Back to the Front

by Stephen O'Shea

  The war was over. Princip’s bullet had caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go to fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million had died in their ditches.

  I HAVE COME down from the mountain. The Vosges end as abruptly as they begin, and here at their southern extremity vineyards hug the lower slopes near the towns of Thann and Cernay. Once past the twine of roadways connecting the two, the Front leads over slow rises of alternating field and woodland to the Swiss border. I set out alone over this uneven plain, glad to regain the gentle rhythm of level walking after the strenuous trails in the mountains. Left-right, left-right, left-right—there is little to occupy me now except a longing for closure. But for a flurry of movement in 1914, this may have been the quietest part of the entire Front.

  The route takes me past a garbage dump, then under an expressway near a village named Burnhaupt. I notice with practiced irony that the expressway’s restaurant complex, Les Portes de l’Alsace, is located in no-man’s-land. My long afternoon’s walk in the fields yields no sign of the distant fighting, just the usual regiment of irritated farm dogs. After a night spent digesting sauerkraut in the market town of Altkirch, the last day of my journey dawns. I decide that there can be no trace of the war left in this land of plump cheeks and gabled domesticity. Rural Alsace is far too house-proud to leave trenches lying about. In a village called Hirtzbach I walk alongside a watercourse overhung with scores of flowerpots. On either side of the stream, half-timbered dwellings strain under the weight of several generations of geraniums. The place has won some sort of award. Evidently, the region’s villages try to outbloom each other every year in a competition adjudicated by flower experts. Neatness must count, too—in Hirtzbach, even the dirt doesn’t have dirt on it.

  The gentle landscape outside the villages here is far prettier than that on the plain near the mountains. Low wooded ridges alternate with paddocks of greenery on which listless horses graze. Signs in the villages now inform the curious that this part of the world may be referred to as the Route of the Fried Carp. The tourist board must have decided that this name was snappier than the End of the Western Front.

  At twin villages named Seppois-le-Bas and Seppois-le-Haut, I arrive at a stream called the Largue. On either side of it ran the final trenches of the Front. I scan an old French military map that shows the sector in great detail. The German side was usually better built than either the French or the British, so I decide to follow the eastern, German side of the Largue. My quest for old bunkers is quickly thwarted. After a mile or so the Western Front becomes a golf course, from which I am shooed away by a party of four annoyed duffers. Reluctantly, I take a road around the links to the hamlet of Mooslargue. Two children stop what they are doing to look at me in openmouthed astonishment. I feel as if I have disturbed a field of sunflowers again.

  Muddy little Mooslargue shares with Pfetterhouse, the much larger town on the other bank of the stream, the distinction of being the last built-up area on the Front. On the other end of the ditch is Nieuport. It is said that when news reached the German trenches that a mine had sunk the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British military chief, some clever Feldgrau in a trench started banging his mess tin in delight. Soon the clatter spread, until the whole of the German Western Front was smashing metal plates together, all the way from Nieuport to Mooslargue, through Flanders, Artois, Picardy, Champagne, Lorraine, and Alsace, a chain of undergound derision 450 miles long. Today, of course, Mooslargue is deep in anonymous sleep.

  The bridge over the Largue between Mooslargue and Pfetterhouse stands about half a mile away from the right angle the Swiss border makes at this extremity of Alsace. The stream has been channeled to the south to create a linear fish pond, around which a dozen or so sportsmen are snoozing on lawn chairs beside firmly planted fishing rods. There are signs posted prohibiting outsiders like me from doing the same, but nowhere does it say that I cannot advance farther upstream. I walk under the shade trees past the fishermen, glad to see they are not as secretive and antisocial as their counterparts on the Somme. Although I’m willing to trade civilities—“Are the carp biting today?”—my presence does not excite any interest. The hiker, apparently, is a transient phenomenon to be endured, like mosquitoes in the heat of summer. After continuing for about eight hundred yards more along the bank of the Largue, I understand why the backpacker must be a common sight here in the high season. My path crosses a trail marked by a sign for a Grande Randonnée, a long-haul hiking path that crisscrosses Europe. This one is the E5, which goes from the Atlantic to the Adriatic. It is fitting that my unsignposted summer of walking down a metaphor should end on a track laid out by professional pedestrians. Left foot meets right. There is even a shelter nearby, suitable for sleeping overnight or brewing some tea.

  I am about to turn on my heels and head back to the road when I realize that this cannot be the end. The Front went all the way to the border. I started at the seaside in Nieuport, on the strand, in the dunes, on the beach—not at some place hundreds of yards away. If there is to be an end to this walk, let it be a proper one. For the first time in a week, my Great War presences return. Go on—say Cadogan, Aronsohn, Tommy, Bartholomew, Daniel—find the right place.

  There is a thicket of trees ahead, which I barge through in the hope of finding something that bespeaks finality. The undergrowth thins gradually until I am walking freely up an ankle-twisting slope strewn with loose rocks and dead leaves. Just as a feeling of foolishness begins to steal over me in this landscape of natural anarchy, I catch sight of three ghostly white markers placed at regular intervals in a row. Two have a straight line painted across their top; one, an L-shaped pattern. This is the border, where Switzerland hangs a right.

  This should be enough—the Front stops here. But it isn’t. I follow the markers farther uphill and, within minutes, find what I’ve been seeking. A concrete pillbox crumbles onto the forest floor. The very last in a long line. My grandfathers, Tommy, Cadogan, Aronsohn tell me what to do.

  I give it a kick, then walk away.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Journey’s End

  THE TREES IN the forest have shed most of their colors. Today the sun has come out, a brittle disk hovering tentatively overhead, too weak to burn off the lingering mists and too tired to bring the forest of Compiegne to life. It is November 11, and the Ohio Boomer and I — ten years older than we were during our wintry weekend visit to the Somme—have walked out of the village of Rethondes and into the woods. The only concession made to the passing of a decade is the size of the lunch we’ve just eaten. It was enormous, a foretaste of French middle age.

  The road leading toward La Clairiere de l’Armistice (the Armistice Clearing) runs as straight as the bridle paths that crisscross it at regular intervals. A dozen or so buses painted a drab army green are parked on either side of the paved roadway, their uniformed drivers slouched behind steering wheels, smoking cigarettes and reading hardcover comic books with an intensity that is almost religious. They take no notice of us as we pass, two more civilians on the way through the woods for the ceremony. The clearing at Rethondes, formerly a railroad siding, is where the piece of paper was signed that put an end to the war on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

  At a junction in the road the police are preventing a small crowd of about twenty people from going the last two hundred yards to the clearing. We make our way to the front of the group and see a platoon of women soldiers surrounded by rifle-toting gendarmes. The police is protecting the army. A civilian in a dark suit talks into his lapel, a sure sign that bodyguards and politicians are on their way.

  “Who’s coming?” I ask my neighbor.

  “Dunno,” he replies. “Maybe the president.”

  His companion lets out a derisive snort. “If it were the president, sausage-head, we wouldn’t be this close.”

  The fi
rst fellow motions toward the police. “Then why are these jerks here?”

  It’s a good question, we all agree, and within minutes it is answered. A dark trio of Citroen limos, their cat’s-eyes headlights shining in spite of the slanting afternoon sunbeams, swings theatrically into the intersection. The women snap to attention, the police tense and face us.

  First out onto the pavement, no doubt because of the spring still left in their limbs, are two youthful men dressed in conservative suits. Falling across their chests, in beauty pageant fashion, are sashes, which identify them as mayors of nearby towns. Two fat sash-wearers then struggle out of the second car, followed by an elderly general laden with shiny medals and metallic braid. The beige kepi on his head looks as if it has spent a week in the shop of a playful goldsmith. One man seems not dressed for a costume party. He, we conclude, must be the out-of-town political dignitary. When he steps out of his limo, all of the others mill about him in agitated deference.

  No one in our crowd of onlookers stirs. There is a low buzz of whispered questioning and a repetitive exchange of shrugs. Sausage-head turns toward his friend and closes his eyes, as if granting him a debating point. When he reopens them, it is to say, defensively, “Must be a minister.” The unknown politico—he is, I learn later, the French minister of veterans’ affairs—nods to the small crowd of voters, who look back at him in stone-faced disappointment at his lack of celebrity. He goes to lay a wreath at a monument obscured by the honor guard of soldiers, but already the crowd has lost interest in him. Two dogs somewhere to the back of us have begun fighting, setting up a howling call-and-response that drowns out any attempt at solemnity.

  By the time everyone has turned around to face the intersection again, the limos are leaving. They go the last few yards before turning up the drive toward the clearing, where the main ceremony of the afternoon is about to begin. The honking of a brass band can already be heard. The police relax, the women soldiers whip out their cigarettes. The stone monument shows a Prussian eagle, dashed and dying, brought down to earth. Eventually, we are allowed to continue on our way.

  THE FRONT HAS changed over the past ten years. More and more people are visiting it, and Western Front associations are booming. All is not so quiet. In the Picard town of Peronne, a new museum and resource center has opened to initiate good Euro-citizens into the history and historiography of the war. It is a radical departure from the private little museums that litter the Front with their mix of undigested nationalism and sly war porn. Peronne’s Historial is a stimulating place, giving primacy to cultural studies over the usual military descriptions.

  Elsewhere, people are sprucing up the Front. In Alsace, a weekend volunteer group formed in the early 1990s now comes to weed the Linge and other battlefields. Around Soissons, a group calling themselves war archaeologists spends their time digging up old bunkers and tracing the graffiti left by long-dead soldiers. The French state, always keen to improve its tourism infrastructure, has adopted a World War I logo for signs and cemeteries. In some places, the unmarked battlefields I visited on foot have since sprouted officially sponsored signboards giving officially sponsored versions of what happened. The one at the Chemin des Dames, for example, manages never once to mention the most famous military mutinies in French history. At the Somme, the local government has installed directional arrows with poppies on them, so that British visitors don’t have to struggle with any foreign iconography. Ten years ago, nothing of this sort existed. As it fades further and further into the past, the First World War, paradoxically, seems to be having a revival.

  Whether this renewal of interest will do the cause of truth any good is another question. For those who take even a glancing interest in modern history, the First World War is usually seen as some natural calamity, like the biblical flood. Those who see it otherwise are sometimes crackpots: on November 11, 1993, a group of anarchists took to the streets in my Paris neighborhood and vented their antimilitarist ire by smashing the windows of the local McDonald’s. Even I, who had hiked the length of the Western Front in search of connections, found that one a bit of a stretch.

  As I walk over to the clearing now, it occurs to me that the Front is losing its hold on my imagination, that this may be my last visit to a site associated with the First World War. As a pastime, I’ve come to realize, it is decidedly odd, akin to the zealous gardening hobby of the New Zealand couple I had met years earlier in a Belgian graveyard. What matters to me now is less the content of the past than the way it informs the present. That is the one lesson drawn from my days and nights at the Front: the past must be addressed, shaken up a bit, but then it should be relinquished.

  “AND THEN FOCH took the armistice and put it in his briefcase. Foch got up from the table. Then Foch got off of the train. Foch, despite the earliness of the hour, went to Paris …”

  A military man on a platform in the Rethondes clearing is giving the keynote speech. It is all about Ferdinand Foch, to the exclusion of anything else. Out of the loudspeakers pours a weirdly outdated cult of the personality. Change a few names, and we could be in North Korea.

  The poor fellow’s speech goes on and on. Foch, Foch, Foch, and more Foch. It’s almost a comfort to see how consistent the French army is in its tastelessness. A lifetime has passed since the armistice was signed here, and one of its officers can still publicly behave as if a French colossus bestrode the planet. Instead of showing decency for the memory of the poilus, the army spokesman is constructing a new Napoleon. The sclerosis of his institution inspires awe.

  I look around the clearing. Aside from the official stand, there are two covered enclosures for special guests. The one closest to me holds veterans and their wives. Only a couple of the men look old enough to have fought in the Great War. The rest, in their seventies and eighties, are witnesses to the Second World War. Some, no doubt, were Resistance fighters. All would know of another railway siding near Compiegne, called Royalieu. It is from there that 53,000 French people were sent to Auschwitz. The trains of Rethondes and Royalieu ran through the darkness of the twentieth century.

  As A GENERATION like the Boomers heads into midlife, perhaps it is only natural we develop a longing for context. Hence an interest in the past, and in the century that formed us. Which is a good thing, as long as the tools of our memory become demilitarized.

  Many studies, and certainly most official literature, minimize the bumbling and atrocious conduct of the war. Of Passchendaele and Haig’s decision to press on I have read in an otherwise literate book: “His decision to continue the offensive after the weather broke may have been wrong but it would have been even more wrong to abandon the attack.” This, and other examples like it, make you question the simple humanity of some military historians. Anachronistic anger, of the type I felt at the Chemin des Dames and at Ypres, may not be such a failing after all. If people are still lying, if the statue of Joffre still stands in Paris, the likeness of Haig in London, then perhaps some anger is useful. Why should we accept the party line? If we are to let the past inform our lives, then at least let it be a version that is not a self-serving story issued by some institution like the army or the state.

  What really should be remembered and taught about the Western Front is that, for the first time, societies were reorganized to feed a killing machine. It would not be the last. My ghosts from the Great War tell me to get the word out: what happened to them can happen again. On June 10, 1991, I stood on lower Broadway in New York’s financial district and saw joyful crowds hang people in effigy, as a way of greeting victorious troops back from Iraq. Celebration was in the air, but so too was the sulfur of hate, thick and unadulterated. Something as degrading as the Western Front no longer seemed so implausible. Lest We Forget—not just the dilemmas of our grandfathers, but the continual siren song of violence in uniform. The Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutus in Rwanda, even the Canadians in Somalia. The next century’s short list for enforced amnesia is already lengthening.

  THE OTHER GROUP of guests
at the ceremony in the Rethondes clearing are schoolchildren. There are perhaps two hundred of them, buzzing around their chairs and squealing for the sheer pleasure of it. Their teachers have almost given up trying to quiet them. The contrast between the two groups of guests opposite the podium is striking. The veterans sit silently, almost motionless with age; the young bounce up and down, in frenzied impatience. One is reflective; the other, unlistening. Don’t move, says one; don’t preach, says the other. The divide is clear, and eternal. It says more about the transmission of experience than any Western Front ever could. I turn and leave the ceremony, satisfied, at last, that I have seen enough of my metaphor.

  The following year the French prime minister will visit Rethondes. By then, I will have learned that there was an unsuspected presence with me when I walked the Front. Another great-uncle, Jeremiah O’Shea, the elder brother of my grandfather, was a soldier in the British army. He was also a forgotten man, until a relative in County Kerry summoned up a vague recollection of him. The archivists at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission did the rest. Jeremiah died at age thirty-two, in his native Tralee, of wounds suffered in the Great War, most probably at Gallipoli. His date of death was July 6, 1916, two days after poet Alan Seeger went to his fated rendezvous and two months, to the day, before yet another great-uncle fell at Guillemont. Thus Jeremiah joins Tommy and the others just when it is time to leave them. I am sorry, Jeremiah.