Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  Edith Wharton, paying a visit to the front, noted the diversity of uniforms.

  The question of color has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue, and the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin’s-egg to the darkest navy. . . . But to this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added; the poppy-red of the Spahis’ tunics, and various other less familiar colours—grey, and a certain greenish khaki, the use of which is due to the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that all available materials are employed.

  The inconsistency of fabrics and the proliferation of uniforms from other countries and armies helped draft dodgers to lose themselves. In Le Feu, five soldiers from the front notice that some of the men who appear, from a distance, to be soldiers, are actually wearing a kind of fancy dress. Arriving home on leave, writer Paul Tuffrau was as astonished by the gaiety of the women on the boulevards as by the dubious military credentials of their men.

  The lighted department stores, the beautiful cars, the pretty girls in their little hats, high-heeled boots, rice powder, muffs and little dogs, and draft dodgers in beautifully tailored blazers and breeches that look like uniforms, but drip with gold braid brighter than anything on the jackets of real officers. Over and over, you see such sights, next to soldiers on leave who roam the boulevards in tin hats, muddy greatcoats and heavy boots.

  In John Dos Passos’s novel Three Soldiers, an American on leave is overwhelmed by the variety and quality of the uniforms in the cafés around the Opéra, none of them damaged or stained by combat. “Serbs, French, English, Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks. God, is there any uniform that isn’t here? The war’s been a great thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it.” Songwriter Cole Porter owned an entire wardrobe of uniforms. His friend Monty Woolley recalled, “Porter had more changes than Maréchal Foch, and wore them with complete disregard to regulation. One night he might be a captain of the Zouaves, the next an aide-de-camp.”

  Young common soldiers, embittered by their experience of the front, found the city’s cynicism disgraceful. In June 1916, Gaston Biron wrote to his mother at the end of a leave, “You will probably be astonished to hear that it was almost without regret that I left Paris, but it’s the truth. I’ve noticed, like all my comrades who are left, that these two years of war have, little by little, made the civilian population selfish and indifferent, and that we and the other combatants are almost forgotten. So what could be more natural than that we become as distant as they are, and return to the front calmly, as if we had never been away?”

  In September, at Chartres, Biron died of wounds. He was thirty.

  After leaving the ambulances, Cocteau joined a fortnightly magazine called Le Mot—The Word. Like most publications in Paris, it was geared to the war. Part of his job, not so different from that of Norman Lindsay in Australia, was to demonize Germany: in his case, to produce sketches of imaginary atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium, including children whose right hands had been hacked off. Fortunately, enough was happening in Paris to take his mind off these squalid tasks.

  Literally and figuratively, he had a new love, aviation, and in particular a young military pilot, Roland Garros. Already famous at twenty-seven for having been the first aviator to cross the Mediterranean, Garros downed four German planes with a new system of aerial gunnery he helped develop. Born on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion—Cocteau called him “my dear creole”—Garros boasted the slight frame, dashing mustache and dark complexion of action star Douglas Fairbanks, one of Cocteau’s childhood heroes. At school, Cocteau took gymnastic classes in hopes of emulating his feats. Garros was married, but he and Cocteau discovered a mutual attraction. The pilot took Cocteau up for joy rides, an experience the poet found all the more dizzying for their infatuation.

  Paris could not help but find war chic. Just as dressmakers were not content simply to get by with inferior materials but adapted them into a new style, hostesses embraced austerity and offered only a token apology for dinners of soup, bread, and wine. Who cared, so long as there was good talk?

  As Malcolm Cowley had noticed, privation and danger stimulated the creative juices. Cocteau flitted around the city, attending benefit concerts for the troops, posing for portraits, and socializing with his old patron, Misia Sert, while cultivating such glamorous newcomers as the Princess Hélène Soutzo, fiancée of diplomat-writer Paul Morand. As he did so, he was incubating an idea for something new: a ballet for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, now based in Rome. In 1912, while the Ballets Russes was appearing in Paris, he’d pressed the impresario to let him write something ambitious for the company.

  Diaghilev is walking home after a performance, his thick underlip sagging, his eyes bleary as Portuguese oysters, his tiny hat perched on his enormous head. Ahead, Nijinsky is sulking, his evening clothes bulging over his muscles. I was at the absurd age when one thinks oneself a poet, and I sensed in Diaghilev a polite resistance. I questioned him about this and he answered, “Astonish me! I’ll wait for you to astonish me.”

  Cocteau believed he had found such an astonishing idea. It would take only passing account of the war. One might almost think of it as thumbing its nose at the news by dwelling on the silliest aspects of reality. As he wrote just before the premiere, “Our wish is that the public may consider this as a work which conceals poetry beneath the coarse outer skin of slapstick. Laughter is natural to Frenchmen: it is important to keep this in mind and not be afraid to laugh, even at this most difficult time.”

  He had already suggested to a producer of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that members of the Fratellini clown family play the “rude mechanicals.” Now he thought of an entire ballet based on the traveling circuses that toured country carnivals. Before such shows, performers appeared on a small stage outside the tent in excerpts from the program, while barkers shouted the attractions of each and urged the audience to pay and see the full show: “Step right up: it’s all happening on the inside.” Both the stage and the performance were called a parade.

  Erik Satie, whom Cocteau knew from Misia’s salons, agreed to write the music. As for the costumes, he must have the gruff, opinionated Pablo Picasso, who could have returned to neutral Spain like many of his compatriots but preferred to remain in Paris. Composer Edgard Varèse offered to introduce them. For the occasion, Cocteau arrived at Picasso’s Montparnasse studio dressed, in tribute to the clowns in his paintings, as Pierrot.

  Picasso was easily persuaded to collaborate on the ballet. Shrugging off the war and ignoring the fact that he hated to travel, he took the train to Rome with Cocteau to pitch their idea to Diaghilev. By the time they arrived, they’d decided broadly on the action and style. Against a vivid backcloth of carnival themes, characters in cubist costumes would dance the story of three circus acts en parade. One would be based on movie serial daredevil Pearl White; another on Charlie Chaplin. There would be a pantomime horse, and (don’t tell Satie) gunshots, sirens, and other noises, the shouts of the barkers spoken through a megaphone, and a passage played on water-filled milk bottles. They called it Parade.

  25

  Misery Hill

  For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

  But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot;

  An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

  An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool—you bet that Tommy sees!

  RUDYARD KIPLING, “Tommy”

  You’re not seeing it at its best,” said Wilf, my guide.

  Shoving frozen hands into the pockets of my waterproof jacket, I pulled my ears deeper into the collar and turned away from the wind. Sleet rattled on my back like birdshot. As I shook my head, more water flew off my hair and eyebrows than one would expect from a good-sized Airedale.

  �
�Really?” I tried not to sound sarcastic.

  Back in the 1970s, I’d lived three years in East Anglia. Our front yard was the North Sea, our nearest neighbor Norway. Wind and rain of dismaying intensity and persistence swept across Suffolk and in particular Norfolk, the most prominent attribute of which was immortalized by Noël Coward in his play Private Lives.

  Elyot (of new wife): I met her at a house party in Norfolk.

  Amanda (ex-wife): Very flat, Norfolk.

  Elyot: There’s no need to be nasty.

  Wiltshire, in which we stood, was on the far side of Britain from Norfolk. Naïvely, I’d expected it to be as I remembered it: a county of stately mansions; a disciplined eighteenth-century landscape, rational and discreet, dotted with faux-Greek follies in white marble. But I’d visited here only in summer. In winter, Wiltshire’s weather gave Norfolk a run for its money.

  How had it looked to Archie when he arrived here in November 1916?

  Perhaps the flat winter landscape, gray and wet, with its leafless trees and pale diffused light, so different from the blistering blue-white of Australian sunshine, aroused in him the same mingled excitement and dismay as when, more than sixty years later, I walked, shivering in my too-thin clothes, into the center of Southampton, where our ship had docked the night before. But how much worse for him and the other volunteers to learn, as they came ashore, of the Battle of the Somme, which had ended just the week before—a four-month campaign by the Allies that gained almost nothing but, on the British side alone, left 420,000 men dead.

  Wilf steered me into the shelter of a large oak. From around the massive trunk, I peered into the murk, across the little one could see of the featureless plain. Cold had numbed my face like Novocain.

  “What’s over there?” I asked, looking west.

  “Artillery range.”

  “And there?” Looking east.

  “Same.” A sweep of his eyes took in most of the horizon. “It’s almost all army. Has been for more than a century.”

  “No farms?”

  For an answer, he hacked at the sodden grass with the heel of his Wellington boot. A divot of turf peeled away, revealing, an inch beneath the surface, the gleam of white.

  “Chalk. The whole plain’s the same. Nothing grows here but grass. Army got it cheap. Anyway, the amount of unexploded ordnance buried in this piece of country . . .” He grimaced. “Even if they let you plow it, you’d probably blow your leg off at the first furrow.”

  We drove back to Codford in Wilf’s mud-spattered SUV, bumping along a track that was mostly a set of parallel ruts brimming with muddy water. In peacetime, a pretty enough village of five hundred people, a single main street, its gray stone church of Saint Mary the oldest and largest building within miles, Codford had been transformed by the time Archie arrived. Three thousand Australians and New Zealanders were quartered across a shallow valley on the edge of town, living in wooden huts and rows of conical white tents.

  I could see why the army chose it. Plenty of open country, a railway spur, and the river Wylye nearby. Not much agriculture, so fewer civilians to be upset by a mob of bored and unruly soldiers on the doorstep. Not many big towns to distract the troops: fewer places for them to get into mischief. During both wars, Salisbury Plain was dotted with camps. Their names turned up repeatedly in memoirs of Australians in Britain—Fovant, Hurdcott, Codford, all within fifty miles of where we stood.

  Wilf led me on a squelching tour of the former campsite. I was glad of my borrowed Wellington boots. Pictures from 1917 showed horse-drawn carts bogged to their axles in mud. It wasn’t any dryer now.

  “Why didn’t they put it up on the chalk?”

  His deadpan look with raised eyebrows, an expression as typical of the British as the French shrug, signaled that I’d asked something a true countryman would have known from simple observation.

  “Too far from the railway and the river.” He nodded in the direction of the Wylye and the bridge over it. “There wasn’t enough mains water, so they used the river for washing—and . . .”

  I got the dangling “and.” Three thousand men and not enough lavatories to go round: no fun for the people living downstream.

  “Very little to do around here, back then,” I said.

  “Not much to do here now.”

  “Pubs?”

  “A couple. Australians liked our dark bitter, a lot stronger than the lager you drink out there. If you wanted lighter beer, the camp canteen sold it in bottles.” He paused. “There was a tottie too, I’m told.”

  “A prostitute? Just the one?”

  “A place like this, the locals wouldn’t have tolerated more. In France, maybe, but not in England. Anyway, she gave everyone the clap, I’m told.”

  More likely they gave it to her. Though Codford mainly existed to toughen up new arrivals from overseas and casualties returning to France, it was also a convalescent camp for gonorrhea and syphilis victims. Soldiers feared a “dose” more than a bullet wound, since any sufferer lost all pay and privileges while being treated. And the army made a point of telling your family what was wrong with you.

  A shaft of watery sun lit the hill behind the camp. Patches of grass and earth had been cleared off the chalk to create a kind of picture. Such carvings cropped up all over the chalk downs. Locals had been making them since the Stone Age. Horses were a popular subject, though the most famous was the Cerne Abbas Giant, a huge man, club in hand, sprawled across a hillside, penis arrogantly erect. According to local custom, even the least fertile woman would conceive if she passed the night within the circle of one of his enormous testicles.

  Rising Sun Badge, Misery Hill, Codford

  “It’s not old,” Wilf said of the Codford design. “1917. Almost overgrown now. Can you make it out?”

  Briefly, as the sun struck it, I recognized the rising sun of the Australian army badge. I nodded.

  “Misery Hill,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “The squaddies called it Misery Hill. It was a punishment. Defaulters were sentenced to dig on it. There were so many brown beer bottles around the camp that the squaddies filled the trenches with them, bottom uppermost. When the sun hit, they made the badge look like it was made of bronze. But nobody can be bothered to keep it up now.”

  A moment passed in silent contemplation. This had been no holiday camp. As much as anywhere in Flanders or on the Somme, it felt drenched in despair.

  I thought about Archie. Leaving a bleak, flat, blisteringly hot and dry landscape, he’d landed in a bleak, flat, freezing cold and wet one. From the little I knew of him, he didn’t seem the kind of man to relish the irony. Particularly not if he was suffering from varicose veins. A chronic affliction of people who spend a lot of time on their feet, the condition occurs when poor circulation in the legs prevents blood from moving back up the body. As it pools in the calves, the veins swell and bulge, becoming knotted, blue, and twisting. Trudging Sydney streets every day, visiting clients to take their orders, Archie would have been a classic sufferer.

  How could the medical examiner in Sydney have failed to notice something so obvious? According to historian Bill Gammage, the standards were demanding. One man “was told that his eyesight was defective and was twice turned away before a £2 tip facilitated his passage into the Australian Infantry Force. Rejected men stumbled in tears from the tables, unable to answer sons or mates left to the fortunes of war. They formed an Association, and wore a large badge to cover their civilian shame.”

  Perhaps, as the flow of recruits dried up, doctors didn’t look too hard. Unlike poor eyesight, varicose veins wouldn’t stop you from firing a gun. Or possibly the weeks of drill, first in Sydney, then at Codford, brought it on. Either way, his arrival in England derailed Archie’s war.

  After three hours, I’d seen everything Codford had to show. If it was boring to me, how much more so for the men stationed here? Particularly when the war ended and they wanted to go home.

  “It was in ’18 that thing
s got rough,” Wilf said. “Repatriation took forever, and the men just lost it. Their officers couldn’t control them. The MPs were sent in, but your mates just beat them up. Then they deserted. Stopped cars on the road and made them take them into Salisbury. Or women drove out here and camped in the woods. And remember that local prostitute?”

  “What about her?”

  “The chaps she infected . . . some say they dragged her out of her house and threw her down the town well.”

  “Seriously?”

  He stared up at a sky as gray as cement.

  “Like I said—not much to do around here.”

  26

  Bedside Manner

  Nursie, come over here and hold my hand.

  Nursie, there’s something I don’t understand.

  ’Round my heart there’s a funny little pain.

  Oh Oh Oh Oh it’s coming back again.

  ART NOEL AND DON PELOSI, “Nursie, Nursie”

  As Archie lingered in Codford Camp, unsure of his future, the privations of the war had begun to bite in Paris. In 1913, philosopher Charles Péguy complained that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.” He exaggerated, but Parisians, seeing their creature pleasures disappearing one by one, must have nodded in agreement.

  Changes began almost at the moment France mobilized. In 1914, the government outlawed absinthe, claiming it sapped the will of young Frenchmen to fight. “Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal,” ranted one ill-informed journalist, “provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant. It disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.” The sentiments were less shocking than the way they were expressed. Before the war, no writer would have been so immoderate.