Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  A woman absently comes out onto the porch of the colonel’s bungalow. It is his young wife, just arrived in India from England. She toys with her parasol, then sets it down against the rail. The bandmaster glances over at her.

  She emerges into the sunshine, her long pale dress just clearing the fine white dust of the yard. Her clear eyes survey the ranks, her head sways in time to the music. She makes her choice.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  The young Irishman stammers a reply. He steps forward, takes her in his arms, and they’re off. They swirl through the whiteness, followed everywhere by the music. Around the red and gold of the band, beyond the ranks of massed men, in front of the barracks, behind the bungalow, alongside the compound wall, back though the stark light of the parade ground. His youthful legs are strong and his eyes are dark. Her eyes are closed, her dress twirls in the dust. There is no one in the yard except them. They dance together as if that’s all they’ve ever done.

  The music stops. They are in front of the bungalow. The colonel looks on with a bemused smile.

  “Thank you for the dance, sir.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  The young man crosses the silent yard and regains his place in the rank. Glances are stolen, the moment is held. All is quiet …

  All is quiet indeed. It’s supposed to be, in this part of the world. I close my eyes to the stars over the Front. They were his stars, too.

  Good night, Grandfather. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing the memory. What else do men think about when they’re stuck out in a field?

  Sleep comes quickly.

  4. Suippes to Ste. Menehould

  Army towns seem to fit a pattern no matter where they’re placed. Once you’re in one, it’s easy to hitch a ride, buy a beer, or start a fight. I’ve arrived in the town of Suippes dusty and hungry after a night outdoors and a morning’s detour to the Navarin Farm monument out at the Front. There I saw more names upon names, testament to the offensives of 1915.

  North of Navarin was the Tranchee des Tantes (Aunts’ Trench), a German defensive position that the French infantry took on September 25,1915, as part of a massive attack along the Front between Auberive and the Argonne. The generals, inured to failure in Champagne, refused to believe reports stating that the Aunts’ Trench had been taken by their men. They resisted pleas to resight the artillery accordingly and stop shelling the trench. No fewer than ten French reconnaissance planes flew from Suippes over the position and reported that yes, indeed, the Aunts’ Trench was held by French units. For three days headquarters refused to believe them, having no faith in the newfangled technology of aviation. By the time a survivor had managed to crawl back and convince the doubting staff officers, it was too late. Yet another chapter in the annals of Great War generalship had been written.

  “CRAZY FUCKIN’ BASTARDS, whadda they want now?” My note-taking about Navarin in a Suippes lunch room has been interrupted by what sounds like a Yankees fan.

  “Crazy fuckin’ bastards!”

  I look up, fearful that I’m about to be involved in some NATO headbutting tournament. I expect to see some demented G.I. on hangover leave from his home base in Germany.

  Instead, the speaker is the cafe’s owner, an elderly gent with whom I had spoken French on my way to this table. He is immensely pleased with his deception.

  “Bastards, whadda they want now?”

  The inflection is perfect, even if the meaning of it all has become cryptic. He pulls up a chair and explains in his native French that he says his crazy bastards line to any American he encounters. He introduces himself as Roger.

  He’s up and out of the chair again, dashing past the cash register to pour a few beers for the crewcuts at the bar. He returns with a badge.

  Roger turns out to be the honorary police chief of Lackawanna, New York. Do I know it? Of course, I must. He owes this position to a Second World War acquaintance with whom he has long corresponded. He does not take the distinction lightly—I am asked to examine the badge several times, which I do. It is not certain that the people of Lackawanna need a police chief whose knowledge of the English language stops at one flawless phrase. But Roger intends to find out. Once he gets tired of Suippes, he’s going to retire to Lackawanna. I don’t ask when this is going to occur: Roger is in his late seventies.

  MY LAST DAY in Champagne continues at random. I decide to travel around the outside perimeter of the forbidden Suippes miltary base. Roger arranges a ride for me to the village of Sommepy-Tahure. Today I’ll give up the animal acquaintance with the land that walking confers for some speed.

  My ride, a wiry middle-aged fellow, cheerfully informs me that there is a killer on the loose in the area of Mourmelon and Suippes. Several young conscripts have been found molested and murdered by the side of deserted country roads like the one we’re traveling. He says that these murders are not only a criminal offense, but also, technically, a destruction of army property. If you pick up a soldier hitching and get into an accident, you’re held liable by the army. The same must be true of murder.

  He asks me, creepily, what I think.

  I say that I’m going to visit my uncle. He doesn’t believe me, but neither of us cares.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE Tommy is a no-show today, as are all my other ghosts from the Great War. Walking crosscountry to the distant village of Cernay-en-Dormois, I realize that it is time to get out of this landscape of fenced-off military bases. Even though the scenery has improved—wooded hillocks and fields of dairy cows have taken over from yesterday’s vacuum—I prefer my armies and my murderers to be stashed safely in the past.

  Within minutes of arriving in Cernay, I am on the back of a motorcycle screaming southward. I asked some lawn chair loungers for the quickest way to get to Ville-sur-Tourbe, a Frontline town, so that I could spend the night there. You can’t stay there, they protested, you must go to Saint Minoo.

  Saint Minoo? Before I can unfold my map a youth named Thierry has already wheeled his bike out of a garage.

  Now he is talking to me from the front of his motorcycle as we tear through the country air.

  “Yah ka oo eh ohn ohoh vachement eee. Oo eh eh ohrss eh oo moto?”

  “Oui,” I reply.

  SAINT MINOO, LIKE the entire day, turns out to be full of surprises. Ste. Menehould, as it is spelled but not pronounced, lay far enough behind the Front to have preserved some of its older neighborhoods. It sits in a defile carved by the River Aisne through the forested hills that mark the transition between Champagne and the Argonne. A statue of its most beloved son, Dom Perignon, the clever monk who first put the bubbles in champagne, stands at the western entrance of the town. The sculptor has put a sly, cackling smile on his face, as if the old vintner were half-Voltaire, half-Mephistopheles. Perhaps he just knows the town’s odd secret.

  It takes me a while, too. I first assume that the highlight of tourism in Ste. Menehould is its local government building, erected in 1730 and fairly frequently remodeled ever since. Then I think civic pride must be linked to the elegant, eighteenth-century square dominating the eastern end of the town. Wrong again. In the main market street leading from the square, I come across a series of establishments exclusively devoted to the study, sale, consumption, and veneration of pigs’ feet. The lowly trotter, not Dom Perignon or civic architecture, is Ste. Menehould’s claim to fame.

  The Soleil d’Or seems to be the trotter temple. Garish flashing lights adorn the restaurant’s exterior, attracting the eye to the large trophy window that gives out onto the street. Yet the trophies here are not just for the biggest pig foot feast of the year; some commemorate the owner’s exploits with pedal-operated sailboats. The largest cup marks his prowess in being the first to cross the English Channel in one such contraption. Two small station wagons parked in front of the restaurant are painted with the French word Pedalovoile (pedal-sailing), proof that the man’s obsession is full blown. I cannot resist going in. A long-distance hiker walks into the establishment
of a pedal maniac to dine on a plate of feet—perhaps I have joined the Donner Party after all.

  The interior is an antiquarian’s dream. Tables, chairs, and cooking utensils from the eighteenth century and earlier occupy a low-ceilinged back room. It is here where the trotters are served breaded, roasted, baked, stuffed, stewed, or any of a number of ingenious ways listed on the menu to disguise the revolting combination of gristle, fat, grease, blood, and bone that constitute the delicacy. The only other diners in the room are the two fattest people I have seen since moving to Europe. How fat are they? It is a wonder their arms can reach the table. They are so big that the hefty pile of trotters in front of them look like the legs from an underfed quail. When my sole breaded pigs foot is placed before me, it looks monstrously large, like a football without the laces. I poke at it gingerly with my fork, then notice the two wet-chinned mountains at the next table smiling at my squeamishness. I promise myself never to come back to Saint Minoo.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Lorraine I Alsace

  I. The Argonne

  BUSHWHACK: TO MAKE one’s way through thick woods by cutting away bushes and branches.

  Today is the first day of the rest of my walk. The Argonne, a forest that is a lozenge-shaped patch of dense greenery between Champagne and Lorraine, must be crossed before reaching Verdun. It was once well known in both French and American folklore as a place where tremendous sacrifices had been made. To say “Argonne” to an American of the 1930s was like saying “Normandy” to his counterpart in the 1950s. The word meant France, the war, the battlefield, abroad. For the French, of course, the Argonne was simply another bloody episode in a sanguinary pageant.

  Ignoring the dark clouds scudding in from the east, I head along a track out of Ville-sur-Tourbe toward Hardemont Wood. My passage causes a lot of bovine discussion among the reclining occupants of the fields, but no animal bothers to stroll over and include me in the debate. The wind begins to whip up and a few droplets come singing down, although not so many as to cause alarm. To my right another village lies nestled in the embrace of a broad and gentle ridge. A large black mass moves in, draining the red rooftops and steeple of their color in the darkening shadow. To my left, about four hundred yards distant, a tall spinney of poplars sways in a snapping breeze that drives yet another black cloud forward over the land. Above this windbreak three hawks hover motionless, enjoying a small Wagnerian moment. Miraculously my stretch of moist cowpath is spared the rain clouds. I reach the forest edge, pause, then enter.

  In moments, my boots are covered in mud, and my progress is like that of an astronaut on a damp planet, one foot squelching in front of the other. My path goes through two dark canyons of trees before bordering on a stagnant watercourse. It is there that the insect attacks begin—mosquitoes, bees, and two very large and stupid flies that keep buzzing directly at my right eyeball. After swatting ineffectually for a time, I begin spitting at them, presenting the edifying spectacle of a bowed and muddied backpacker seething with obscenities and spittle. I step over what looks to be a dead dog and arrive, at last, at a clearing. Only it isn’t—every square inch of cleared land is taken up by sunflowers. Beautiful. Even the path is gone. I feel as if I’m intruding on a crowd of rush-hour commuters.

  Unwilling to turn back, I scrape my way along the edge of the field. As it is a dull overcast day, the flowers have nothing to look at but me. A strange sort of self-consciousness sets in as I walk past these vegetal voyeurs, but it is quickly banished when the drone of my accompanying insects reaches symphonic proportions. I begin yelling in rage, only to wake a pondful of ducks at some unseen haven one or two hundred yards to my left. They set up a raucous, laughing chorus of derision at my yelps and shouts. Chastened but still muttering, I continue picking my way around the wall of sunflowers. I was never a Boy Scout.

  A large open field appears on my right, newly plowed and free of insect-harboring weeds. I run toward it, almost tumbling headfirst into a hitherto unnoticed drainage ditch separating field from forest. I clamber down and up the ditch, treading with a squirt on the tonguelike orange slugs that trail their slime over the moist leaves. I won’t be eating escargots for many years. At last I am in the field, a muddy but open space that rises slightly toward the east. All is now peace and tranquillity as a village appears on a rise a mile away. Calculating that I should head toward the woods opposite the village, I set a lively pace to make up for lost time. A dip in the field reveals a red Massey-Ferguson tractor sitting idly in a hollow a stone’s throw away. The muddy furrows give way to burnt hay stubble covered with millions of ladybugs.

  I walk on, content to be out in the open, until I happen to glance once more over to the left to take in the bucolic village scene. It is no longer visible. A thick black curtain of rain is advancing rapidly toward me. I look over at the distant woods, their shades of dull green now a dark mass of indistinguishable shapes. The rain begins sweeping horizontally across the field, making any further advance an exercise in melodrama. Just the two of us out here, me and the tractor. The tractor! I squint to see if it’s worth the trouble. Yes, it has a cab. I begin running over the ladybugs and damp cinders to shelter. Soaking, I climb into the cab and listen to the wind rock the machine in its muddy moorings.

  The worst of the squall passes and I step down into the morass left by the rain. I move toward the woods in the insistent drizzle, knowing that ahead of me, at least, there will be a fairly dry forest floor. The last fifty yards I cover like a swamp creature, sodden and mud-caked and foul-tempered. I slide into the forest, only to find that the track I’ve taken abruptly ends in a thicket of brush and thorns. Outside the rain and mud, inside the brush and—trenches! They are here, camouflaged under a cover of wet leaves but unmistakably Great War pits, sinuously twisting beneath the obstacles on the forest floor. I climb down into one that’s going my way—east—and begin to walk in what might pass for a war buffs dream. Thus far, I had only scratched the surface of the Western Front. Now I am in it.

  I pick my way carefully down the trench, conscious that the leafy carpet below and the canopy of undergrowth above might conceal twisted metal, live ammunition, or worse. The twists and turns go on for a few hundred yards before I reach an impasse formed, unexpectedly, of treetops. The trench has unhelpfully led to the top of a cliff, out of which tall oaks are growing. Seeing the impassable steepness of the slope, I clamber out of the snaking main trench and look around for another route. I see a straight communication trench leading south and decide to give it a try. Within minutes, I come face-to-face with a young deer, staring with indignant fright at my twig-snapping approach. It bounds out of the trench and leaves me alone again. A quarter of an hour later, I am in a shaved wheatfield, in sight of a lovely sylvan village. The trenches have gotten me out of trouble.

  Mud-covered and flushed, I enter the lone cafe of Vienne-le-Chateau. Conversation pauses for a moment, then resumes. I order a hot chocolate and listen to the regulars complaining about this spell of March weather in August. The bartender insists I have some hot food. I munch a few proffered fried potatoes and gaze hopefully at a map that is supposed to show me the way through the heart of the Argonne.

  THE WHOLE PROBLEM with this forest is its denseness. In 1914 and 1915 both the French and the Germans found it impossible to take in its entirety. Indeed, in eight months of deadly skirmishes in this tiny Frontline part of the Argonne—an area only seven miles wide by two miles deep—150,000 men were killed. In 1918 the Americans advanced through it, at a similar human cost. The latter Argonne operation was more chaotic and haphazard than any offensive of the entire war—thousands fell as massive traffic jams on narrow roads slowed the delivery of needed ammunition and supplies to the troops doing battle. Not that they had set out with a paucity of means. The American army began here its budget-busting twentieth-century tradition of overkill in firepower and funding. The initial bombardment of September 26, 1918, on the German positions expended more explosives in three ho
urs than had been used in all of the American Civil War. One historian, John Toland, calculated the cost of this murderous sound and light show to be $1 million a minute.

  The Meuse-Argonne offensive, as it is known in military histories, gave rise to two now obscure American legends of the Great War. One of the stories concerns the so-called Lost Battalion, a group of 550 men who were surrounded at Charlevaux, a wooded vale located about six miles north of where I am currently eating my midday potatoes. Commanded by Charles Whittlesey, a storklike Wall Street lawyer known for his imperturbable demeanor, the encircled battalion held out for three days and nights of repeated, merciless attacks from all sides. In fact, mercy was shown on one occasion: a German squad, led by an officer who had learned English selling tungsten for six years in Seattle, pleaded with Whittlesey’s men to surrender. They refused. A subsequent attempt by the main American force to take the pressure off the embattled soldiers backfired badly when the artillery started shelling the precise spot where the Lost Battalion was holding its ground. Dozens of men died in the first moments of this “friendly fire,” and it looked as if most of the unit was going to be annihilated. A courier pigeon named Cher Ami —which was later stuffed and given to the Smithsonian—eventually got through to the gunners with a message to point their cannons somewhere else. When the Lost Battalion was finally rescued on October 7, 1918, only 194 men were healthy enough to walk away from the most famous death trap of the American war effort. Whittlesey had survived, but not for long. In November 1921, he boarded an ocean liner bound for Havana, had a drink at the bar, then went out on deck and threw himself overboard.

  The other war story shows the hero in a better light. It occurred the day after the Lost Battalion was found and relieved, in the nearby village of Chatel-Chehery. There, Alvin York of Tennessee, a hard-drinking hell-raiser turned born-again teetotaler, would perform a barely credible stunt that would eventually make him the most decorated American soldier of the Great War. During an American attack that was clearly a fiasco in the making, York crept away from his decimated platoon and surreptitiously made his way to a hiding place near the enemy lines. A backwoods marksman, York began picking off German machine-gunners without giving away his position. One gunner would fall, another would take his place, York would fire again, that gunner would fall, another would take his place, York would fire again, and so on. Soon the yokel’s unerring aim had spooked scores of Germans into surrendering to what they thought was a far superior force. Incredibly, Alvin York had single-handedly killed 28 German soldiers and captured 132 others.