Underneath evergreen boughs expectantly outstretched for the snow soon to come, a road marker points out the boundaries of the ephemeral principality of Salm-Salm. Nearby, a worn sandstone marker shows the limits of the German advance in the First World War. A helmet rests on laurel leaves; on the base are inscribed the words: Ici Fut Repousse L’Envahisseur (The Invader Was Halted Here). In the 1920s, veterans’ associations and motoring clubs paid for these demarcation stones to be placed along the line of the farthest German advance. Another marker appears just a few miles on, outside the village of Frapelle. Its little valley, through which the River Fave runs, seems to be sadder and more scarred by time than wooded Salm-Salm. Rusting wrought-iron calvaries stand near crumbling bunkers, the door of a wayside chapel creaks in the freshening breeze, great black birds swoop through the rotting rail fences. The rain clouds are closing in once again and the sky darkens. A local delivery van gives me a ride through a three-mile-long tunnel to the town of Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. I’m at the gates of Alsace in the pouring rain. Before I pass them, we must first return to Picardy.
IN THE SPRING of 1918, the Germans got to the gates of Amiens. Their attack on March 21 opened at 4:40 in the morning when close to 7,000 artillery guns fired off steel and gas shells on the unsuspecting British front and rear positions. It was the most massive bombardment of the war. After five hours of this inferno, the Sturmtruppen dashed out of their trenches into a thick, protective fog and by noon had smashed through the British lines and were heading into open country. By nightfall, the Germans had gained more in one day on the Somme than the British and French had captured in all of their offensive of 1916—which had lasted 140 days and cost them more than 500,000 casualties. The following days, the feats were repeated as the British were forced to scramble back over the downlands of Picardy in utter disarray. Guillemont fell, as did Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, even Albert, all the towns and villages so viciously contested two years earlier. Trench warfare was over. My grandfather Bartholomew, caught up in this rout, was made prisoner as half a million German soldiers advanced forty miles into the west.
An Australian friend also had a grandfather involved in that distant turmoil. Private Frank Gordon Turner, a survivor of Passchendaele, celebrated his twenty-first birthday on March 21, 1918, the fateful day of the launching of Ludendorff’s so-called Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle). He and his fellow troops from New South Wales, then stationed in Artois, were hurriedly sent south to the Somme and eventually into billets at Villers-Bretonneux, a village just six miles east of Amiens. It was there, on April 4, 1918, that the Australians would finally be the ones to halt the overextended German forces. His journal for that day is a common man’s experience of an uncommon day:
I was awakened by the loud report of a shell which landed just a few yards from the room I was sleeping in & opposite the window, parts of the shell came through the window & splintered wood must have been flying. With my first waking breath I got the fumes from the shell down my throat & to make matters worse a piece of wood hit me in the face making my left: cheek bleed a little, the fumes of the shell burnt my throat terribly. I thought I’d snuff it. I got out into the fresh air & slime & slobber streamed from my nose & mouth … an officer came up & asked me if I could detect any gas about. I’d a liked to have told him what I thought of him asking me if I could detect gas when I reckon I had got a stumack full of it. That shell wounded 6 … & killed one poor chap. One of the fellows … had one leg blown off below the knee & the other one partially cut off… We stood to at about 7 a.m. we got word fritz was advancing towards Villers Bretonneux & so we got all our gear on & went out to meet him. We had some close goes with shells as we passed down the narrow streets along the road to the open fields, we had only gone about ¼ of a mile from the town when we could see the Germans coming about ½ to ¾ of a mile away, there was an aerodrome between us & him & as it afforded a bit of cover we made in that direction … we went forward again about 300 yds. & got along a road in front of the aerodrome from where we got a very good field of fire, as we got into our position the nearest germans were about 300 yds. in front of us. hundreds of them must have fallen by our rifle shots … it was raining all the day; about 2 p.m. there seemed to be some movement on our right, all our men were retreating & we knew no reason for it. we thought fritz must have broken through & was cutting us off… Fritz evidently didn’t grasp the situation of things on our side & never stirred from his position, we dug ourselves in when it got dark & was fairly comfortable till word came we had to go about 200 yds. further on. The night was pitch black & we went forward once & got lost, found our old position & started out again, this time after a good deal of wandering about we found the place we had to go to. & so we had to dig in for the second time in one night. I was very tired but daybreak was approaching & it rested with ourselves whether we were under cover by daylight or not. My mate Ted Ryan & I dug in together & was quite safe by morning.
Ludendorff then launched a scaled-down but nonetheless murderous attack in Flanders and Artois. The spearhead of his forces encountered a Portuguese unit, who abandoned the Christ of the Trenches at Neuve Chapelle and disappeared behind the lines. Debacle threatened again as stormtroopers raced past the whorehouses of Bethune and Armentieres toward Hazebrouck and Bailleul, major supply depots for the British army.
Fatigue now stepped in. Many German soldiers, half-starved after years of fighting on the side that had been successfully blockaded, could not believe their eyes when they saw the relative opulence of British supplies in food and drink. They realized that their leaders had been lying to them about the effect of submarine warfare and the parlous state of Allied economies. In the open countryside behind the old British lines, the conquering Germans busted open wine cellars. The best army on the Western Front began to disintegrate. In just over a month, more than 350,000 German soldiers had been wounded as a result of the attacks in Flanders, Artois, and Picardy; 50,000 had been killed. Mass drunkenness and bouts of long-deferred gluttony stalled Ludendorff’s latest advance, as did stiffening British resistance. The ordinary, stoic Feldgrau began to disobey orders. As at the Chemin des Dames in 1917, the human spirit momentarily triumphed.
His Flanders breakthrough thwarted and his army disgruntled, Ludendorff called off the offensive. During May of 1918 the Germans secretly moved thirty divisions to their lines behind the Chemin des Dames, the quiet “sanatorium of the Western Front” ever since the Nivelle disaster thirteen months earlier. The French suspected nothing. Worse yet, the general in charge of this section of the Front, Denis August Duchene, refused to implement the defense-in-depth system of manning the trenches out of a stubborn belief that every single speck of his beloved France should be defended to the utmost. Thus the bulk of his forces were in front-line trenches—and were consequently annihilated when the awesome German artillery went into action on May 27. Within a day, the attackers had overrun the French line, sprinted down the slopes from the Chemin des Dames, crossed the River Aisne, and gone more than twelve miles. For the French army, which had broken itself in the Nivelle offensive, the German success on this day and over this terrain was a slap in the face felt for many years. It was yet another reason to ensure that the miracle on the Marne and the myth of Verdun became the sole French memories of the war.
The spirit of Götterdämmerung had overtaken the military minds in control of the Kaiser’s armies. Nothing mattered but the battle, regardless of the future. As the Germans came ever closer to the Marne, even Pershing grew alarmed enough to allow his new doughboy divisions to be put under the temporary control of the French and the British. Eventually the offensive was stopped at Chateau-Thierry.
This astounding spring of 1918 was not yet over. A debilitated Europe came into contact with an influenza strain that would kill millions more than the war itself It was called “Spanish” influenza, because Spain, as a nonbelligerent country, had allowed its uncensored press to report the multiplying instances of the sickness within its
borders. On the Western Front, whole regiments of Allied soldiers fell ill; the underfed and extenuated Germans fared even worse. Ludendorff, unfazed, ordered more attacks. By mid-July of 1918, the German army could do no more. The stage was set for the endgame.
9. Alsace
In Flanders the river that separates the Latin from the Germanic peoples is called the Douve. I crossed that linguistic front on a sunny day in July, just south of the village of Messines, Belgium. Here in the Vosges, the Liepvrette forms the divide and runs through the town of Ste. Marie-auxMines. It is now mid-September and the sky seems to have resigned itself to remaining gray. To the north of the Liepvrette lived the French speaking Catholics who owed allegiance to the Duke of Lorraine, to the south, the Alsatian-speaking Lutherans and Calvinists bound to the Count of Ribeaupierre. The political and linguistic division was enshrined in an agreement of 1399; the religious complexities came later, shortly before Ste. Marie-aux-Mines turned into the site of a sixteenth-century silver rush. Hence its name.
On the town’s main square, the facades of half-timbered houses form a staircase of gables on either side of steeply pitched roofs. French is definitely not the only lingua franca in the streets here. Alsatian drifts out of pastry shops selling rich butter and pound cakes unknown in the Latin lands of petits fours and croissants. Alsace, the smallest of France’s regions, is the final staging ground of the Front.
These last days are spent hiking and hitching along the Route des Crêtes, a summit-skirting roadway built in the First World War to help French troops get to and from the diabolically placed battlefields of the Alsatian Front. On peaks such as Tête des Faux and the Linge, men fought each other so as to control vantage points over other peaks. It was inane, even by Great War standards. Wherever the high ground was highest, the loosely organized lines suddenly became full-blown trench systems, in spots just a few yards apart, accessible only to French chasseur and German Jäger troops on their skis. It sounds more exalted than the trench warfare in Champagne or Artois, but in fact it was as brutal as any other sector of the Front. A relative dearth of artillery meant more hand-to-hand fighting, more desperate bayoneting in sneak attacks, more gas canisters in the still mountain air, more blood on the snow. Thousands of men perished in these fights of 1914 and 1915, until both parties to the pointless savagery realized that stalemate had descended on the mountains and that the war would be won or lost elsewhere. This land was meant not for war but for hikers.
Make that hikers with the legs of a champion cyclist. My second day in the Vosges Mountains has brought me huffing uphill to the Bonhomme Pass, formerly the boundary between France and Germany. The Front passed onto imperial German soil here for the only portion of its entire 450-mile length. Bonhomme, at 3,084 feet in altitude, leads to higher battlefields yet. I take a hiking trail south from the pass and am soon within hollering distance of two mountain lakes, Lac Blanc and Lac Noir. They look cloned from a postcard image of northern Ontario. Great gray rock formations and lone pine trees stick out at odd angles along their shores. As I leave Lac Noir, its green-black waters turn blue in a sudden and brilliant burst of sunshine, and the morning’s autumnal chill is banished. Soon the forest thins in the warming air and the first of a series of alpine meadows appears before me. I have somehow gone from Ontario to Austria in a few steps. Cowbells tinkle over great slopes of deep green, which are bordered by hardy bushes the color of rust. I continue on, enchanted, Maria von Trapp-like, forgetting why I am here—until a French tricolor can be seen fluttering incongruously in the distance. I am nearing the Linge, one of the two famous Front sites of Alsace.
The battlefield, or rather battlehump, looks like a garden strung with barbed wire. A strange park suitable only for mountain goats with a metal detector, the Linge stretches on seemingly indefinitely, its trench systems snaking up and down a summit denuded of trees. A level path has been carved out through the topsy-turvy contours; whenever the trail-makers struck a body they put up a cross—white for French, black for German. The resulting random cemetery of black and white against the purples and greens of the thistles and junipers makes the place oddly beautiful.
The attention to appearance continues in the Linge’s small museum. In 1914, a French commander gave his assessment of what it took to be a chasseur soldier and wear the broad berets of his regiment with the appropriate swagger. His words are blown up and put on a large cardboard sign. The man should have been writing cover lines for fashion magazines. The original French is worth citing:
C’est la rapidite dans Vexecution des gens qui “pigent, ” qui (
(It’s about doing things fast by people who “get it,” who “move it.” It’s about drive, it’s about pace, it’s about style.)
The other major battle site in Alsace is far less tony. It spreads like a stain over a peak called Hartmannswillerkopf, a lookout over the valley of the Rhine. On leaving the Linge, the Front runs downhill to the east of Munster, a tourist town now principally famous for its cheese and the storks that nest on its gaily colored rooftops. From there the broken line of bunkers heads into the shadow of the Grand Ballon, the summit of which, at 4,628 feet in altitude, is the highest point of the Vosges. Hartmannswillerkopf, a few miles to the southeast of the Grand Ballon, qualifies as the Alsatian Verdun in both senselessness and empty symbolism. The French chasseurs, unable to get their stylish mouths around the Alsatian, dubbed the place Le Vieil Armand (Old Armand).
In the first two years of the war a horrible game of King of the Castle was waged here by troops destined to perish after each fragile conquest. It became a point of honor to take the summit of Hartmannswillerkopf. There were attacks and counterattacks in almost every month of 1915. The battles here surpass even the Linge for feral atrocity. At the peak of the mountain the trenches came within four yards of each other. Pumped-up units would capture the height, celebrate their victory, then disappear to the last man in the inevitable reprisal raid a few days later. When in the beginning of 1916 it finally dawned on both sides that neither could dominate the highest point for long, the armies retreated to comfortable trenches slightly downhill and spent the rest of the war awaiting the decision of Picardy, Flanders, and Lorraine. It had taken a murderously long time for this modus vivendi to develop. Aside from Hartmannswillerkopf’s huge cemetery of the identifiable dead in their separate plots, there is a mass grave here for more than 10,000 soldiers.
When I walk from the wide lawn of the graveyard up the last two hundred yards to the cross at the summit, the notion of a calvary is inescapable even if that image does not fit. There is nothing holy or sanctified about such tortured ground. The peak is scarred, not sacred. Far from being a national Golgotha, Hartmannswillerkopf is the Front’s final testament to the sheer futility of the Great War. Unlike every other part of the Front, however, the trenches here come with a view. Hundreds of feet below the peak, the green and yellow plain of Alsace fans out toward the dark metallic ribbon of the Rhine in the distance. Beyond that, a dozen miles away, the cloud-topped ridges of Schwarzwald—the Black Forest—roll in like breakers from the eastern horizon.
The view from this, the last great battlefield of the Western Front, might please some improperly weaned Nietschzean, but it is inconveniently grandiose for my purposes. The war, like the Front, did not end on the heights of exultation, with some clear-eyed view from a mountaintop of acquired wisdom. The war of our grandfathers ended the way it had been waged: sloppily, cruelly, destructive of the past and disastrous for the future. The endgame of the war already partook of the twentieth century’s long march into forgetfulness.
So WHAT HAPPENED? The byword of the regular Allied soldier stuck in France after the last of the Ludendorff offensives was: “Wait for the Americans and the tanks.” The former now numbered more than a million and the latter, proven devastatingly effective in a limited engagement at Cambrai at the end of 1917, were rolling off assembly lines. The chief Allied commanders�
��Foch and Petain for the French, Haig for the British, Pershing for the Americans—drew up plans for a grandiose offensive in 1919. In the meantime, it was agreed, the exhausted Germans could be kept off balance by a series of attacks until the advent of the wet, cold days of winter.
The French and the Americans began the decisive action on July 18, 1918, by attacking the new German salient that stretched to the Marne. Their superiority in manpower and firepower pushed the Germans back until new defensive lines were formed south of the River Aisne. On August 8, it was the turn of the British army. In a surprise attack out of the village of Villers-Bretonneux in Picardy, Australian and Canadian troops followed a wall of tanks and made ten-mile incursions into the German front. More important, the scale and suddenness of the success revealed to commanders on both sides the demoralization of the Kaiser’s armies. Many units surrendered after putting up only token resistance, the Feldgrau soldiers singing in delight as they emerged from their dugouts to surrender.
The Allied attacks then came in quick succession, forcing the German warlords to scramble to send their ever-depleting number of reinforcements to help manage an orderly retreat. On August 20, the French attacked again on the Aisne; the following day the British hit north of Albert. By the time the Americans went into action at St. Mihiel the Germans had retreated in Picardy once again to the Hindenburg Line. Even that could not be held. The Belgians and the British finally broke through at Ypres, as the Americans pressed up in the Argonne in late September. Soon every Allied army was attacking as the German army slowly backed its way through Belgium and northern France.
At home, imperial Germany began to fall apart. The autocratic government and the privations of wartime could be endured no longer. Riots broke out, sailors mutinied, and a new liberal chancellor was appointed to work real reforms with the Reichstag. Ludendorff resigned his post on October 27—and would remain in obscurity until 1923, when he participated in Hitler’s failed beer-hall putsch in Munich. In early November, 1918, the Second Reich finally collapsed under the pressure of mounting chaos, and the Kaiser, forced to abdicate, fled to the Netherlands. The newly constituted republic consented to the Allied terms for surrender and the armistice was signed in Field-Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in a clearing of the Compiegne forest. The papers were initialed in the early hours of November 11, 1918. A few seconds before eleven o’clock that same morning, one observer with South African troops in Flanders saw a German machine-gunner fire off a scorching hail of bullets toward their trenches. At the stroke of eleven, the gunner stood up, made a deep bow, turned around, and walked away.
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