The Somme battlefield is about thirty miles of farmland, flat here, gently rolling there. In high tourist season it is very green, but broken up often. Unlike at Verdun, where the French dead lie in a few very large cemeteries, there are British cemeteries everywhere around here, some with a thousand graves, some with a hundred. While everyone buried men where they fell during the war, the French, Germans, and Americans often consolidated their burial sites afterward; the British didn’t. Their cemeteries tend to contain mostly men who fell in a single action. Often, most or even all are from the same regiment, and sometimes from the same town. The cemeteries’ names, written on green-and-white arrow-shaped signs, sound like housing developments: Delville Wood. Peake Wood. Contalmaison Chateau. Caterpillar Valley. Thistle Dump. (OK, maybe not that last one.) They sit in the middle of open fields like housing developments, too, surrounded by walls, fronted by gates. Interspersed among them are monuments: steles, obelisks, crosses, Celtic crosses, statuary; English, Scottish, Australian, South African, Canadian. The entire Beaumont-Hamel battlefield is a monument to Newfoundland’s regiment. Ulster Tower, which honors the 36th Ulster Division—they lost nearly five thousand men on July 1, 1916—is a replica of a memorial tower on an old estate in Northern Ireland. Nearby, in the village of Thiepval, a massive multilevel redbrick arch bears the names of more than seventy thousand BEF troops who went missing at the Somme. It sits on a hill, topped by flags and surrounded by trees; at first glimpse, from several miles off, it looks like a fairy-tale palace.
For a long time, it is said, British policy was to make the world England; in this part of Picardy, you could say that Britain’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission managed to accomplish what centuries of cross-channel warfare and intrigue could not.
* * *
The Somme battlefield, which before July 1, 1916, had been all farm and pasture, was reclaimed for those purposes afterward: Trenches were filled in, shell holes leveled. And then the tourists started coming, so many that a lot of farmers felt pressure to beautify their property—make it more quaint, photogenic. Hard as I tried, I just could not picture a battle happening here, much less one of the greatest in the history of the world.
So I went to Flanders.
If the Somme was four months of the war’s most bitter and futile savagery, Flanders was four years of it. If there was any place where you could reasonably expect to behold the lasting scars of the horrors that characterized the war in the thirty-two months before the United States entered it, it would be Flanders. And that turned out to be true—in one spot. But those scars aren’t visible; you can only perceive them using other senses. If you rely only upon your eyes, Flanders appears even more remote from those historic horrors than the Somme, for one reason: It’s in Belgium.
I didn’t even spot the sign telling me I was entering Belgium, but I knew I had done so because everything—the road, the buildings, the cars, even the sky—suddenly looked shinier, more affluent. And more controlled. The French, for example, can be very, well, laissez-faire about speeding; in Belgium, there are unmanned cameras everywhere, on highways and local roads, monitoring your velocity and recording your license plate. Fortunately, I’d been warned; now you have, too.
Belgium is a much smaller country than France, with a vibrant economy, and Flanders is a particularly industrious, and prosperous, region of it. Though it was once almost entirely farms, the land there is, for the most part, deemed too valuable for agriculture these days. The town of Waregem saw fighting right up until the armistice; in November 1918, two American divisions, the 37th and 91st, fought there. After the war, when the AEF laid out a burial ground in Waregem, it was still all farmland. Today, the Flanders Field American Cemetery, with 368 graves, sits in a neighborhood of two-million-euro houses. It is far from singular. If the Somme is pastoral countryside, Flanders is posh suburb. You’d have an easier time picturing a Civil War battle being fought in Palm Beach.
I did manage, here and there, to spot a few recognizable battle sites in Flanders, but they all looked hopelessly alien to their surroundings, compact and self-contained pockets of trauma wedged into tidy, orderly neighborhoods. As I strolled around the little park in the village of Zillebeke that comprised what was once Hill 60—from 1915 to 1917, Australian and German sappers waged an underground battle there that cost many lives—I watched fellow visitors stare at the gouged and upheaved landscape as if they had come across a surrealistic bronze sculpture in a room full of Old Master paintings. No doubt they watched me doing the same thing.
Then I came to Ypres.
The unofficial capital of Flanders, Ypres looks like a medieval city—surprising when you consider that it was the site, all told, of five battles between 1914 and 1918, and was more or less destroyed by the war’s end. After the armistice, though, it was rebuilt so thoroughly, and has been so well preserved since, that it looks like a particularly charming Hollywood back lot. Flanders is in the Dutch part of Belgium, which means most everyone speaks pretty good English; in Ypres, they all do, quite possibly better than you do. The city’s economy is built on tourism, particularly British and Australian. I’m not sure if it actually gets more Australians than English, or only seems like it does because the Australians are less shy about making their presence known. Walk into just about any pub solely to use the restroom and, if it’s detected you’re Anglophone—the accent matters not—you will probably be greeted heartily, implored repeatedly to sit down until you assent, and plied with ale for as long as you can take it.
Ypres’s expansive main plaza, the Grote Markt, teems with English-speakers. It’s dominated by the enormous commercial edifice known as Cloth Hall, and by Saint Martin’s cathedral; both were built in the thirteenth century, reduced to rubble during the war, and meticulously reconstructed afterward. The rest of the square is cafés and restaurants, chocolatiers, and storefronts with names like Tommy’s Souvenirs (“Tommy” being the BEF equivalent of doughboy), the British Grenadier Bookshop, and Over the Top Tours. Union Jacks are everywhere you look. If you go to the right place at the right time, you can buy a block of dark chocolate shaped like a British Mark V tank. “I think eighty percent of our clients are English,” the woman who sold it to me said. It sounded low.
The Grote Markt fairly teems with tourists during the day, but as evening takes hold, they’re all drawn, like water down a spout, toward where it narrows and ends suddenly at a massive triumphal arch of brick and cement: the Menin Gate.
The gate is a memorial to the BEF dead of Ypres. Imposing and surrounded by legend, it was completed and unveiled in 1927; shortly thereafter, a fire brigade in the area sent some buglers out one evening to stand under the arch and play the “Last Post,” an army bugle call signifying the end of the day’s duty—the British equivalent of “Taps.” Soon it became a tradition; it has sounded every evening at precisely 8:00 p.m. since July 2, 1928. During the second war, the ceremony was temporarily moved to a military cemetery in England, but they never missed a night. (In July 2015, a couple of weeks after my visit, they held the 30,000th consecutive Last Post ceremony.) I had mentioned to several British perennials on the Somme that I hoped to attend a Last Post ceremony. “Better get there by seven thirty, or you won’t see a thing,” one advised; “I wouldn’t get there past seven,” another insisted.
That in mind, I managed to break free from my generous Australian hosts at the pub and headed down to the Menin Gate around six o’clock, while the square was still full of lingering tourists. The few people poking around down there at that point only made the place feel even more outsized: Its arch alone—just the opening, not the structure around it—is forty-eight feet high and thirty wide; the chamber it leads to, known as the Hall of Memory, is forty yards long and twenty-two wide. The hall’s barrel-vaulted ceiling, which is even taller than the arch, is coffered, but every other surface—inside and out, floor to ceiling—is covered with names: British and Australian, India
n and South African, Canadian and West Indian. They built the Menin Gate on such an enormous scale because they wanted to have enough wall space to list the name of every British Commonwealth soldier who went missing at Ypres. But they miscalculated: It could only fit 54,382 of them. They had to build another memorial nearby, known as Tyne Cot, for the remaining 34,916 names. I never made it to that one; just looking at the names on the Menin Gate was dizzying. If you take it upon yourself to try to read every one, even in a single section of wall, you can get to feeling claustrophobic, as if all those thousands of men are standing there with you.
I climbed several sets of steps from the Hall of Memory to an upper outdoor gallery (also covered with names) to get some air and a little space; when I returned to the hall, a few minutes later—it was six thirty now—I saw exactly one couple lined up for the ceremony, propped up against a large pillar. Something in their relaxed posture told me they had done this before. I walked over and asked if theirs was a good spot to view the ceremony. “Absolutely!” the man replied, in an Australian accent. He was smaller than his countrymen I’d just left at the pub, and older, a slight man with dark brown hair in his late fifties. He and his wife, a petite blonde around the same age, were, like the group I had spent a couple of hours drinking with, friendly, gregarious, and very enthusiastic about, well, everything. They completed each other’s sentences, at least until they got talking about the gate, at which point the man became so excited that he took over their side of the conversation entirely. They had been to the ceremony many times before, they told me, but had recently retired and were just now embarking on a nine-month trip around the world; figured this was as fine a place to start as any. The man, in particular, seemed as awed by the place as if he had only read about it in books and was just now seeing it for the first time; rattled off history, dimensions, and statistics, some of which were a bit suspect. “There are three hundred and fifty-two thousand names on these walls,” he declared, shaking his head. “Never missed a night, not even during World War II with the Germans all about. A piper would sneak out here every night, play the ‘Last Post,’ and then run away while they shot at him. Never got him.” It’s the kind of place that generates a lot of myths and exaggerations.
As people started streaming in, the couple, surprised to find an American in Ypres, asked me what I knew about the war. I talked a bit about this and that, to appreciative nods, then decided to blow their minds by dropping the name of Sir John Monash. Monash, an Australian, is regarded by many historians as the finest general the BEF had in that war. I said as much. It worked: They were impressed and excited, couldn’t believe I’d heard of the man.
“Monash never got the credit he deserved,” the man asserted. “The English never thought much of him, you know, until late in the war. But he was the best they had, and by God they knew it by the end of the war.”
“They saw him as just another colonial,” I said. “They thought the best generals had to be English.”
“That’s what the historians like to say,” my friend replied, his voice taking on a fervent tone more suited to a sermon or a political rally. “But that’s not the real story. They didn’t try to marginalize him because he was Australian—they did it because he was Jewish!”
“Who knew?” I said.
“Everyone in Australia!” he replied. Who knew?
By seven forty-five, hundreds of people were packed onto the sidewalks and stairways underneath the gate; hundreds more filled the streets outside, where they could not possibly see a thing. Officials in suits and ties gathered in the center of the hall, behind a podium. Chatter grew louder, rolled around the barrel vault, and fell, amplified, on the other side of the hall. And then, precisely at eight o’clock, a little bell sounded, and everyone—a thousand people, maybe more—fell silent, immediately and utterly. Even the children. I’d never experienced anything like it.
In the archway nearest to me, several men in handsome fire brigade uniforms appeared, clutching bugles polished to a high shine. At a silent signal, they marched in, their footsteps echoing off the ceiling and walls, and suddenly came to a stop a few yards from me, perfectly aligned. At another silent signal, they raised their bugles to their lips in unison, took a breath, waited a beat, and played the “Last Post.” It did sound a bit like “Taps”—a touch livelier—and lasted about ninety seconds. When it was done, no one clapped or made any kind of sound; no one moved.
After another thirty seconds or so, one of the men in suits stepped to the podium and made a few brief remarks, in a Flemish accent, about the names on the walls and what they represented. When he was done, another man in a suit stepped up and read, in an English accent, a short biography of one of the names engraved on the walls, a soldier who was killed a hundred years ago that day. Then a third suited man, bearing a local accent, stepped up and called upon representatives from preselected organizations and institutions, as well as a few school groups, to come forward and silently lay wreaths, about a dozen in all.
And then, as promptly as it began, the ceremony ended, and everyone started pouring out into the narrow medieval streets of Ypres, Belgium. The whole thing had lasted ten minutes.
I turned to my Australian neighbors to say good-bye, but it felt, somehow, wrong to speak out loud just yet; and judging by the look on the man’s face—eyes twitching at the corners, mouth screwed up tight—I’m not sure he could have said much of anything right then. I extended my hand to him, instead, and he grasped it in his, tightly, and held it firm for eight or ten seconds but didn’t shake it. We nodded at each other, and he released my hand; his wife rested one of hers on my shoulder and looked at me deeply for a moment. Then we turned away from each other and walked out, separately. I wandered, slowly, back up the old lane to the Grote Markt, to the restaurants and chocolate shops and Tommy’s Souvenirs, thinking about how, rather than traveling back in time, a thousand people stood together on one spot and for ten minutes brought 1915 to the present. It really happened. And no one said a word.
* * *
And that’s what the United States of America missed by entering the First World War “late.” Don’t make the mistake, though, of thinking that the men of the AEF were spared. The war was far from over by the time they got there. New horrors, unthinkable in those early years, awaited them, and they set off to face them already burdened with the knowledge of all those earlier horrors. They trained on ground that was deeply gouged and scarred; ate and slept among bones that would later be collected at Douaumont and other ossuaries. Long before any of them fired a shot, or got shot at, they could see, and feel, how close the war was. A century later, following their trail along the Western Front from Lorraine to Picardy and back again, it still felt close. Sometimes too close.
In all my time traveling around northwestern France and Belgium, though, with the exception of those ten minutes under the Menin Gate, the war always felt remote to me. The Somme and Flanders are iconic historical sites where the history itself is extremely well hidden from view. You might as well put them out of your mind now: None of what you’re about to see from here on out looks or feels anything like those two places do today. The Somme and Flanders are sites where battles once took place. The rest are battle sites.
The difference will soon become obvious.
Chapter Three
Chemin des Américains
Turn your back on the Somme, now, and look ahead, about 250 miles east and one year forward, to the little farming village of Bathelémont. You’re still in France, but just barely; between 1871 and 1918, Bathelémont sat right on the border with Germany, across from formerly French villages that had been taken by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War. Nevertheless, Bathelémont, which is set among rolling hills about an hour from the Vosges Mountains, is unmistakably French—linguistically, culturally, architecturally. You would never find a place like the Old Blighty Tea Room in Bathelémont. Come to think of
it, I don’t recall seeing a commercial establishment of any kind there.
To those who think of Flanders or the Somme or Verdun or the Argonne when they think of the Western Front, this is a strange theater to conjure, this easternmost part of Lorraine, and Alsace, and the Vosges. It can be hilly, even mountainous; in 1915, Hilsenfirst, in Alsace, saw the highest fighting on the Western Front of the entire war, at 4,167 feet above sea level. The French Cemetery at La Fontenelle, in the commune of Ban-de-Sapt in the Vosges, sits atop a very tall hill—impossible to imagine in a place like the Somme—where brutal fighting took place on every slope in the summer of 1915. The topography here somehow makes the war feel more personal; the pain in your calves as you hike the inclines without a heavy rifle and pack and wool uniform connects you, perhaps, with the notion that combat is difficult even for those who come through it unscathed. There are little monuments here and there, mostly dating to the summer of 1914—when it must have still felt possible to document each tragic death the war wrought individually—like the small stone cross I spotted, set back off the road in a clearing:
Here is buried
Antoine LaHache
Priest of La Voivre
Shot by the Germans
August 29, 1914
Bathelémont is in Lorraine, but even by the standards of that région, it’s small, and lonely. Although it’s only about twenty miles east of Nancy, a city of 100,000 that draws a lot of tourists—the city center has a palace, a cathedral, and an expansive plaza, all of them jewels of ornate eighteenth-century French architecture—it’s rare to see anyone out walking the streets of Bathelémont, which has maybe five dozen residents, and no architectural jewels. It’s the kind of place that looks as if nothing has ever happened there. And yet, within a span of just eleven days in the autumn of 1917, the American Expeditionary Forces experienced two monumental firsts in Bathelémont—one exultant; the other grim.
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