Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  Back on the plateau above Nampcel the sky opens. This is my first truly bad moment of the walk. I am caught in wide-open country as a summer thunderstorm comes dancing over the plain. I hurry on, aware of the inviting electrons coursing through me. I wonder if being short makes me less appetizing as a spark plug, or if I can find another nook like Nampcel before the business end of the clouds passes overhead. A motorist approaches, sees my plight, drives on. My Francophilia touches bottom. I let loose a long stream of curses — until I feel the hairs rise on the nape of my neck. Then the world goes blindingly white. There is a tremendous clap of thunder.

  I sit on the ground. I am too frightened to feel foolish. “War Buff Found Toasted.” “Western Front Strikes Again.” “Historical Hiker a Thing of the Past.” I work up headlines for imaginary obits, which takes my mind off the obvious question: Why did I ever leave the safety of the bunker? The first pellets of hail go bouncing off the road surface and are soon biting into the canvas expanse of the backpack now perched atop my head. They are followed by a torrent of hailstones, a sustained burst of icy shrapnel. The air goes white as another electrical discharge crackles over the land. The noise of the falling hail is smothered under a deafening blanket of thunder. The temperature drops, the rain teems down. I watch as puddles form around me. They are soon muddy ponds. I can feel the rain through my sodden sweatshirt. The poor poilus.

  A car honks its horn. Dutch license plates. I get up — I’m going where they’re going.

  QUI A CASSÉ la vase de Soissons? (Who shattered the Soissons vase?) This is, in French folklore, the unanswerable, rhetorical question par excellence. It refers to a story of misplaced loot and capricious decapitation in Merovingian times—nobody knows the name of the anonymous soldier who defied his king Clovis and broke the vase, but the conundrum has survived to the present day. A more descriptive question, given the depredations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would be, “Qui a cassé Soissons?” for the town, once the capital of the Gauls and an important ecclesiastical see, is now a sorry mess. The cathedral is disfigured, halfheartedly restored, its statuary smashed, its walls covered in an obscene acne of shell and bullet holes. Another large church in Soissons, belonging to a once thriving monastery, was dismantled in a moment of post-Revolutionary zeal, leaving only twin Gothic towers to loom over the town as a reminder of former glory. In the other main church, an exhibition entitled “150 Years of Restoration in Picardy” serves as a nice counterpoint for any sightseer who happens to be marooned here. There is so much to restore because so much has been wrecked.

  As if to underscore the waste, a military parade is being held this drizzly Monday morning. Soissons marks the beginning of a region of soldiering. All around the town there are military bases and artillery firing ranges, some of them placed smack in the middle of the Western Front. Thus, an armed-to-the-teeth march can be summoned up at the drop of a kepi. The reason for today’s spectacle, as far as I can tell, seems to be the commissioning of a new commanding officer for some outlying contingent. Tanks rumble past, and troops too old to be conscripts stride down the main street as if they own it. The morning shoppers look on impassively, apparently accustomed to such inane muscle-flexing in the middle of modern Europe. It is strange to see such martial pride in a town that has been robbed of interest and of its heritage by the destruction of war and the collapse of armies sent to defend it.

  6. Home Leave

  Soissons gets on my nerves so much that I give myself a furlough. I go on home leave in mid-August, to get away from the Front and the army. Although most Parisians have their toes in the Med at this time of the year, many of my acquaintances from the magazine business have already returned to the city. It is the moment to begin churning out hype-filled articles on what to expect in September when Paris comes to life again.

  This is especially true of Paris Passion, an English-language monthly run on a shoestring and written for a pittance. In the summer of my walk, it is still an enthusiastic post-collegiate enterprise staffed by people of unbending principle who just happen to sleep together a lot. I write about bars and restaurants for the magazine—thus I spend a couple of evenings in both types of places explaining what I’ve been doing on my summer vacation. Eyes invariably glaze over, until I produce the bullets and barbed wire picked up along the way. The reactions are varied.

  “You mean this shit is just lying out there?”

  “You could make earrings out of the bullets. Start a line of no-future jewelry.”

  “What about the pesticides? Don’t you end up covered in pesticide every day?”

  “I’d be depressed. I can’t stand farms.”

  “See any skulls?”

  “At least it’s not crowded.”

  “Where’d you say this place was again?”

  The home front is, as always, difficult to understand. A middle-aged French friend shakes her head and says sorrowfully, “La boue, la boue, la boue” — as if repeating the word “mud” like a mantra sufficed. It reminds me of the pitch for the war porn place near the Menin Road.

  Perhaps my going out to the Front is an exercise in doomed voyeurism. Might it not be possible that there is nothing to see? That you can’t go back to where you’ve never been? That it would be better to stay here, in my Paris apartment, digesting a dozen snails and expectorating the word “mud” over a cognac? I think of the amusement park at Ypres, the diesel fumes at Loos, the hollow sky of the Santerre, the hailstones of Nampcel. I think of becoming a deserter. Pilgrims, unlike soldiers, need to believe in something.

  THE NEXT MORNING I reluctantly pick through the mail that has accumulated over the past few weeks. Bills, bank statements. The usual, except for a small envelope with an Irish stamp. The postmark reads Baile Atha Cliath, which is the Celtically correct way of saying “town of the hurdle ford,” or Dublin. Someone has used India ink to address the envelope; old-fashioned penmanship gives tails to many of the letters and leaves the p’s unclosed so that they look like umbrella handles. I recognize the handwriting from childhood, when our grandmother used to send harp and shamrock badges for her Canadian grandsons to wear on St. Patrick’s Day.

  Inside the envelope is a small card, slightly bigger than a business card. There is no salutation, no accompanying note, no signature, just the words “Thomas Conlon. Guillemont Road Cemetery,” written in the same decorous hand. I look at the card in bewilderment. I know a Thomas Conlon—he is Uncle Tommy, my mother’s bachelor brother, a quiet, witty Dubliner to whom I owe my middle name, Thomas. There is obviously a connection here that I am missing.

  The place name looks familiar as well. I consult my guidebooks, peruse the hiker’s journal I’ve been keeping. My jaw drops open. I reread what I had written: “Let’s make a movie: to the immediate right, the black pointed spires of Guillemont and Longueval piercing the level of the trees …” Of course! The cemetery near “The Greatest Thing in the World.” Of the scores of cemeteries passed and ignored, the roads not taken, the fields left untrod, could I have stumbled unknowingly into the sole graveyard on the Western Front that bears some connection to my family? For I did visit a graveyard on the Guillemont Road—that is where I was sitting when I wrote the entry in the journal. The bucolic loveliness of the view made me stop my frantic pedaling. I then remember seeing a Celtic cross in the village. Could that have something to do with my uncle Tommy’s namesake?

  No one in Ireland is answering his phone. It’s too early to call Canada. The train for Amiens, with a connection to Albert, leaves the Gare du Nord at noon. My watch shows eleven o’clock. It’s a half-hour metro ride to the train station. My backpack is hurriedly refilled, my walking boots are laced up, and my urge to desert is, well, history. I’m going back to the Front.

  THE 2,255 GRAVES of the Guillemont Road Cemetery stand pallid in the failing light of the day. Were it not for old photographs, it would be impossible to imagine the surrounding countryside as a battlefield. Yet it was obviously a savage place in 1916, fo
r fully two-thirds of the graves here contain unidentifiable bodies. A picture taken in September of that year shows a couple of trucks, their canvas coverings emblazoned with shamrocks, carting the wounded from an advanced dressing station, itself nothing more than a couple of shell craters in a limitless lunar mudscape. The trucks, juddering down the pitted surface of the Guillemont Road back to Albert, must have caused agony to the wounded men stretched out in their vans.

  Those who couldn’t make the journey are buried here. The land in front of the village of Guillemont had been the scene of pointless attacks since midsummer. One of the dead was Raymond Asquith, the thirty-seven year-old son of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. It is said that Guillemont broke the older man and allowed the allies of David Lloyd George to take control of the government that much sooner. The younger Asquith’s grave in the Guillemont cemetery reads: “Small time but in that small most greatly lived this star of England.” Like Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Asquith began to question the wisdom of sending so many young men to die once he had lost a son. In Kipling’s case, the disappearance of his eighteen-year-old son near Loos brought forth a bitter couplet: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

  A few rows over from Asquith, between the graves of a Captain G. M. Shufflebothan and a Private Gilham, I find my man. The inscription is simple:

  23914 Private

  T. Conlon

  Royal Dublin Fusiliers

  6th September 1916 Age 20

  My great-uncle Tommy? I look around: I am standing no more than ten paces from the spot where I sat down to write in my journal during my Tour de Somme. A coincidental near-miss becomes an uncanny reunion. The entry in the cemetery registrar, with the name of my greatgrandfather the farmer printed on the yellowing page, seals the encounter: “Son of Richard Conlon, of Duleek, Co. Meath.” I have read so many names—at Thiepval, the Menin Gate, Notre Dame de Lorette, La Targette—yet here the force of the forgotten assumes a shape I can begin to see. A twenty-year-old Tommy Conlon, the younger brother of my grandfather Bartholomew, running down this slope with rifle aloft and fear in his heart, in pursuit of a meaningless objective during a misconceived campaign of a needless war. A shellburst, then blackness. The life of one young Irishman gone, barely begun. Fresh out of school at Drogheda, fed the usual lies, obliterated. One family’s antimilitarism was born in this field and passed down to their descendants, who would share it across time and oceans.

  I stand in front of the Commonwealth-issue headstone, smoking a cigarette in the twilight, the first member of Tommy Conlon’s family to have come to France and visited his grave since his death in 1916. He’s like a grown-up cousin that one meets for the first time at a wedding. I don’t know what to do, what to say—so I invite him along. Henceforth, Private Cadogan and Musketier Aronsohn will have company as we walk the Front.

  The downlands in front of Albert darken and the stars start to come out. It will take me a good two and half hours to walk back to my hotel in town, I set out on the Guillemont Road, this time unconcerned about hailing a ride. There is no one out on these country roads on this summer night.

  Tommy Conlon was not the only Tommy or indeed the only Thomas to die in Guillemont. One of the commanding officers of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was Tom Kettle, a beloved orator, Irish nationalist politician, essayist, and poet. He is said to have served James Joyce as a model for the character Hughes in Stephen Hero. Kettle was shot and killed between Guillemont and Ginchy on September 9, 1916, and his body was never identified for burial. Doubtless his is one of the nameless tombstones in the Guillemont Road Cemetery. Kettle, shortly before he joined Tommy Conlon, Raymond Asquith, and two thousand others underground, wrote at length about the legacy of the Great War. He is quoted in Tim Cross’s invaluable The Lost Voices of World War I:

  When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it [the war], with its wounds and weariness and flesh stabbing and bone pulverizing and lunacies and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battlefields, two landmarks in human progress will be revealed. The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of the soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war.

  It’s difficult to say whether Kettle, or any other soldier on the Somme, would be shocked about how low his war has sunk on the horizon of general consciousness. How it has truly gone “beyond all phrase” and turned into mute monument and unread indignation. What was all-consuming, in the literal as well as the figurative sense, is now the stuff of solitary musing on a long walk through a starry night. The battlefields are silent; my footfalls don’t awaken any presences. Voltaire, of all people, once admonished: “We owe respect to the living; but to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.”

  Home leave is over. The walk east must resume.

  7. Soupir

  The early-morning mist accompanies me along the right bank of the River Aisne. Soissons and its grimy streets, which I reached via an intercity bus ride across Picardy, fade into memory. My route out of town follows that taken by Joan of Arc when she was dragging the ineffectual Dauphin to Reims to be crowned King Charles VII. Sesquicentennial plaques mark the way, done in the Art Deco style popular in 1929. The commemorative signposts were no doubt a sop to historic decency thrown by a French state and army that, through gross incompetence, had caused massacres and mutinies along this stretch of the Front only a decade or so earlier. What better way to forget the criminal behavior of the immediate past than by harking back to a halcyon time of martial, mystic grandeur?

  The banks of the Aisne are covered with lush, impenetrable shrubs and vines that bar access to the river to any nonresident bather. The fog has dulled the flowering bushes along the roadside into vegetable monotony, which is a shame, for the locals here seem to take great pride in competing to see who can create the most colorful rock garden. At Vailly-sur-Aisne, a picturesquely situated place framed between blackwater river to the south and wooded height to the north, the sun eventually burns off the lingering mist, revealing an artfully rebuilt town that does not betray its past as the site of furious fighting in 1914, 1917, and 1918. On the outskirts of Vailly, where ramparts must once have stood, midway rides have been set up. The carnies, in their mobile homes, are gathered around their television sets, awaiting the opening of the fair and the coming of customers. Tomorrow is the Assumption holiday, yet another anomalous religious festival on the official calendar of agnostic France. That day—August 15 — marks the moment when, impossibly, the glacial pace of country life slows down even further. Traditionally the hottest day of the summer, it is also the absolute zero of social and business activity. As if rehearsing for the big sleep on the morrow, the main market street of Vailly is devoid of life at ten o’clock this morning.

  I continue eastward through the stillness. Even the cars must be snoozing in the building heat; the traffic is nonexistent. At the village of Chavonne, I pass French and British military cemeteries on my way to a crossroads pointing to a place called Soupir. I’m attracted to the name, for soupir is the French word for “sigh.” In yet another instance of toponymic irony like that at La Targette, the countryside around Soupir is a landscape of sighs, a place of cosmopolitan bereavement. Near the tombs of the French and the British are German and Italian war graves, all casualties of the last two years of the war. Beyond them and the village itself, another casualty awaits. The wrought-iron gates to the Chateau de Soupir swing open, leading into a field empty of any construction save a triumphal arch standing improbably alone, bereft of the large mansion to which it once belonged. The Picard bishop and man of letters, Francois de Fenelon, is supposed to have stayed here several centuries ago, when this arch looked out onto a formal French garden with its rational mastery of space and perspective. Now the remnant of the Chateau de Soupir looks forlorn and faintly ridiculous in its neat field of hay, like an arch of defeat.

  Un
like Shelley’s Ozymandias, Soupir is an instant ruin, divorced from the Romantic ideal of ruination that required deliquescence over centuries. This chateau or others like it inhabited the world and the imaginations of our grandparents and great-grandparents, those with whom we might have been contemporaries for a few short years. It disappeared overnight. The ruination was what Lutyens partly conveyed with his Thiepval memorial — an evocation of defeat and disappearance. I know that across the road, in the wooded hills called Mont de Sapins and Les Gouttes d’Or, the ground is scored with the usual awful undulations of the Great War, yet here the violence is done through absence, by what is suddenly missing and gone forever. Alone in its field, the shattered manor has become a gnomon in a large sundial, the shadow of the freestanding wall turning endlessly on itself with the passage of each day. It is in and out of time, a grandfather clock in a forgotten room. In Soupir I have found my monument for the Western Front, my link to Tommy and Cadogan and Aronsohn and Daniel and Bartholomew and all our grandfathers. The wind in the grass sighs.