by Terry Castle
Animals, it seems, knew better—that such walking was intolerable. “In one official history,” Wolff notes, “there is a picture…captioned ‘Bogged,’ of a mule in a shell-hole. His hindquarters are deep in the mud; only his head and shoulders protrude. In utter despair his head rests in the mud, eyes half-closed. Many mules had panicked, had fought merely to stand on visible portions of the planking, and could be made to move only with much coaxing and punishment.” The collapsing pack mule is a vignette out of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey—but here gone awry and nightmarish.
The most celebrated walking of all was that of soldiers going “over the top.” In order to stay in sync with the barrage and each other, attacking troops were strictly enjoined not to run. Once up over the parapet and into No Man’s Land, they were required to proceed in a stylized, almost courtly fashion—one man every two yards, rifles at the port, bayonets fixed, everyone moving forward in slow and regular waves. And thus unfurled what one writer calls “the classic drama of the Western Front,” the solemn, pavane-like motion of men towards machine-gun fire and death:
In the flame and clamour and greasy smoke the British slogged forward deliberately, almost unhurriedly. They moved from crater to crater, but even in the craters they were not safe, for the German gunners streamed bullets against the edges of the holes and wounded many men lying near the rims. As the British walked, some seemed to pause and bow their heads; they sank carefully to their knees; they rolled over without haste and then lay quietly in the soft, almost caressing mud.
There is something beyond uncanny in such scenes. On the first day of the Somme, defending German gunners watched in amazement as row upon row of British soldiers plodded calmly towards them, only to be cut down in swathes. For the oncoming troops, it took every ounce of courage not to break formation—even as hellfire raged, crumps exploded, and ground churned up around them. For the few who survived, the dream-like walk towards enemy trenches remained ever after, in the words of one historian, “an intensely personal journey etched in [the] memory like the Stations of the Cross.”
As Paul Fussell long ago pointed out, the passage over No Man’s Land was indeed a Christ-like transit, a hideous stroll into the Valley of Death. Like the assault on the Somme, the Passion begins—kinesthetically and archetypally—in heroic pedestrianism: the tedious trudge “up the line” to the boneyard known as Golgotha. Jesus is the first man in history to walk unwaveringly towards his own death. And ultimate masculine fortitude—at least in the modern West—has never lost its association with this Christ-like, goal-oriented walking. It is striking how many accounts of the destruction of the World Trade Center obsessively replay the image of doomed firemen and police walking into the towers and up the fatal stairwells—with exactly the same steady, flowing motion of attacking soldiers in the Great War. In a 2001 Newsweek report on the last minutes of Bill Feehan, a deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department killed in the collapse of the North Tower, he is seen exhorting his subordinates to walk just so:
Feehan’s men—Guidetti, Goldbach and two other deputy commissioners, Tom McDonald and Tom Fitzpatrick—began rushing to the elevator. “Now, hold it, guys,” said Feehan, wearing a wry smile, holding his arms to the side and waving his palms down, like a teacher calming rambunctious schoolchildren. “Do we really want to run to this? Or should we walk to it?” Feehan was following an old dictum: “Firemen should never run.” It was important to stay calm, to size up the job before rushing in.
Panic-stricken civilians making their way down were staggered—or so one reads again and again—by the sight of “firefighters loaded with gear, trudging their way up the stairs. Everyone stepped aside to let them pass, watching them in awe.” Onward, Christian soldiers.
Cynics will no doubt want to debunk the heroic image of World War I walking: they will call attention to the fact that men who balked at the whistle—the signal for the start of the assault—faced being shot on the spot by their commanding officers. True enough. It’s also true that other frightened soldiers simply faded from the scene, only to be caught and punished later. (The Ypres museum has a sad little pamphlet for sale commemorating the 306 British troops officially tried and “shot at dawn” for cowardice or desertion.) Kipling—Kipling!—has the following wrenching couplet in his Epitaphs (1919):
I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
(“The Coward”)
Yet, relatively speaking, very few men seem to have failed thus in their duty. Those who did so were usually blatantly shell-shocked or otherwise unfit. However amazing in retrospect, the vast majority of ordinary soldiers accepted the martial tasks assigned them, even when such tasks were plainly suicidal. The most moving British novel to come out of the war, Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1930), may be taken as a fitful, yet forceful, demonstration of this fact. The hero, a laconic private soldier named Bourne, commits himself to a nighttime trench raid, though he knows it is doomed to fail. When asked by his foolish commanding officer if he has any objection to going, Bourne feels “something in him dilate enormously, and then contract to nothing again,” but says only that he is “quite ready” to go. He goes; he dies; and the book ends.
If you’re a woman—and a woman haunted by feelings of cowardice—it’s hard to know where to stand with all of this. You regret the appalling, absurd waste of life. You excoriate the madness of the system. You rail against war. You see the savage toll the cult of heroism takes—has always taken—on men and boys. But painful, too—at times exorbitantly so, once you become sensitized to it—the near-total exclusion of your own sex from such primal dramas of unflinching physical courage. You feel at a moral deficit. You wonder, perhaps dubiously, if you would be capable of such nobility under the circumstances: of moving forward calmly. You fear the worst. For Brittain was right: women have seldom been asked to exert their valor in this direct, theatrical, entirely wasteful, and (yet) sublime fashion. Certainly I never have.
From early childhood I have searched with little success for a woman who might show me, in some comparable and quite literal way, how to walk towards death. Few have offered themselves as models. A psychoanalyst I know says this is because women are preeminently concerned with “life.” Children and the raising of children. They have no interest in walking towards death. Given half a chance, they walk away from death. It’s “pure and simple biology,” the shrink says. But whence my own odd questing? Some retardation of normal development? Some sad hormonal jousting with the male of the species? Some dissatisfaction with simply staying put and waiting for things to happen? Last week I went to see the film version of Lord of the Rings—not having thought much about Tolkien since I was twelve. The trilogy’s a death-trip of course—a long weary trudge through mud, mines, ravaged woods, and orc-infested caves. As I pondered the dire, cacophonous, corpse-laden wastelands through which Frodo and his friends are forced to travel—now digitalized and Dolby-ized and fiercely estranging (like video games and cyberterrorism)—I found myself wondering whether Tolkien had been a soldier on the Western Front. Couldn’t remember. Got home and looked him up: he fought on the Somme with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
True, a woman on her way to public execution in some degree resembles a soldier going over the top. As a child, I uncovered a few such women, and studied them as best I could. But a certain intimacy, kinship—even friendliness—was almost always lacking. They never felt like comrades. There was Joan of Arc, but I found her celebrated visions freakish and her personality aloof. I was not raised a Catholic, so stories of female saints and martyrs made little or no impression. I was too young for the terrible dramas of the Holocaust and Resistance. There was the aforementioned Edith Cavell—her fate, I find, is luridly described in a children’s Pageant of History book I still have on my shelves—but it would take a while before I understood her actions in context. (Calling me, not long ago, from the grotty pay phone near the latter’s memorial at
the foot of Charing Cross Road, Blakey had to endure me squeaking away, at eight thousand miles’ distance, But of course she was a spy! The Germans had every right to shoot her! She knew it! etc.) Only now do I begin to find the high starched collar, iron-gray hair, and sweeping black cape oddly alluring. No, sir, I do not require a blindfold.
The French Revolution, to be sure, offers instances of almost picturesque feminine gallantry—though it’s hardly fashionable to say so. Madame Roland was famously poised on the scaffold: she let Lamarche, a feeble old man being executed with her, go first so he would not have the sight of her own headless corpse before him as he approached the guillotine. Marie Antoinette, former cocotte, was even more so. Hounded, half-starved, white-haired, and decrepit at the age of thirty-four (from chronic menstrual flux and the gross abuse of her jailers), the no-good Autrichienne became quite staggeringly noble in her final moments. David’s harrowing sketch of her, set down from life as she rolled by in the death cart on her way to execution, is the unexpected emblem of a stupendous and electrifying heroism.
The French Revolution is also the setting for the only major work of art—the only one that I can think of at least—devoted profoundly and entirely to the topic of feminine courage: Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera Dialogues of the Carmelites. Based on a play by Bernanos and a novel by Gertrud von Le Fort, Die letzte am Schafott (“The Last to the Scaffold”), the opera turns on the struggle of Sister Blanche de l’Agonie du Christ, a novice in the Carmelite order at Compiègne, to master the dread that assails her when the sisters of the convent are arrested during the Terror. The plot has its origin in fact: Marie de l’Incarnation, a Carmelite nun who survived the Revolution, tells a similar story in her memoirs. (And how odd, the WWI freak notes, that it should all have taken place at Compiègne: British GHQ during the retreat from Mons and site of the signing of the Armistice in 1918.)* When the other sisters take a vow of martyrdom, Blanche runs away and hides for several weeks at her father’s house. Mortified by her own cowardice, however, she secretly follows her fellow nuns when they are taken to Paris for execution. In the opera’s final moments, as the condemned women march to the guillotine singing the Salve Regina—a voice falling out with each ferocious slice on the cymbals—Blanche suddenly materializes from the crowd and joins in the procession. Hers is the only voice left, soaring up in triumph, when the last blade stroke comes down and the curtain drops.
But Blanche is a bit of a pill, too—a sexless high soprano and one of those blonde, seraphic goody-goodies one could never stand at school. Charlotte Brontë would have loathed her. And for every Blanche, it seems, there are always women like the unhappy Lange Vaubernier, better known as Madame du Barry, the one-time mistress of Louis XV. On her way to execution, according to Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins (1847), the aging harlot flung back her veil “in order that her countenance might move the people” and “did not cease to invoke pity, in the most humiliating terms.” The poet, spokesman of the People, is extravagantly contemptuous:
Tears flowed incessantly from her eyes upon her bosom. Her piercing cries prevailed over the noise of the wheels and the clamor of the multitude. It seemed as if the knife struck this woman beforehand, and deprived her a thousand times of life.
“Life! Life!” she cried; “life for my repentance!—life for all my devotion to the Republic!—life for all my riches to the nation!”
The people laughed and shrugged their shoulders. They showed her, by signs, the pillow of the guillotine, upon which her charming head was about to sleep. The passage of the courtesan to the scaffold was but one lamentation. Under the knife she still wept. The Court had enervated her soul. She alone, among all the women executed, died a coward, because she died neither for opinion, for virtue, nor for love, but for vice. She dishonored the scaffold as she had dishonored the throne.
Poor old Lange. See yah. Wouldn’t wanna be yah.
At a certain point one just gives up and decides to go with the men. They’re so much closer to home, after all. Unless one is insane or a sex fanatic, it’s impossible to identify much with Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette; whereas one’s estimable Uncle Newton, soft mustache and all, seems just a few decades and a Chunnel trip away. I sometimes feel I could call him up on the phone. He lives in the same world as I do, the familiar vale of sorrows, fuck-ups, and relentless, chain-reaction human disasters. (How acutely one feels the 9/11 violence to be, like so much else in our time, simply one of the hundreds of geopolitical aftershocks of the First World War. Palestine, after all, began its long, sad modern history in 1917, when Allenby’s Army drove off the Turks at Gaza and occupied Jerusalem.)* And compelling indeed is the knowledge that I myself can now walk exactly where he walked. The worst signs of battle have long disappeared from the Western Front but the war tourism industry battens still on the morbid hankering of visitors to stroll freely about those very places (Loos, Menin, Hooge, Stuff Trench, Polygon Wood, Vimy, Festubert, Beaumont Hamel, Gheluvelt, Neuve-Chapelle) where walking (of any sort) was once so foul and frightening. One can now wander unimpeded over spots formerly blasted by gun and shell fire; where lifting one’s head above the parapet, even by an inch, meant getting it blown off. One feels floaty and tall and invulnerable, like a ghost. You imagine getting hit all over—positively laced with bullets—but it doesn’t hurt at all.
And then, too, there’s the mana effect: the hope that by treading just so, on the very spot, some ancient family backbone will be magically imparted. (After I came back from my trip, I found it oddly difficult to brush the Somme mud off my hiking shoes.) Traveling through Picardy and Flanders, it’s hard to forget that the soil itself is full of once-sentient matter, now dissolved but still in situ. We are inclined to make fun of Rupert Brooke–style animism these days, perhaps because his creepy brand of dirt-magic is still so weirdly potent:
There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Yet it’s only a short step from Brooke’s patriotic composting to fantasies of an even more atavistic sort. Almost as soon as the first Great War cemeteries were opened to the public, sentimental grave visitors sought to absorb the magical rigor of the dead. In The Unending Vigil (1967), his history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Philip Longworth relates a saccharine tale of a French child at Versailles—a “heroic little thing…doomed by a disease of the spine”—who insisted on tending the graves of her “chers soldats anglais” until her sickness defeated her. The punning import of the story is so obvious as to be risible: how else to ward off “spinelessness” in the face of mortality? I’ve got her number, and she, undoubtedly, has mine.
So I want my great-uncle to make me brave; is that what it boils down to? To place his hand in the small of my back and give me that first shove up onto the fire-step? To start me off on my wind-up-toy-like way into No Man’s Land? That’s an answer for the moment, I suppose, but no more than that. It would be nice to be sturdier and less addled, not such a twit on wheels. It would be gratifying to impress everyone with my handsome, jut-jawed selflessness. (“I now perceive one immense omission in my Psychology,” William James once wrote; “the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.”) Somewhere, it seems, there must be a lost baby picture of me—at my father’s perhaps?—in which I look just like Mel Gibson in Gallipoli. Huzzah, matey!
At the same time, I see how kooky and notional it all is. How can I be sure, for example, that my great-uncle even died bravely? His service record seems to have disappeared; according to the Public Record Office Web site, it looks to have been one of the hundreds of thousands of such records destroyed during the Blitz. Perhaps he was a puny little time-serving fellow who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My mother’s
vague recollection of him being shot by “his own guns” is worrying: perhaps he was sitting in a dugout drinking a cup of tea, or nibbling on a piece of chocolate (the family vice), and simply got blown up by accident. Perhaps he was picked off by an errant bullet while using the company latrine. Perhaps he started jabbering in terror one day and his sergeant-major just had to brain him in homicidal exasperation. Such things were all part of the “normal wastage” of the war. I have a great deal invested, I realize, in the image of him not being wasted. I prefer to view him stalking forward coolly, his fellow Poplar and Stepney Rifles at his side, across the muddy, blood-drenched plains of the Ancre.
But even if my fantasy about him is accurate, do I really need him to show me the way? I’ve gotten this far, after all, on my own two feet. Might it not be the case, terrors notwithstanding, that most people end up “walking towards death” in a fairly resolute fashion whether they plan to or not? One of the few times, paradoxically, I’ve found myself in apparent physical danger, when a bomb warning sounded deep in one of the Tube tunnels at Charing Cross and everyone had to evacuate in a hurry, I not only remained calm but felt peculiarly philosophical. The long-legged platform guard skedaddled at once—I can still see him bounding up the escalator steps two or three at a time—leaving a little group of tourists and children and old-age pensioners to scramble along after him. I ran about a third of the way up the escalator, panting horribly—it was one of those extra long ones and for some reason wasn’t moving—then thought: oh fuck this, I’m too tired to run anymore! I don’t care if I get blown up! It was like the old French and Saunders skit: my leg bones have gone away. So I walked the rest of the way, more or less sedately, ultimately surfacing in Trafalgar Square. The crowds and the pigeons were bustling about as usual. No bomb went off, that week or later.