by Geert Mak
The attitude adopted by the poet Robert Graves was the polar opposite of this, perhaps in part because Graves was an officer and wished to do all he could to renounce his German origins. He had no qualms about treating an unsuspecting German, whom he had heard humming a tune from Die lustige Witwe during a reconnaissance mission, to a mortar attack fifteen minutes later. He killed with calm pragmatism. He had come up with a sort of formula for taking risks: ‘We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk.’
This same pragmatism also extended to the killing of prisoners. Although it was in violation of every military convention and code of honour, Barthas, Graves and other diarists mention it frequently. Prisoners on the way to the rear lines would have a live grenade stuffed into their pockets, or were simply shot down. When a German patrol found a wounded man in no-man's-land, there was every chance they would slit his throat. Graves: ‘We ourselves preferred the mace.’
The most important thing in actual combat was the group, the soldiers with whom one interacted on a daily basis. ‘Regimental pride’, Graves called it. ‘No one wanted to be a bigger coward than his neighbour,’ Barthas observed. ‘Besides that, the men, stubborn as they were, believed in their own good luck.’ This same sense of solidarity was sometimes a powerful motive for killing: protecting the group, avenging a fallen comrade. Ernst Jünger describes how one of his men, the father of four children, was killed by a British sniper: ‘His comrades hung around the foxholes for a long time, hoping to avenge him. They wept with rage. They seemed to consider the Englishman who had fired the deadly shot to be their personal enemy.’ After the death of one of his best friends, the English poet Siegfried Sassoon volunteered for patrol duty every night ‘looking for Germans to kill’.
‘I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war,’ wrote Winston Churchill to Violet Asquith, the prime minister's daughter, in early 1915. ‘I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can't help it – I enjoy every second of it.’
Still, in most of the accounts of the Great War, one finds little or nothing of the individual passion for killing. On the contrary. Barthas relates how his men, while pursuing the enemy, were suddenly handed butchers’ knives. Clearly, these were to be used to kill the German wounded or prisoners. Most of the soldiers threw them aside: ‘These are weapons for murderers, not for soldiers.’ During the Battle of the Somme, German machine-gunners – shocked by the slaughter – regularly stopped firing long enough to allow British soldiers to crawl back to their trenches. Some British officers even felt that the soldiers’ greatest reservations about going over the top had to do not with their fear of dying, but their fear of killing.
The British machine-gunner Albert Depew was one of the few who wrote openly about how, in 1918, he had jumped a German in a trench and run his bayonet right through the man. ‘He was as delicate as a pencil. When I returned to our trenches after my first charge, I could not sleep for a long time afterwards for remembering what that fellow looked like and how my bayonet slipped into him and how he screamed when he fell. He had his leg and his neck twisted under him after he got it. I thought about it a lot, and it grew to be almost a habit that whenever I was going to sleep I would think about him, and then all hope of sleeping was gone.’
Chapter NINE
Verdun
YPRES LIVES OFF THE PAST, OFF ITS STEP GABLES, ITS NEWLY constructed Middle Ages, off the graves and the dead. Ever since 1927, two buglers from the local volunteer fire department meet each evening at eight to sound the last post. Riek van den Kerkhove has been doing it for nineteen years now, Antoon Verschoot for almost forty-six. They pull up on their bicycles, snap to attention, wait until two policemen have stopped traffic, then let the notes echo from the walls of the enormous Menenpoort with its plaques holding the names of 54,896 dead soldiers. A dozen or so people stand around, looking on. Within a matter of moments it is over, they shake hands with the policemen, the traffic races on across the cobblestones again.
Antoon's broad face shines with amiability. He's retired now, but he continues to do this. ‘It's hard sometimes, in the winter, when you've been sitting nice and warm in front of the TV.’ Riek says: ‘It's an obligation of honour.’ He missed the call only once, when he was busy pulling someone out of the water. But otherwise the last post is always sounded, even when a house is burning down at the same time. ‘It goes before all the rest, you know,’ Antoon says.
When will the emotion of the Great War fade? When will it finally become history? When will the Battle of the Somme become something like the Battle of Waterloo? Allow me to hazard a guess: within the next ten years. Somewhere between the third and fourth generation, somewhere between the grandchildren – who can scarcely remember anyone who was involved – and the great-grandchildren the feeling will change. In the great charnel house at Verdun, the daily Mass recently became monthly. To the south of the Somme a huge airport is planned, to be built across two war cemeteries. See here the writing on the wall. The spectacle, not the memory, gradually becomes the crux of the matter.
At the Queen Victoria's Rifles Café, the tables still bear long rows of vues stéréoscopiques from the 1920s. For three quarters of a century the proprietor has been earning a handful of francs from his selection of the grisliest stereo photographs: corpses caught in the barbed wire, decapitated Germans, part of a horse in a tree. Today, this has all been raised to perfection. In the Yser Tower at Diksmuide you can stick your nose in a machine and smell the gas. Chlorine gas actually does smell a bit like bleach, mustard gas a little like mustard. At the impressive In Flanders Field peace museum at Ypres you can enter a darkened room for a trip through noman's-land, complete with snatches of dreams: what was going on in the mind of a German or British soldier as he went over the top? The room is full of noise and death rattles, full of images of running soldiers, phantoms from a peaceful life before the war: ‘Why me? Why us?’ Using a computer programme, you can pick out a soldier at will and trace the course of his life. I adopt Charles Hamilton Sorley, reading Greats at Oxford. He was killed at Loos, ‘a bullet through the head’.
There are other approaches as well. At the new Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, all the glory and illusions have been stripped away. The military uniforms and equipment are not displayed upright, but on the floor, like fallen men. Of course, that's how it was, almost everything here once belonged to the dead. But I am afraid the Historial will remain the lone exception. Today little cars trundle on rails through the old citadel of Verdun, like in an amusement park ride, and I am sure in twenty years’ time they will be trundling everywhere, through cunning replicas of the trenches complete with rats, excrement and the smell of corpses, the whinnying of dying horses and the cries of the mortally wounded. Slowly the feeling shifts from one of solidarity to one of curiosity.
Along the autoroute from Lille to Paris, the Battle of the Somme is only a tap of the accelerator. In late summer 1916, 1.2 million people died here, between two exits. The motorway runs at a slight distance from the eastern boundary of the battlefield. Drivers are kept informed of that as well, on big brown signs along the road, LA GRANDE GUERRE, the way a famous chateau or a pleasant vintage might be pointed out elsewhere. Then they flash by, back into the serenity of present-day Picardy.
Here the war has already entered the next phase, that of a popular tourist attraction, a mainstay of the region's commercial infrastructure. Everywhere one finds folders promoting these centres of infernal attraction; staying at my hotel – it is 15 February, the heart of winter – there are at least three couples touring the front lines. The museums compete by offering even more audio and visual effects. For the first time in ages, I can receive Dutch channels on the TV in my room. On the news they are interviewing tourists who were stranded for a few days in a snow-bound Swiss village. ‘What we've been through!’ one tanned w
oman says. ‘We felt just like refugees.’ Another one cries ‘Everything, we've lost everything!’ She's talking about a suitcase full of skling outfits and make-up.
It is foggy outside, and as the day progresses the fog grows thicker. I drive carefully to the Somme. The blue contours of a ship are barely visible at the locks on the Canal du Nord. Close by is a stand of black willows, a few coots are swimming around, then all this dissolves again into silence and greyness. All the trenches, all the craters, all the forgotten remnants, all the lost bodies are covered in a white veil from sky to earth.
The Somme was the battle of total planning. On paper, there was no way this offensive could go wrong. The confrontation had been on the drawing boards for months on either side of the front, while at least a million soldiers and 200,000 horses, along with untold quantities of rifles, cannons and munitions, were being assembled. The countless tents, field kitchens, field hospitals, command posts and halting-places looked like little cities. ‘It was one big anthill,’ Louis Barthas wrote on 9 October, 1916, when he arrived at the Somme halfway through the battle. ‘There were convoys driving back and forth along the roads that passed through the camp, heavy munitions trucks, ambulances and all manner of military vehicles. Railway tracks had also been built, along which massive convoys of supplies, ammunition and food were transported …The camp was too big to be taken in at a glance. All you could hear was the noisy hubbub, mixed with the thundering of cannons in the distance.’
The British had even built a special bunker along the front line for Geoffrey Malins, the man assigned to make their victory film. The Germans, supposedly wiped out by days of shelling, nevertheless proved to be alive and kicking at the start of the battle. Their barbed-wire barriers, their strong positions, their machine guns, all were still intact. It was the greatest slaughter in British military history. Of the 100,000 men who moved out that day, more than 19,000 had been killed by noon. Forty thousand were wounded. General Sir Beauvoir de Lisle reported: ‘It was a remarkable display of training and discipline, and the attack failed only because dead men cannot move on.’
It took weeks before the British were able to recover the bodies of their comrades. ‘Wounded, they had crawled into shell craters, wrapped themselves in their waterproof blankets, pulled out their bibles and died like that.’
Thanks to tips from Lyn MacDonald's veterans, I am able to find Malin's cinematic vantage point. It is, in all probability, this large hollow beside the Scottish monument at Beaumont Hamel, now covered in tall grass but an excellent place indeed for a camera. I squat down in it and see the images in my mind's eye. A group of soldiers has taken cover against the shoulder of the rutted road in front of me, ready for a renewed attack. They are young boys, half calm, half tense, one of them turns and looks boldly into the lens, another moves off camera, some are fussing with their equipment and take a swig from a canteen. One is casually smoking a cigarette, while another lies in the foreground, acting tough, showing off. One final draw on the cigarette, a signal sounds, the bayonets are mounted on the rifles, and then it all breaks loose.
What the film does not show is how it ended: less than two minutes later, all these men were dead.
I take the bus along the old infantry lines. The war cemeteries stand like orchards along the farmers’ roads, stop by stop. I visit the field where almost the entire Royal Newfoundland Regiment was mown down during a senseless attack, a case of collective suicide that even today could serve as an example for Muslim fundamentalists. No fewer than 700 boys. Their desperate passage can still be precisely traced. Sheep graze around the bomb craters and trenches. The barbed wire is gone, the bodies have vanished, but the Canadian fir trees planted here make a fearsome noise: hear their branches talking in the wind.
I am reminded of a conversation that Vera Brittain, as an army nurse, overheard in a hospital ward. A sergeant told of a fantastic captain he had had, an officer who always got his boys out of a tight spot. He was killed at the Somme, and they had mourned him like a brother. ‘But a while back, just before the Krauts came into Albert, we were in a bit of a fix and I was doing all I could to get us out of it, and suddenly I see him, with his clear eyes and his old grin, bringing up the rear. So, Will, he says, that was a close shave. And I go to answer him, and suddenly he's gone.’ Then someone else in the ward began to talk about a couple of stretcher-bearers, a top crew. ‘One day one of those coal bins comes whistling down and they're gone. But last week a few of our boys saw them again, carrying a couple of wounded fellows down the trench. And in the train I met a boy who swears they carried him out of it.’
Robert Graves mentions a similar experience. During a banquet held for his company, he wrote, he saw at the window one of his soldiers, a fellow by the name of Challonner. ‘There was no mistaking him or the cap badge he was wearing. I jumped up and looked out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag end smoking on the pavement.’ Challoner had been killed a month earlier.
Vera Brittain tended not to put much stock in it, but her men were adamant. ‘That's right, Sister, they're dead. But they were our mates when they were killed at the Somme in ‘16, and it's a fact: they still fight alongside us.’
The next day I ride through gentle, rolling countryside, the weekend-house country of Paris, green and modest. In the fields ploughed red I can still see the vague, whitish traces of trenches. This is a region of gradualness. The towns and villages display no grand movements, they contain no huge monuments, no shocking modernities.
In the little roadside restaurants everyone is served the menu of the day, no option: soup, chicken, cheese, pudding, coffee. The men know each other well, they shake hands after their meal and then climb back into their trucks or vans. I find a hotel with a grandma knitting and a chambermaid with big eyes. Later, in the corridor, I see her again with a mobile phone, and all she says into it is ‘Je t'aime … oui, je t'aime … merci … mais je t'aime …’
Verdun is a peaceful town, and contains the most horrible war memorial I have ever seen. It is a tower, atop which a knight glowers threat-eningly across the rooftops. If I were a three-year-old citizen of Verdun, I would be afraid to close my eyes at night. At the knight's feet lies a museum, marked by the usual pride and pomp, the same drive for glory that almost destroyed the French Army. The Battle of Verdun began on 21 February, 1916 and lasted ten months. It accounted for 260,000 lives, almost one a minute. In the long run no one got much further because of it, but that did not bother German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn. What he wanted, above all, was bodies. He knew that the fortifications of Verdun had long been the gateway to France, that the city had always had a special symbolic significance for the French, and he wanted them literally to ‘bleed to death’ here. The German code name for the attack on Verdun was ‘Gericht’, the place of execution.
Falkenhayn understood the mentality of the French generals very well. They threw everyone and everything they had into the fray, thinking only of glorious attacks, and were barely concerned with the lives of their troops. That is reflected in what remains of the French trenches: shallow and makeshift, in contrast to the German concrete. Verdun was a trap for the French Army, with pride and glory as its bait.
The only supply line, the legendary Voie Sacrée, remained intact, but that too was part of the German plan: to bleed to death, one needs an artery. The French foot soldiers called Verdun ‘the big sausage machine’, and as they came marching up they could see from afar the stinking hell of rumbling and flame, a gaping maw signifying the end of everything. For the German soldier, in fact, it was hardly different: 330,000 of them would be killed or wounded, compared to 360,000 Frenchmen. Verdun was much more traumatic for the average Frenchman, however, because the French Army worked by rotation. Most French soldiers, therefore, had a chance to become personally acquainted with ‘the big sausage machine’, even if only for a while, with all the accompanying physical and psychological consequences.
Corporal Barthas’ company arrived at Verdun
on 12 May, 1916. They were to relieve the troops of the 125th Regiment. When they entered the trenches, all they found was ‘one huge pile of ripped-apart human flesh’. The day before, it seems, there had been a massive mortar attack. ‘Everywhere lay wreckage, ruined rifles, torn knapsacks from which tender letters and carefully cherished memories had fallen and were scattered in the wind. There were also shattered canteens, shoulder bags torn to shreds, all bearing the insignia of the 125th Regiment.’
One day later they were allowed to leave again, in a terrible nighttime journey on foot across the battlefield, ‘across barbed wire, poles, split sandbags, corpses and assorted wreckage … After each lightning flash of mortar fire, the darkness seemed only blacker.’
Across those same fields today hangs a thick, cold layer of fog. The landscape, in Barthas’ day shelled into barrenness, is now covered with gaunt trees. Until not so very long ago, nothing would grow here at all, except the hardy Canadian firs. Trenches and shell craters are still visible everywhere, filled with brown meltwater. All the war sights are indicated with large signs. I work my way quickly past all the highlights of this macabre Disneyland: the monument, the charnel house, the firebombed village, the fortress of glory, the sacred trench with the bayonets of seventeen stalwart soldiers who, according to legend, were buried alive in a mortar attack. (Sticking a bayonet into the ground was a quick way to mark the grave of a few poor sods, but of course no one here cares to hear about that.)
The Douaumount ossuary rises up from the mist. The enormous grey charnel house, the size of a large secondary school, contains the bones of more than 130,000 of the fallen. You can see them through the little half-misted windows at the back of the building; here and there some orderly soul has neatly piled them up: femurs with femurs, ribs with ribs, arms with arms, whole and half skulls, all with lovely young teeth.