I HAVE REACHED the fertile desolation of the plateau. A straight road leads east through the wavering kinks of scorched air. Unlike many rural routes in France, the wayside is devoid of shade trees. There is nothing to block the prospect or deflect the wind. The fields have been harvested, leaving the baked brown earth a cracked labyrinth of tractor treadmarks and flattened furrows. A few skeletal hayracks stand out against the blue sky, their supporting beams bleached by the sun. By the shoulder of the road, a small borne informs me that I’m on the Chemin des Dames. No one is in sight. My stride quickens, and soon several miles have passed and the inventory of the hours lengthens: a huge graveyard, a flagpole, a private memorial; a chapel built in the late 1950s and visited in 1962 by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle; a rebuilt village, Cerny-en-Laonnois, snoozing at a crossroads; then more empty fields with distant ricks sweltering in the afternoon glare. Off to my right I catch occasional glimpses of the Aisne valley. In places it still bears the puckers of seventy-year-old detonations.
The morning of April 16, 1917, was a massacre. As one lieutenant later told a French parliamentary committee investigating the fiasco: “At six in the morning, the battle began; by seven, it was lost.” Regiments disappeared in a withering hail of bullets and shellfire. Nivelle, whose plan had called for an intense artillery barrage, made precisely the same mistakes as the British had on the Somme. There was a ten-day artillery campaign before the sixteenth, which robbed the attack of any possible surprise, and the wrong guns were used. Less than a third of his artillery was of the heavy caliber needed to entomb the defenders in their cavernous shelters. Worse, of the 392 German gun batteries trained on the advancing troops, only 53 had been spotted by reconnaissance aircraft in the run-up to the fatal day. The French thus climbed up an inclined no-man’s-land rocking with deadly explosions. Worse still, the stormy weather had prevented most airplanes from flying in the days immediately preceding the battle — thus no one detected the fresh divisions the Germans had moved into the sector. The French attackers were meant to follow a creeping barrage in the manner of the Canadians at Vimy. They were meant to effect a war-winning breakthrough, to advance seven miles in a few hours. By day’s end, those still alive were five hundred yards at most from their starting point, hugging the ground as the wind swept snow into their faces. The next day, Nivelle sent thousands more to their deaths.
I arrive at the Dragon Hole, scene of some of the fiercest fighting of 1917. The land to the south becomes clifflike; there are shell craters in the meadow far below. Inside, a pompous little man leads a group of war tourists around the dankness, extolling the courage of the doomed army in a spiel of florid French that never once shrinks from cliche. Nothing is said about the wisdom of attacking the spot or about the subsequent mutinies. The guide sells us a version of 1917 with a shrill nationalist pitch, like a paraplegic celebrating the car crash that disabled him. We look at fading displays under glass. Once back out into the air, everyone breathes easier. A bottle blonde in high heels clicks across the parking lot in pursuit of her hyperactive son; an old man soothes a crying youngster who has fallen off a cannon; an Assumption Day picnic on a crater lip degenerates into a family quarrel. The view and my mood suddenly improve—at a feature of the Chemin des Dames called the Isthmus of Hurtebise, the land drops away on both sides, and the prospects to the north and south stretch to rivers and ridges that lie outside this crude swath of the Front. Undamaged France beckons. Champagne has been reached.
The time line falters as well. At Hurtebise I have stumbled onto a Napoleonic battlefield. On March 7, 1814, Bonaparte’s men clashed on this picturesque height with the Russians of the Grand Alliance sent to crush the French Emperor. Napoleon, as usual, won, but the victory was Pyrrhic at best: for the 5,000 Cossacks killed on the battlefield, there were 7,000 French dead. A monument marks the spot at Hurtebise Farm. A poilu holds a tattered flag with a Marie-Louise, the name given to the conscripts of 1814. The casualty total a century later would show the progress of technology and the regression of generalship. Nivelle lost 275,000 soldiers on the Chemin des Dames. Napoleon would have been dumbfounded by Nivelle’s mulish wastefulness, and by the result—in mid-May, the descendants of his Grande Armee began talking back to their officers. The soldiers heading up to the line bleated like sheep, derisively, in an open admission of loss of faith in their leaders.
From Hurtebise, I walk to the easternmost, wooded end of the Chemin and the villages of Craonne and Craonnelle. This is the so-called California Plateau, named by a nineteenth-century entrepreneur who thought the gold rush association would attract quarrymen to his outdoor dance-hall. It became the most dreaded part of the battlefield. By May 1917, it was known to the entire French army, thanks to a song that smacked of the now-rampant defeatism. The Madelon was forgotten. I quote from Rene Courtois’s monograph, Le Chemin des Dames:
Adieu la vie, adieu I amour
Adieu toutes les femmes
C’est bien fini, c’est pour toujours
De cette guerre infame
C’est d Craonne, sur le plateau
Qu ‘on doit laisser sa peau,
Car nous sommes tous condamnes
Nous sommes les sacrifies.
(Goodbye to life, goodbye to love
Goodbye to all women
It’s all over now, finished for good,
This awful war.
At Craonne, on the plateau
That’s where we’ll lose our lives
Because we are all doomed
We are sacrificed.)
Mutiny and sedition got started among those about to be rotated back to such places as Craonne and Cerny-en-Laonnois. In early May, a regiment that had been taken out of the line and promised leave stayed in their billets drinking wine and playing cards when the order came that they were to return to the Chemin des Dames. The poilus elected representatives, who politely told their officers that there was no way they were returning to the Front. When the officers insisted, the men said they would shoot them first.
The revolt spread with astonishing speed. Before long, more than two-thirds of the units of the French army were affected by insubordination, or worse. Some units agreed to man the trenches, but not to attack. For the first time on the Western Front, men got together as a mass and denounced the madness. It was the war’s finest moment. Tens of thousands of poilus refused to go back to the Front. They wanted the whole sorry slaughter to be history. Now. Immediately.
Ordinary soldiers took over towns behind the Front—martial Soissons is still trying to live down the shame—and commandeered troop trains. There was talk of taking Paris, of overthrowing the government, of going home. The offensive on the heights of the Chemin des Dames petered out into inertia. Henceforth, it would be “the sanatorium” of the Front, the place to send the shell-shocked and those too weary to fight.
Something remarkable happened in May 1917. A shared wave of common sense and common dignity swept over multitudes of mistreated men. The message implicit in their mass disobedience was clear: No longer could their lives be squandered in pointless slaughter. They were men before they were soldiers, individuals before being Frenchmen. The mutineers of the Chemin des Dames are the Front’s only true heroes. It is their statues that should have pride of place in the capitals of Europe instead of those of their executioners. The mutineers, by their actions, resisted the industrialization of murder. Had their example been followed more often during the twentieth century, there might be less reluctance to look back at history. The men of the Chemin des Dames tried to save their skins and, in so doing, save the past from the obloquy of forever being an example of the grotesque. Instead, the skeleton of Soupir’s chateau stands alone in its field, unknown and unneeded.
THE SUMMER AND fall of 1917 saw the tumult on the Western Front return to its more normal medium. Pieces of steel, rather than ideas, were exchanged. Nivelle was dispatched to an obscure command in North Africa after being found blameless b
y an indulgent board of inquiry. His replacement was Henri-Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Petain, a saturnine but humane general who would disgrace himself in old age as head of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Petain quelled the mutinies in the army by promising to call off suicidal offensives, institute more frequent home leave, and improve the food. That was the carrot. The stick was the series of courts-martial conducted by an army hierarchy terrified of its brush with total collapse: 23,385 men were convicted of mutinous actions, 432 were condemned to death, and 50 were shot. Henri Barbusse, according to historian A. J. P. Taylor, claimed that 250 men were purposely obliterated by their own artillery. The soldiers whose death sentences had been commuted were sent instead to penal servitude in the tropics. It is a complaisant commonplace in French histories of the war to state that these figures prove that the army showed leniency toward its mutinous men. To make such a statement is to be a stooge. Leniency was shown to Nivelle, not to the four hundred or so lives that were ruined for standing up to the lunacy of 1917. Even Petain realized this. Henceforth, the strategy of the French army would be to sit and wait for the Americans.
The British thought otherwise. Haig might have blood on his hands, but Lloyd George had egg on his face. The prime minister’s previous support of Nivelle now looked foolhardy, proof of the politician’s misapprehension of all things military. Haig, claiming that the French generals wanted him to launch a major offensive to keep the German invader away from their convalescing army, argued for a huge new campaign in Flanders. The French, in fact, had asked the British simply to keep the Germans occupied with diversionary attacks, but with the mood of I-told-you-so reigning in the war councils of London, Haig was hard to resist. When the mines were blown under the Messines Ridge in June, signaling the first painless British advance since the heady opening day of Neuve Chapelle in 1915, the momentum for the Flanders campaign became unstoppable. There was no gainsaying Haig; he would have his Third Battle of Ypres. It began on July 31, 1917. Another slaughter commenced. On August 29, nineteen-year-old Private E. R. Cadogan died near the Ramscapelle Road outside of Nieuport. Eleven days earlier, Musketier Leopold Aronsohn perished in Artois.
The Ypres campaign ended in the ghastly slime of Passchendaele. Now that so much of the Front and the war is behind us, perhaps the true scale of the crime can be better understood. Field-Marshal Haig advocated frontal assaults, devoid of surprise, in the rain and the mud of the Salient, and even spoke of his cavalry breaking through into open country. He promoted these tactics after the Chemin des Dames, after Verdun, after the Somme, after Loos, after Neuve Chapelle, after the Kindermord at Langemarck. It is astonishing that his name did not become a verb meaning “to learn nothing.” At war’s end Haig received a lump sum gift of £100,000 and was made a peer. Leniency was shown once again.
THE WALK DOWN from Craonnelle into the plain of Champagne has me limping in the lengthening shadows. I pass the first vineyard of my journey—quite an accomplishment for someone who has spent several weeks hiking through the French countryside. It’s as if I’d driven across America without glimpsing a Wal-Mart. This vineyard overlooks the lowlands near the Aisne; next to it on the slope is a large military graveyard, its headstones perversely planted in the same arrangement as the grapevines. The effect is eerie, as if the cemetery were a desiccated vineyard and its crosses oversized stakes deserted by the vine. In contrast to the greenery of the growing grapes, the burnt brown grass of the cemetery seems sad and neglected.
At Pontavert, a village that grew up around a canal lock, I am picked up by a vanful of tipsy country boys. They give me a lift, at hair-raising speed, to the main road leading to Reims. On the way there we pass a sign pointing to Julius Caesar’s encampment. Yet another battle was fought around here, this one in 57 B.C. There is no record of mutinies or of fallen Cossacks in that battle.
I am deposited at a road junction opposite the village Berry-au-Bac. On one side of the main road are tanks and a war monument, placed in memory of a tank cemetery that formed here during the Nivelle offensive. Signs point off to craters where hundreds were killed by exploding mines. Farther up, there’s a farm called Le Cholera.
I look around—cholera, tanks, and craters. In the distance, on the plain of Champagne, the towers of the Reims cathedral stand out in the deepening gloom. The decision is not too difficult. I stick out my thumb and start walking toward town.
2. Reims
Hundreds of starlings are swooping around the facade of the Reims cathedral this evening. They dip and dive as one, controlled by some unseen puppeteer in the scarlet sky above. In the plaza several groups of hang-together tourists wheel about in a sluggish variation of the birds’ aerial dance. The clicking of shutters accompanies the white exclamation of flashes. Automatic light meters adjust to the failing day.
The crowd grows denser on the square—no one wants to go into the sanctuary as long as the birds continue to career around the towers, dart between the statues, twist and turn about the spire. The spectacle makes the eye giddy. It’s as if the mass of sculpted stone were suddenly lighter than air, ready to be drawn aloft by the skittering flock. The pale cathedral has at last awakened to the throngs of men and women staring at it with uplifted faces. That’s when I spot her.
Joan. In armor and on horseback. She rides off to one side of the square. This used to be her town and her show. At the moment she’s half-hidden behind a sanitation truck. Someone has managed to climb her tall pedestal to get a better view of the birds. Of the two great medieval presences in this city, the cathedral and Joan of Arc, one is faring much better tonight.
They used to work as a team, particularly when the Front was just a few short miles to the north of the city. Reims, with its cathedral and its armored virgin, became the poster child of the Great War. Although other towns suffered greatly, this prosperous city became the ville martyre known throughout the world. When Woodrow Wilson was taken on a tour of its devastated streets after the war, the proponents of clemency toward Germany cried foul. Reims had become too emotional an object. The Kaiser’s artillerymen had pounded much of the city into rubble—surely Wilson’s much-lauded equanimity would be shaken by the sight of the devastation. Besides, Reims’s worst moment of the war, when 20,000 shells rained down from the skies, occurred on April 6, 1917, the same day that the U.S.A. went to war with Germany. It was unfair to upset the American president as he prepared to negotiate.
For the better part of four years, the German army had been dug into the heights near Berry-au-Bac and Brimont, training their cannon on the city. Like the tourists turning their cameras on the starlings, all they had to do was point and shoot. The cathedral was first hit in September 1914. Stupefaction greeted this bombardment. Until then, no one thought such vandalism possible. The Germans shrugged off international criticism by claiming that the church was being used as a lookout by French artillery spotters, which it probably was. When the building’s roof caught fire after one well-aimed round of shelling and the magnificent medieval timbers came crashing down into the nave, talk turned to the barbarism of the German soul. This event, along with the burning of the university library of Louvain, Belgium, counted as the greatest aesthetic crime of the war. The fate of Reims and its cathedral would henceforth galvanize world attention as French propagandists used the city’s predicament to full effect. Stories were told of schoolchildren taught in the champagne cellars of the city, of local priests and politicians holed up for months on end as the shells exploded overhead, of apparitions of Joan of Arc during nights made ghostly by the flares above the trenches.
It is difficult to imagine today the spell cast by the image of heroic Reims. People once avidly read news of the place. The educated of the world followed the sandbagging of the cathedral in 1915. The mayor’s name, Langlet, and the cardinal’s, Lucon, were known to every philanthropist itchy to write a check. The town became a magnet for self-promoters. To be a prominent Parisian and not to have visited Reims was an unpardonable lapse, an in
sult to the notion of patriotic chic. Well-connected tourists flocked to the place—actresses, industrialists, and politicians made sure to have their pilgrimages to this Frontline fortress followed in loving detail by the popular press. A totteringly old Sarah Bernhardt showed up in September 1916 to pose with the statue of Joan of Arc on the cathedral esplanade and to film a short scene in some now-forgotten movie. An eyewitness recounts that the actress, dressed as a Red Cross nurse, held a handsome actor-soldier in her arms and then uttered the line, “Oh! An airplane!”—after which cast and crew dashed back to the safety of Paris. Other performers came to declaim patriotic verse in the cathedral doorway as proof of their courage and as filler for the new medium of newsreel. The procession of self-serving pilgrims did not escape the notice of satirists. One political cartoon published in 1915 showed the silhouettes of several well-fed grandees picking their way through the rubble-strewn city. Looking on, an older man confides to the youngster on his shoulders: “That’s a cabinet minister, my boy. He’s come to inaugurate our ruins.”
I TAKE A closer look at the statue of Joan the next morning. She looks mannish, with a small head. She was moved from her place of honor in front of the cathedral sometime after the Second World War. Originally placed there by a national subscription in the 1890s, Joan was first unveiled by President Felix Faure, the French statesman whose most famous act was to die in the embrace of his mistress. At the time Faure inaugurated the equestrian statue, much of French nationalist discourse was tied up with the lost lands of Alsace and Lorraine. Champagne was thus a border province of France. Joan, a mystic from the Lorraine town of Domremy, had shone in Reims; hence, placing her here would show the dastardly Prussians that turn-of-the-century France meant business. Joan would soon get around to taking back what was hers.
Back to the Front Page 17