire departement capable of such a generous gesture. He’s wearing sunglasses, a dirty brown suitcoat, a moth-eaten sweater, gray stretch slacks and red running shoes, and he hasn’t shaved in at least four days. There is a crazy intensity in his eyes. He’s obviously not all there. We make a good pair.
His moped is towing a little wagon open to the four winds, barely larger than a child’s toy. I believe the correct name for it is a dog cart. Gratefully, I squeeze my rear end down onto the cart’s platform and leave my tired legs hanging akimbo over the road. It is an enjoyable two-mile ride into central Chaulnes, a small market town in the heart of the farm country. Housewives heading home from the boulangerie frown in undisguised horror at the sight of us—the local eccentric putt-putting his way into town with an ungainly trophy found wandering the fields. Gallic good ole boys at cafe tables shout encouragement as we pass, small children burst out laughing. We arrive at the central esplanade beneath a statue of a stern Enlightenment grammarian.
My benefactor pulls me to my feet and firmly rejects my offer of a drink. “No! No! No!” he says in a gravelly voice. “When you’re on the road you don’t give anything! Understand?” I must not look convinced, so he continues. “If you’re given something, that’s okay, but you’re not to give anything. Understand? Understand?”
I nod. His face creases into a toothless smile and he pats my shoulder. “Look, I won’t wish you a good journey, so I’ll just say merde. Understand?”
It’s my turn to smile.
“Merde!”
With that, the Angel of Chaulnes fires up his moped and trundles off into the evening light.
4. The Noyon Salient
The Noyon Salient was a large bulge in the German lines, a blunted belly of destruction and menace that hung over Paris, some sixty miles to the south. The Front, as one walks down it from Flanders and Artois, turns left in this part of Picardy and heads east toward Champagne. Noyon, as befits a turning point, has the distinction of being a palindrome. Sex at Noyon taxes.
The word play is not mere whimsy—Noyon is also the birthplace of John Calvin, the man whose followers would make income a metaphysical come-on. And Calvin’s unexpected appearance in Noyon, in turn, coincides nicely with Ypres’s relation to Cornelius Jansen. Oddly, two great Christian reformers are associated with the two great salients of the Western Front, two catalysts of religious renewal connected to two catalysts of deicidal disbelief. It’s as if St. Francis came from Antietam, twice.
All of the towns and villages within an immediate southerly radius of Noyon were deliberately destroyed in the spring of 1917, when the Germans evacuated the bulge and fell back on the Siegfriedstellung, or Hindenburg Line, a fortified defensive position that allowed them to shorten their trenches. The Germans laid waste to hundreds of square miles of land when they made their surprise withdrawal from the salient around Noyon. It was one of the greatest property crimes ever perpetrated on France—farmland was ravaged, towns dynamited, wells poisoned, churches and castles destroyed, and the resulting rubble booby-trapped. Until then, the Noyon Salient had been a relatively quiet sector of the Front. But quiet—especially “all quiet” — is a loaded term. In those times when no great offensives were being held, it is estimated that the French army alone lost 100,000 men a month. For end-of-the-century ears, the number sounds impossibly, unimaginably large.
My walk through this part of Picardy inspires little more than a few consecutive days of irritation. A province of France rich in cathedrals and supposedly redolent of medieval glory, Picardy south of the Santerre reveals itself to be a blanket of rural bleakness made even more disagreeable to the walker by impassable thruways and fenced-off train lines. The express from Paris to the northern city of Valenciennes once derailed in this washed-out Pissarro landscape because of a sudden track subsidence. The railbed, at the point where it crossed the Front, collapsed into an unseen and unsuspected underground hollow made by an old trench. For once history had undermined engineering, rather than the other way around.
I look at my route map. Fouquescourt, Damery, Beauvraignes, Crapeaumesnil. Lackadaisical little villages file by in the shuttered-up silence of midafternoon, their only structure of note the inevitable and usually dramatic war memorial. A maiden weeps, a soldier falls, a cock crows—all decisions made by town councilors when a postwar French government decreed the erection of a monument to the war dead a legal obligation. The eternal duet of small-town France—mairie vs. church—was joined by a mute third party, so that even the most insignificant collection of houses now has a memorial in its midst. It is said that the political complexion of a town after the war can be divined by its monument: sober or regretful means socialist or anticlerical, triumphalist or bloodthirsty translates as conservative or nationalist, Pieta-like or angel-filled almost always tips off a militant Catholic or right-winger. A French hamlet might not have a water tower, a baker, or even a store, but it will always have a list of the dead chiseled in stone. The Great War added a dash of lugubrious kitsch to every village of France that no amount of romanticizing about arty country living can erase. For the French, the Great War is an immutable presence, like Church and State.
The war did, however, change its name. For a while it was known as la grande guerre or la der des der (short for la dernihe des dernihes—the last of the last) until the debacle of 1940 showed it to be just another conflict in France’s long inventory of inconclusive bloodletting. Now it’s called, with actuarial breeziness, la guerre de quatorze, and is usually shrugged off as a necessary nightmare over which too much time has been spent and too much ink spilt. The expression “C’est reparti comme en quatorze” (roughly: It’s 1914 all over again), a reference to the war hysteria that swept the country at the prospect of a rematch with the Germans (the first round was in 1870), survives in the French language to describe any activity enthusiastically taken up again. The kickoff of a soccer match between rivals, the reconciliation of a quarreling couple, even the onset of a rainstorm—all are good pretexts for dunking a sugar cube into your demitasse and uttering, knowingly, “C’est reparti comme en quatorze.”
Of all the cliches and bywords related to the Great War, there are few that have lived on through to the end of the century. Most are fairly musty, but it is surprising how many linger on somewhere in the recesses of memory. Below is a short list from the lexicon of World War I commonplaces:
The powder keg of Europe Shell shock
The Balkan tinderbox Dogfight
The war to end all wars Peace without victory
The war to make the world Gott strafe England
safe for democracy Hang the Kaiser!
The Fourteen Points On les aural!
Trench coat Freedom of the seas
The Western Front La fleur au fusil
Tommy Home before Christmas
Poilu The miracle on the Marne
Doughboy The taxis of the Marne
Feldgrau La Vote Sacree
Fritz The Big Push
Jerry La Madelon
Heine Over there
Boche Wacht am Rhein
Hun No-man’s-land
Jack Johnson Over the top
Big Bertha Go west
Creeping barrage Buy the farm
Some are too obvious to explain, others not. A Tommy, for example, is a British soldier, derived from the name Thomas Atkins, the John Doe chosen during the Napoleonic Wars to show infantrymen how to fill out an army paybook. Similarly, poilu (hairy) is the name of a French infantryman, taken from prewar slang for any male acquaintance. The German equivalent, Feldgrau, refers to his field-gray uniform. (The Germans had other words for the infantryman: Kilom
eterschwein and Lakenpatscher, respectively, “kilometer pig” and “puddle splasher.”) The American doughboy is more of a mystery: depending on the source one consults, the word is either a corruption of “adobe” or a tribute to a dumpling. As for the words that follow it in the list, everything from Fritz to Hun counts as an anti-German slur.
Jack Johnson, the black boxer, was the undefeated world heavyweight champ from 1908 to 1915—hence the name given to a certain type of concussive shell emitting black smoke. Bertha, after whom a massive long-range gun was called, was Bertha Antoinette Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the heiress to the Krupp armaments empire. The expressions of hostility are more straightforward: for the Germans’ famous “God Punish England/’ there is Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s “Hang the Kaiser!”, General Philippe Petain’s “On les aura!” (“We’ll get ‘em!”), and President Woodrow Wilson’s “Peace without victory,” his idea for a winner-take-nothing peace.
La fleur au fusil (flower in the rifle) refers to the raucous sendoff given to troops marching off to war in 1914. Old newsreel footage shows young Parisiennes rushing out and planting kisses on soldiers’ cheeks as they headed to almost certain death. Whether this was staged for propaganda purposes is still debated by historians. “Home before Christmas” indicates the expected length of the war at its outset. The Allied victory at the Marne in September 1914 was transformed by myth-making publicists into a miracle—as indeed it may have been, given the blundering that had preceded it—and the taxis in question were Parisian cabs requisitioned as troop transport. La Voie Sacree (the sacred road) was the thirty-three-mile route from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun that, in 1916, kept the French side of the killing ground supplied with men and munitions. The Big Push occurred in 1918, as the Allies kept attacking until the Germans gave way.
The next titles in the list could be called the Great War Greatest Hits. “Over There” is American and, naturally enough, self-assured; “Madelon,” French and convivial; “The Rhine Watch,” German and soulful. “No-man’s-land,” although an expression dating back to the Middle Ages, came to be almost exclusively associated with the treacherous, shell-shattered clearing between the underground armies of the Great War. “Over the top,” the locution used to describe climbing out of the safety of a trench to attack, has shaken off the war and come to mean off the wall, out of bounds or, simply, beyond the reasonable. The last two in the lexicon — “go west” and “buy the farm”—are ways to express what going over the top into no-man’s-land often meant: getting killed. Wordplay is not always innocent.
THE DOGS IN the Noyon Salient seem uninterested in pouncing on the dusty drifter as he passes. After all, they’ve seen armies go by. The war cemeteries in this stretch of the Front grow rarer—not only because it was a quiet sector in 1915-17, but also because the posthumous gardening instincts of the British have been left behind. Strictly speaking, the Western Front gives way here to la ligne des tranchees or Die Westfront. The French and the Germans preferred large national ossuaries to bury their war dead, the former out of a Jacobin urge to centralize, the latter from the necessity of taking whichever few plots of land were grudgingly allotted to them. Aside from the suspect prevalence of 1920s-era housing, the traces of war have all but disappeared in the Noyon Salient. I find myself ashamed at being annoyed at a landscape that has returned to obscurity. To belong to no one—to be no-man’s-land—carries a perverse notoriety, but to belong to a nobody, to have reembraced the discretion of individual ownership, robs a countryside of cachet.
Not that the newly ahistorical province is devoid of charm. Southwest of the forgettable market town of Roye, the Picard plateau offers the first signs of relief I have seen since bidding goodbye to the sociopathic fishermen on the Somme. Ahead are the forests of the Noyonnais, a region of small hills that stretches east along the line of the Front. Beet fields are replaced by orchards, swirling dirt by swarms of flies. In Lassigny, a cheerful red-roofed town just within the departement of the Oise, beauty returns to the world. At Thiescourt, Lassigny’s neighbor along the line of the Front, there is even a handsome, reconstructed Gothic church standing alone on a rise, looking like a postcard for liturgical bliss. I have become so accustomed to sad villages that I fear I’ve somehow wandered off course, to a place unaffected by the gore of the Great War. It’s only on seeing a French tricolor float behind the church above a farmer’s field—always a telltale marker of many soldiers’ graves—that I realize the Front is still with me, beneath my boots as I tread the black pavement.
On the way out of Thiescourt, a boy of about seven on a bicycle keeps pace with me on the opposite side of the road. He glances over warily. I smile in what I hope is an avuncular manner. The rider and his bike sidle ever closer. Curiosity finally wins the day.
“Monsieur, where are you going?”
“To Ribecourt.”
“Are you going to walk there?”
Yes.
“You’re going to have sore feet, Monsieur.”
5. Ribecourt to Nampcel to Soissons
A slope leads down toward the industrial town of Ribecourt on the River Oise. Behind me, on the crest of the hill, stands a domesticated forest. Every hundred feet or so some zealous souls have posted signs, Defense dEntrer—Chasse Gardee, to underscore the private nature of their private property. This is someone’s land. Between the trees near the roadway, the owners of the different swaths of the forest have seen fit to string barbed wire, so that no stray animals can get in or out without injury, and no army of picnickers or fornicators can wreak havoc in the undergrowth. There are no stiles here for scaling fences, no hiking paths for the crosscountry wanderer, and no visible hints that humans are welcome anywhere in the vicinity. This is not the wilderness—and has not been for a long time. The local government has already put signs up for next year’s celebration of the founding of the French national monarchy: Oise 987—1987, il y a mille ans, la naissance de la France! (A thousand years ago, France was born here!) Oise, appropriately enough, is pronounced “was.”
I cross the river and leave Ribecourt’s industries behind me. A long row of houses follows the trace of what was the French front line toward a town called Bailly. Family men stand in their plot of no-man’s-land, washing their cars in the driveways of model homes that resemble oversized shoe boxes topped with steep circumflex accents. The men momentarily stop what they’re doing and look up hopefully at the passing pedestrian. I sense that if I were a nubile young woman, unwanted conversations might be struck up or unpleasant gestures with the garden hose might be made. As it is, yeti-like canines come gamboling over lawns toward me, unrestrained by either a leash or a reluctance to drool. It is Sunday morning and this is purgatory.
Relief comes from yet another woodland. The sylvan stretch ahead is an outgrowth of the much larger acreage of greenery known as the Forest of Compiegne. The city of the same name is a few miles to the south, but my path leads me away from it, away from the clearing where the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The Front lies due east through the forest towns of Ollencourt and Tracy-le-Val. At the latter I stop in for a quick coffee, only to remember that Sunday morning is the congregating time for country drunks throughout France. This place is no exception. Rheumy eyes peer through the cumulus of cigarette smoke as beers are knocked back and last night’s lottery drawing is debated in numbing detail. At cafe counters such as this, the French language is less enunciated than gulped, usually in brief glottal intakes that would give most other people the hiccups. Occasionally, one of the debaters lets loose a great hacking gob of a cough that hushes his fellows until the final gurgles of angry phlegm have trickled off into silence.
My footsteps hasten, as I try to shake off the dog-loving car-washers and tubercular tipplers that inhabit this section of the Front. In an access of sudden scenic prettiness, the road winds between two bosky hillocks before heading up and out onto an utterly treeless plateau that stretches for a few miles. The French countryside, a succession of microco
sms that make the continental features of North America seem inhuman in their scale, never ceases to surprise. I had thought myself locked into a day or two of sourly fenced-off shadiness; instead, I am on an exposed upland with little more than the sky as companion. A succession of wildflowers — Queen Anne’s lace, morning glories, thistles, poppies—leads me into a long low field of sheared wheat. The road tapers off into a dirt track, then a cowpath, then trampled weeds. A gust of wind ushers a human-sized swirl of white dust across a neighboring meadow. I begin to sing, from the sheer joy of solitude. The only bump on the horizon is a large manor farm, placed squarely on a gray crossroads a couple of miles away. I think of Private Cadogan, the dead youth in Flanders, and how today, right now, there can be no eulogy for him save the wind and the clouds. There is no Western Front here, just the wide embrace of emptiness. There is no trace of it in the soil, or the sky. I am walking a tabula rasa.
The plateau, called the Toutvent (Every wind), just happens to conceal its secrets well. After an hour or so of brisk hiking, the land suddenly dips, as if at the top of an intermediate ski slope. The cavity deepens and the grassy walls of a natural depression rise higher on either side. Two large German cemeteries of Great War dead, lost amid mature trees the tops of which are invisible from the plateau, lead even farther down toward the gulley floor. Inevitably, for this is France, a village has been built in this topographical vulva, a banged-up Brigadoon that war, if nothing else, has managed to find. The road sign reads, “Nampcel.” I check my map, see that I have wandered behind German lines—hence the cemeteries—and that I should be close to something called LAbri du Kronprinz (The Crown Prince’s Dugout). A woman in the village waves an irritated hand in one direction when I ask her where it is. Up a small track, over a rusty gate, and suddenly I see, hidden by the undergrowth like some Mayan monument, a three-story concrete structure built into the side of the gulley wall.
I pick my way around in the cool semidarkness. The same barely breathable dankness that I came across in Vimy permeates the lower floor. It is the smell of damp earth, cold stone, and old fear, the clammy musk of the Great War. The structure may not have been built for the Kaiser’s nephew—German fortifications tend to get inflated in importance in local legend—but it certainly could have housed an entire general’s staff. Square, spacious rooms lead off a central corridor on three levels. Where once heels clicked, confiscated local wine flowed, and telephone operators barked orders to poor subalterns stuck in the open country at such places as Tracy and Ollencourt, there is now only a bit of lonely graffiti from a later time. The place is a delinquent’s dream — the litter of beer bottles and charred carnpfire remains shows its current vocation. Outside once again, I can see the cleverness of its location: tucked as it is into the south side of the Nampcel depression, no French artillery shell could ever have had the boomerang trajectory necessary to hit the place. For those inside the capacious hideout, the war must have been all sound and fury—and not much else.
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