Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  The two are literary war buffs, the most distinguished branch of a family that includes souvenir hunters, gore aficionados, munitions freaks, destruction junkies, army bores, inverted pacifists, medal collectors, mutilation perverts, macho memoirists, armchair Napoleons, misogynist camp-followers, closet Attilas, frustrated murderers, and myself. My erudite dinner companions think of the Great War exclusively as a literary event. One of them downs the last of his brandy and, to my astonishment, proposes to recite from memory the entirety of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Owen, Britain’s most beloved war poet, was killed in action just one week before the Armistice of 1918.

  The poem’s title, I am told by way of a throat-clearing introduction, refers to a line from Horace, “How sweet and noble it is to die for one’s country,” which every public schoolboy in 1914 Britain would have known in its Latin original. Owen sets his famous parable on the Front as a group of soldiers leave the trenches for a rest in the rear. “Five-Nines” are shells:

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

  Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,

  Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

  But someone was still yelling out and stumbling,

  And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …

  Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  The waiter looks askance at us as we sit in silence, brooding in a bath of anachronism. I eventually ask the reciter where he learned to declaim Great War poetry so movingly.

  “I didn’t iearn’ it,” comes the reply. “I wrote it. I am Wilfred Owen.”

  The laughter arrives a split second too late, and the would-have-been poet has a fixed look in his eye. I find an excuse to leave shortly afterward. They’re delighted when I turn and salute at the door.

  THE LANDSCAPE EAST of St. Mihiel looks as literary as last night’s dinner companions. A green plain stretches out to the east, its perspective pleasantly broken up by great stands of tall birches and swaying poplars. In the background, a sudden hill stands alone, crowned with a classical peristyle. Large puffs of cloud float over it, weightless portents in a blue sky. Birds wheel about. The view is Byronic, Romantic, as much an incitement to reverie as is the natural rhythm of walking. I half expect the classical building to be an ivy-covered ruin, or to see a riderless white charger rearing on the summit. I feel the need for a cloak, or a headful of Greek. The bucolic Olympus draws nearer.

  The spell is broken as two fighter jets thunder in from the north to bank sharply over the monument. The apprentice top guns of France obviously have a favorite flight path that takes them hedge-hopping at earsplitting speed over the Mort Homme, Les Eparges, and then this hill, Montsec. The effect is unpleasant in the extreme. What was a peaceful setting becomes a disturbed chop of raw sound. A third jet rends the air above the hill. For once the Western Front had disguised itself as something other than a killing field, and these French flyboys have to go and ruin it. Petulant and proprietary, I begin the ascent of the hill.

  For all my Romantic maunderings, the circular colonnade atop Montsec is a war monument. It commemorates an American attack of September 1918, just like the pillar at Montfaucon. The St. Mihiel offensive, as it came to be known, was the first U.S.-commanded military action on European soil and preceded the Meuse-Argonne effort by a couple of weeks. It raised the curtain on a new era of Old World acquiescence in leadership from abroad. The American army was a fledgling then, not the bloated beast of today that eats away at Washington’s financial health. Montsec, in a way, is the birthplace of the Pentagon.

  Given that dubious distinction, the view from its summit might be expected to be overpriced, or at least classified. Neither is the case. Montsec’s vista stretches from the hills near the Meuse across a quilt of farmlands to the heights of the Moselle. It was here on September 12, 1918, that Pershing’s men closed the giant German salient of St. Mihiel, through a combination of luck and overwhelming superiority in men and materiel. The luck came from the German decision to retreat just as the battle was about to begin. In some places, the American infantry had to go chasing after their prey, looking for someone to fight. In others, artillery obliterated the German lines. The battle, unlike Meuse-Argonne, was a swift American victory.

  From Montsec the distant American and German cemeteries at Thiaucourt can be made out far to the east. Closer by is the village of Essey, where the youthful Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were supposed to have engaged in an ostentatious game of chicken by walking out in the open as German shells flew. My sole companion during my stay atop Montsec is a gray cat that slinks around the monumental columns in a private slalom. When it suddenly stiffens, I guess the reason. An instant later, yet another Mirage jet flashes in front of the sun, screaming its message about the tiresome grandeur of French firepower.

  Back on the plain, after an hour or two of walking, I come across a more prosaic reminder of that firepower. A suspicious-looking copse turns out to be the ruins of Remenauville, a village destroyed in the Great War. Its flattened neighbors were rebuilt, but no one returned here, at least to live. A large sign in Remenauville’s rubble warns the visitor:

  Ne Ramassez Aucun Objet Metallique

  Evitez Nos Eorets en Periode de Chasse

  (Do Not Pick up Metal Objects

  Stay away from Our Woods in Hunting Season)

  The shooting never stops around here.

  8. Pont-H-Mousson to Badonviller to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

  The long days of summer are drawing to a close. At sunset now, the slanting light in the sky betrays that Pont-a-Mousson lies closer to the pole than to the equator. Its latitude is the same as that of the uppermost tip of Lake Superior. The town sits on the left bank of the Moselle, midway between the two major urban centers of Lorraine. Upstream is Nancy, the baise-beige gem of eastern France; downstream, Metz, the region’s battered industrial and religious center. Pont-a-Mousson, although small, is famous throughout the country. On any given day thousands of people in French cities look down to see whether their shoes are still clean and glimpse the words “Pont-a-Mousson” stamped on manholes and sewer covers. It may not spell glory, but it is recognition.

  On crossing the Moselle, the warrior Western Front is almost over; indeed, many histories do not consider the Franco-German face-off that took place from this point to the border of Switzerland as trench warfare in the traditional murderous sense. Their maps of the Front stop at St. Mihiel. Yet there were trenches in most places, even if the warfare was limited. After the lemming-like attacks of Plan XVII in the summer and fall of 1914, the remaining Lorraine segment of the Front became a fairly somnolent sector, loosely held and leisurely in its rhythms. The vagaries of terrain and inadequate tr
ansport links ruled out offensives of the gruesome magnitude of the Somme or Verdun. One story of these lackadaisical trenches tells of a French reserve unit in the front line firing off its ammunition harmlessly in the air at the same hour and day every week. The German troops opposite would then do likewise, after which everyone went back to playing cards and skittles with their friends. In rugged Alsace, a few savage battles took place in 1914 and 1915 until the generals who ordered them realized, presumably, that they were looking at large-scale maps of remote mountaintops lost in a sea of conifers. All was then quiet in most of Alsace and Lorraine, an ironical wartime fate for the regions that had been peacetime bones of contention.

  Thus the last part of the journey must hasten over a Western Front that is little more than a dotted line. Hunting season approaches, and as I struggle up the slopes of Vosges I do not want some schnapps-sipping rifleman to mistake me for an oddly foulmouthed deer. Dispatches will suffice as I race not to the sea but to Switzerland. The Front is ending, as are the summer and the warm weather. So too is the war. Nineteen-eighteen is upon us.

  THE MOMENTOUS EVENTS of 1917 spelled both trouble and triumph for the Allies. The Americans had finally plumped for war, but they were not about to let their ever-increasing contingent of men in France be placed under the authority of the likes of Haig and Nivelle. The sorry slaughters of the Chemin des Dames and Passchendaele had given proof of command incompetence, and army morale now rarely rose above the parapet of the muddy trenches. Unlike the volunteers in the first half of the war, most new conscripts at the Front in 1918 knew that they were cannon fodder in a questionable cause.

  The Western Front was one of the few fronts that remained a stalemate in the world at war of 1918. In the Ottoman lands of the Middle East, the work of British armies and agents had done what the ineffective landing at Gallipoli had failed to do three years earlier. The Ottoman Empire teetered on the brink of collapse. Arab nationalists, aided by T. E. Lawrence, one of the few dashing figures of the entire conflict, had cast their lot in with the Allies and fought effectively against the Turks. In its desire to lay its hands on Ottoman possessions, London spoke of nationhood to all who could help in the struggle. Not only were Arabs promised autonomy, but so were European Zionists. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 recognized the principle of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. When the British army took Jerusalem just before Christmas, 1917, much was made in the press about this being the first time since the Crusader era that Westerners had controlled the sacred city. Less was made of the British determination to keep the place. To the embarrassment of British and French governments paying lip service to Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, the newly empowered Bolsheviks of Russia published the secret treaties that had been signed among Allies with an aim to divvying up the Ottoman Empire. The British and French now looked as rapacious as their worst caricatures of the Germans.

  Embarrassment, however, was the least of the worries to emerge from Russia. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks had yanked Russia out of the war—or rather they had recognized that in the long-suffering Russian army there was no real will to fight any longer. Combat stopped on November 29, 1917. As good revolutionaries, the Bolshevik delegation to the peace talks at the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk refused at first to negotiate with the German representatives. How could heralds of a new world order deal with the lackeys of an imperial power? In response, the German armies advanced farther and farther into Russia until Petrograd itself was menaced. Trotsky changed his mind and on March 3, 1918, signed a peace treaty. The gigantic Eastern Front ceased to exist. The Germans could do what they hadn’t done since the summer of 1914: concentrate all their strength in the West. The Americans hadn’t yet arrived, and the British and French had exhausted themselves the year before. For a warlord like Erich Ludendorff, who along with Hindenburg now commanded the war effort, the moment was propitious to renew the attack. Visions of winning the war once again swam in front of Prussian monocles.

  THE ROUTE FROM Pont-a-Mousson to the next Front town of Nomeny may be the Platonic Form of a French roadway. Magnificent poplars line both shoulders, giving a rustling, silken shade to the walker as he looks out at the golden fields rolling to the horizon. The three b’s of Francophilia—beret, baguette, and bicycle—would not look out of place here, especially if the first were worn by a wrinkled peasant taking the second home from town on the third. Some say that the French originally started planting these roadside trees so that their armies could march in the shade. Others maintain that it’s done to halt erosion and provide windbreaks. Still others claim that they are placed there because they look good. Whatever the case, it is a pleasant way to start my several days of forced march southeast toward the Vosges.

  The Front turns at Nomeny to head south along the valley formed by the River Seille. After a few hours’ walking through its villages, I am convinced that it should be renamed the River Dog. Woofers bound out of yards, from behind fences, seemingly out of trees. A particularly friendly one slobbers on an unproffered trouser leg. I press on, past the vale of Champenoux, an important site of the battle for Nancy in 1914, and a lonely French military cemetery on a rise outside of town. There is not one signature in the visitors’ register. Long days go by serenely as the Front snakes through windswept farmland east to Arracourt, then southeast past the villages of Xures, Xousse, and finally to Badonviller, at the edge of the forests of the Vosges. The landscape thus far has been untortured, but unlovely too, the village churches always a variation of reinforced concrete and stern slate roofs. Mud from tractors scores the roadways and leaves telltale marks in front of the large slatted doors that serve as entrances to the farmhouses. People in Lorraine used to sleep with their livestock; now it appears they cohabit with their farm machinery.

  Badonviller is a town that once was to pottery what the nearby city of Baccarat is to crystal. The works have all closed, and the place is a somber snapshot of rural France, the crows in its main square sharing a bench with an aging cure in a black soutane. Beyond is the leading edge of pine trees and an abrupt ridge that I cross at a gap called Chapelotte. Bunkers and pillboxes can be seen sticking out of the forest floor, and a hiking trail has been laid out to titillate the war buff. I follow it over well-marked trenches and a carpet of needles to end up in a small outdoorsy tourist outpost named Pierre Percee. The ruin of a pink sandstone castle overlooks a placid lake mottled with wind-surfers. This is too beautiful to be the Front. A man in a wet suit gives me a ride in his four-wheel drive through the forests to the town of Senones. He never realized that the guerre de quatorze came anywhere near his sylvan paradise.

  IN ITS CLOSING stages, it didn’t. By the spring of 1918, Ludendorff was ready to launch his final offensives all the way back up in Flanders and Picardy. Unlike their French and British counterparts, the planners on the German general staff had learned from years of static warfare. They might have been undemocratic, class-conscious, heinous Junker autocrats, but they were open to new ideas. These were supplied by a certain Captain Geyer, one of the shrewdest tacticians of the war. He saw that the Allies’ adoption of the German defense-in-depth system—whereby the first trench was lightly manned and the main fighting force kept in different positions well away from no-man’s-land—spelled failure for the offensive tactic that had been adopted by both sides since the time of Verdun. The defenders could always counterattack.

  It is important to linger for a moment here on tactics, because Geyer had found the way to end trench warfare. He eliminated the static Front. Henceforth, the war would be one of movement, the type of moving mayhem that generals had been seeking since the failure of the Schlieffen Plan. Geyer’s tactics called for an intelligent use of surprise, precision artillery, and specially trained Sturmtruppen, or storm troopers.

  Sturmtruppen were the key. These elite troops probed the lines right behind the creeping barrage of artillery until they found a gap in the defenses. They then ran through, rifles slung over their shoulders, throwing gre
nades and reaching the enemy’s second or third lines. They performed fish-hook maneuvers, whereby they raced beyond defensive positions then turned around, set up machine guns, and fired into the startled defenders’ backs. Once they had established isolated strongholds the bulk of the infantry came on, accompanied by dive-bombing airplanes and mobile artillery. The goal was to create confusion, exploit it, and unnerve defenders who would no longer know where the Front was. To do this the stormtroopers needed suicidal bravery, great latitude in taking the initiative, and lots of luck.

  On March 21, 1918, everything fell into place. Ludendorff decided to attack over the old Somme battlefield. In the week that followed, it looked as if Germany might win the war.

  SENONES IS A logging town and former monastic center that used to be the capital of an independent principality known as Salm-Salm. It was a forested Ruritania that lay sandwiched between Alsace and Lorraine and lived peacefully under its German princes until a stirred-up local populace voted to become a part of France during the revolution. Nowadays, given the banners and pennants festooning its old square, the town seems to regret its vote. As I walk through the wet streets of this lumberjack Versailles, the Front seems farther away than ever. Yet in the wooded ridge to the northwest of town, elaborate concrete bunkers mark the trace of the Great War stalemate.

  I set off southward, climbing a gradual slope to a plateau that was once the hinterland of the princes of Salm-Salm. As if to continue a tradition of strange toponymy—Senones is the Front’s second palindrome—the Salm-Salm countryside is now known as Ban-de-Sapt. I spend a quiet moment in the French military cemetery of Fontenelle, its Art Deco sandstone statues a marked change from the crumbling concrete memorials evident elsewhere in Lorraine. All around the graveyard is a dense forest, the familiar thicket of rusted picket stakes and barbed wire barring any exploration. By this stage of my journey, seeing a trench does not immediately impress. It is the cumulative effect of having seen so many tortured forest floors that stays in memory. The Front is a scar, even in this Lorraine fastness.