I am not alone. The grandfathers of the Great War have come back to haunt contemporary writing long after my afternoon in Soupir. Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, Jean Rouaud’s Les Champs d’Honneur (Fields of Glory) — both are novels in which people of the present era seek out truth about their grandfathers’ experience of World War I. Geoff Dyer’s smart nonfiction Missing of the Somme begins thus, “When I was a boy my grandfather took me to the Museum of Natural History,” and soon thereafter goes into the old man’s war history. Pat Barker, whose superb Great War fiction trilogy—Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road—has no such reminiscing from the modern day to the past, nonetheless cannot escape the lure of the grandfather clause. In The Ghost Road, her ambivalent, bisexual hero Billy Prior goes back to the trenches for a third tour of duty. He meets a young officer there who has come to the hell of the Front for the first time. The imagery is inescapable:
Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. He was this boy’s greatgrandfather.
CHAPTER
5
Champagne
I. Cerny-en-Laonnois to Craonne to Berry-au-Bac
THE DRY, HOT Assumption holiday under a leaden August sun begins in Picardy and finishes in Champagne. There is an end to the summer in sight, as the blue line of the Vosges grows closer with every step I take. I shall walk out of the last of the scarred Picard woods today and into the great chalky Champenois dust bowl that stretches out from the sacred city of Reims to the dark hills of the Argonne. The agony of the Front continued on beyond Champagne, into Lorraine and Alsace, but perhaps nowhere was the sting of incompetence as sharp as right here, along the Chemin des Dames.
The attack launched here in the spring of 1917 showed French military planners to be a band of blinkered dilettantes, like so many rubes hopelessly outplayed and outpositioned in a game of skill. For dames is also the French word for checkers, and on this crimson landscape the German generals knew every move of their opponents in advance and countered devastatingly. Tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers were killed, swept off the checkerboard thanks to the impossible tasks set for them. The sheer magnitude of the rout at the Chemin des Dames called for the enforcement of willed amnesia. The French army—any army, in fact—is a natural enemy of truth. Alliances shift, but the opposition between the logic of military obedience and that of informed criticism will always remain. Arguably, covering up its blunders and cruelties is what the French army has done best in the twentieth century.
It waited until 1995, for example, before one of its official spokesmen begrudgingly allowed that Alfred Dreyfus had been wronged one hundred years previously. Similarly, its behavior during the war of Algerian independence in the 1950s and 1960s, during which thousands were tortured and killed by French officers, remains a taboo subject in French military and political circles. The smothering of the Chemin des Dames debacle and its aftermath followed the same implacable need for mendacity. In a well-known instance of the long hand of military censorship reaching across time, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory—a film made in 1957—was successfully kept off French movie screens until well into the 1970s. Its depiction of the unfair courts-martial of poilus for insubordination in a futile Great War offensive was considered too biased for the impressionable minds of French moviegoers.
The graduates of French military academies after World War I would learn precisely the wrong lessons from the Chemin des Dames fiasco. They poured all their efforts during the interwar period into building a useless fortification, the Maginot Line, as a means of thwarting any other Schlieffen-like German attack on France. The decision to build the Line—it failed miserably in 1940 — rivals the plan of attack along the Chemin des Dames as an illustration of awe-inspiring incompetence. As I write these words in the 1990s, the current generation of bemedaled French strategists is exploding nuclear bombs under a Pacific atoll in anticipation, perhaps, of some future aquatic threat. History will judge whether these fellows are any cleverer than their predecessors.
Such judgment goes by the name of hindsight, a backward-looking, second-guessing perspective that I have often used in recounting the events at the Front. Professional historians find hindsight unjust, even distasteful; I believe it to be a necessary weapon to fight against the apologists of mayhem. Scholars quite rightly point out the exaggerations of popular rumor and the paranoid imaginings of the mistreated—no, hundreds of men were not shot as a result of the Chemin des Dames mutinies, as was once commonly believed. But as these overblown bubbles of oral transmission get punctured, sometimes the emphasis gets shifted. The hunt for inaccuracy becomes paramount, and in redressing a minor libel the original enormity gets lost. No, Haig did not bungle everything, completely, all the time, but—lest we forget—he did send hundreds of thousands unnecessarily to their deaths on two occasions. The men who routinely referred to him as “the Butcher” are all dead and gone now, yet his statue still stands in London’s Whitehall. Haig and Joffre and Falkenhayn and their ilk died not on some hopeless, hellish battlefield but of old age, in their beds, and their memory, while fading, is still honored in some quarters. We have forgotten how heinous a lesson about the military mind they inadvertently taught the world. The twentieth century’s opening event, the murder of millions through incompetence, has become unacknowledged, and the perpetrators unpunished in our vision of the past. A little less intellectual charity toward them is in order, even if that means using the disreputable narrative tool of hindsight. The reluctance to put one’s life in the hands of the military, an ancestral reflex made universal by the Great War, should never be allowed to weaken.
THE CHEMIN DES Dames cries out for hindsight. It is hard to imagine a stupider place to order an attack. Seeing is disbelieving. In the valley below Passchendaele, I had to picture the mud, reconstruct the horror from accounts I was reading; to the uninformed eye, the notorious spot looks like an unprepossessing village in an unremarkable landscape, but not much else. The Somme, too, looked innocuous, or, at least, like a place where the attacker in a war was not automatically doomed to failure. It was command error on a colossal scale rather than the nature of the terrain that had led to the mass British suicides in 1916.
Not so the Chemin des Dames. The landscape is such that no casual hiker with a knowledge of the past can fail to pity the poor poilus ordered to assault the German lines here. When I leave Soupir to head northward, the road starts to ascend and will not stop its ascent for a couple of miles. North of the River Aisne between Soissons and Reims the land resembles a tall escarpment. The incline is steep in parts. On either side of my route outcroppings of the plateau summit, some three hundred feet above the floor of the Aisne valley, jut out from the body of the incline. Imagine an oak leaf a hundred yards thick—its lateral lobes are these jutting cliffs, from which machine-gunners had a field day mowing down the men slogging up the gentler slopes to the flat land at the top. To attack here was insane.
My walk continues in the building heat. The floors of the reforested parts of the slopes show the customary egg-carton craziness of Great War carnage; the plowed farmer’s fields, the usual collection of dud shells and rusted bullets. Near a village called Beaulne, I quickly pass some old bones piled up against a fencepost. This time the toponymic coincidence does not charm. I am eager to finish the ascent.
The top is the location of the chemin of the Chemin des Dames, a road used by the daughters of Louis XV whenever they visited a noblewoman of the district. These grandes dames enjoyed the road—the midrib of our oak leaf—because it provided such dominating views to both north and south. The distant spires of Laon and Reims could be glimpsed on very fine days. What provided agreeable scenery from a jolting eighteenth-century carria
ge also made an admirable firing range for twentieth-century gunners looking downhill. To worsen matters for the French attacker, geology favored the defenders too. The rock of the plateau is porous—indeed, the great cathedrals of the region had been built from the stone quarried here—and the land was already a maze of tunnels and subterranean chambers long before the engineers of the German army dug shelters deep into the ground. The moles who built the redoubtable blockhouse into the gulley wall of Nampcel would use all the advantages of malleable stone here. At the easternmost point of the Chemin des Dames, where the upland is called the California Plateau, a series of underground tunnels was so extensive that it could comfortably hold 8,000 men. The German soldiers, never at a loss for Sturm und Drang modifiers, named the feature die Drachenhöhle, the Dragon Hole.
The French plan of attack was simple. Thousands of troops, less than six months after escaping from the slaughter of Verdun, were to proceed uphill, between machine-gun-infested cliffs, in full view of an impregnable enemy, with no attempt to use the element of surprise. How could the French command have done this to its soldiers? Good question. What’s even more puzzling is how the civilian authors of a major French two-volume compendium, La première guerre mondiale, could write as late as 1968: “Strategically, the attack sector was judiciously chosen because, as long as the breakthrough occurred in the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours, the entire center of the German line would collapse. Unfortunately for the French, no ground was ever better suited to the defensive.” Love of the dialectic—or at least its first two contradictory statements—must have afflicted the writers. If the terrain was so formidable, how could the sector have been “judiciously” chosen? The slope up toward the Chemin des Dames is an infantryman’s graveyard. And when did great French breakthroughs ever occur in the First World War? Passages such as these litter books on the war, as if military historians never visited battlefields or realized that the men in the fanciest uniforms frequently have a lot of unfurnished rooms upstairs. To understand the Chemin des Dames, it is not necessary to find lame excuses; it is far better to understand 1917.
OR, RATHER, THE result of 1916. Between them, the strategists of the French, British, and German general staffs had managed to kill more than one million men in nine months—and the Front had not budged. Small wonder that political leaders began to question the abilities of their generals. The near-loss of Verdun had led to Joffre’s being promoted beyond the reach of the levers of command. The man responsible for the most horrendous casualties in French history—hundreds of thousands of his countrymen killed in incessant, repetitive attacks in Lorraine during the debacle of 1914—was raised to the rank of field marshal. Ever the dullard in tactics, he initially did not realize that this meant he would lose effective control of the armies.
Perhaps Joffre thought he would be treated as gently as the British treated their commander. Douglas Haig—the man who made July 1, 1916, the worst day in all of British martial history—was also elevated to the heights of field marshaldom, but he was not relieved of command. His protector and patron, King George V, wanted to show some overt support for his friend and reward him for standing up to the assaults of the new prime minister, David Lloyd George. The king rightly saw that Haig was in danger of deserved demotion. Lloyd George, just as rightly, viewed the new field marshal as a plodding old soldier with too little imagination and talent to be left in charge of so many British lives. The Somme had sickened Lloyd George—he wanted to see anyone but Haig conduct the battles of 1917. The prime minister, unable to fire the well-connected bumbler, would henceforth look to circumvent his military commander.
Unfortunately for the poilus of 1917, Lloyd George and other politicians fell under the spell of the French general Robert Georges Nivelle, a heretofore obscure officer who had scored a few high-profile victories in the closing days of the Verdun battles. Much of the ground he won back had already been evacuated by the Germans, but the symbolic purpose of regaining lost territory did not escape the notice of a French press desperate for good news after the horrible losses of the year. Nivelle, perhaps the most canny manipulator of opinion of the entire war, was soon considered by almost everyone as a man with a plan, a bold new tactician who would somehow outsmart the stubborn realities of trench warfare. What had actually happened in his Verdun successes—a short, intense artillery barrage on a very small front, followed by an advance over ground that was in the process of being surrendered—got lost in the enthusiasm for Nivelle’s messianistic military message: I can win the war. I have the secret. Everything is under control.
He was saying it in English, too. Nivelle, whose mother came from Britain, was an urbane man who could knock back port with the best of his cross-Channel colleagues and speak English fluently and persuasively. Nivelle’s cozy parleys with Lloyd George clinched his appointment as military supremo. He was believed in both languages, because people in power hoped that the searingly murderous mistakes of the past could somehow be halted. This new general exuded self-assurance; he had, after all, won battles in the world’s most awful battlefield. Nivelle was charming, cultivated, and convincing. The French populace, and, more important, the French army, took him at his word and dared to hope that the end of the war was just around the corner. Not since 1914 had there been such optimism afoot. To be fair to Nivelle, he believed his own hype.
Once made de facto commander-in-chief of the Allied effort, Nivelle worked only minor modifications to Joffre’s plan for 1917, but they were crucial nonetheless. The British would attack near Arras, the French at the Chemin des Dames. This way, the new commander hoped, the Noyon Salient, that weak, quiet sector of the line, would be cruelly pinched, and the Germans would have to waste their reserves in shoring up their defenses.
Trouble came to Nivelle’s paradise when the Germans retreated from the Noyon Salient in March 1917 and hunkered down along the Hindenburg Line. There was no Salient left to pinch—the Germans had shortened their lines by forty miles and thus freed valuable divisions to use as a reserve in case of Allied attack. Such a defensive coup might have given other commanders pause, but not Nivelle. A collective suspension of disbelief reigned at headquarters, despite a few rumblings from rivals he had beaten for the top job. These criticisms were discounted as sour grapes from also-rans, even though detailed plans were known to have been captured by German raiding parties. Nivelle’s own loquaciousness around the press ensured that the coming attack counted as the worst-kept secret of the war. As March became April, disaster drew nearer.
That winter and spring of 1917 were, in many ways, as momentous as the summer of 1914. The changes latent since Princip fired his bullet finally took place, and the nineteenth century expired. In December 1916, Franz Josef, the decrepit Austro-Hungarian emperor who had let his ministers issue Serbia the unanswerable ultimatum thirty months earlier, died unhappy in Vienna, to be succeeded by a twenty-nine-year-old eager for peace. The glue that had held Mitteleuropa together quickly began to come unstuck. In Germany, a failure of the potato crop turned the winter into a nightmare of watery turnip soup and starving children. Hurt by the British-enforced shipping embargo, the German government felt compelled to return the favor and cut Britain off from its vital supplies. On January 31, 1917, the Germans announced that they would begin unrestricted submarine warfare—that is, they would sink any ship on the high seas, whether belligerent or neutral in its national origin. The Americans were naturally appalled; three days later the American cargo ship Housatonic was sunk by a U-boat in the north Atlantic. It was the first of many that spring.
The American century began in 1917. The U-boats ushered it in, with the help of the new German foreign minister, Dr. Alfred von Zimmermann, and the strange, unsolicited telegram he sent to the Mexican government. Zimmermann promised lavish German support, in the event of an American entry into the war, should Mexico wish to wrest the southwestern states of the union back from their Yankee usurpers. Bribes were paid, and the telegram was deciphered, translated,
and leaked to the press. Five weeks later, on April 6, 1917, the United States Congress declared war on Germany. President Wilson, elected the previous autumn on the slogan “He Kept Us out of the War,” couched the American action in the terms of unalloyed idealism. He was a new pope launching a new crusade. He might also have added that American business could not afford to let France and Britain renege on their mountainous debts, and that the Allies’ credit line was exhausted. Someone had to make sure that they won the war—or everyone would go broke.
At the same time, ice was breaking in Russia. Two weeks after incensed Americans read about the Zimmermann telegram in their newspapers, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate by his rebellious army. The bloodbath on the Eastern Front had been too great, the suffering too harsh, the incompetence too patent. The creaking, 303-year-old oligarchy of the Romanovs came to an ignominious end on March 15, 1917. Russia remained a belligerent nation at grips with the Central Powers, but it was now teetering on the brink of neutrality. The German government gambled that it could get Russia out of the war altogether before the Americans arrived in force. In April, it allowed a closed train with Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin as a passenger to cross its territory and shunt home to Russia. The newly empowered democrats of Petrograd intended to continue the fight alongside the Allies. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, promised to have no truck with the imperialist powers of either side.
Thus in April 1917, a new era dawned, one in which the old powers of Europe would eventually have to share the world stage with an internationalist America and a turbulent Russia. Fittingly, for a senescent civilization that had placed millions of its youths in two long parallel ditches, spring refused to come in 1917. The weather over the Front was execrable, a filthy, unseasonable mix of cold sleet and chilling winds. On April 6, the shivering Allied troops were warmed by America’s declaration of war. Three days later, the British launched their attacks near Arras as part of the Nivelle offensive. The Canadians took Vimy Ridge in a snowstorm, but elsewhere the usual failures occurred with the usual horrific human cost. A week after that, on April 16, Lenin arrived at the Finland Station of Petrograd, ready for his rendezvous with destiny. The same day, in northern France, the weather was a howling mess as a cold deluge of sleet and snow swirled out of lowering gray clouds. In the murky darkness of 6:00 A.M., the French army stepped out of its trenches and headed uphill toward the Chemin des Dames.
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