The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  The generals thought to break the stasis using massive concentrations of artillery. Somehow, surely, the enemy positions could be pulverized, allowing charges to succeed? Weapons and Tactics: “Most of the history of the War of 1914–18 is the history of the failure of this idea.”

  You see, artillery barrages, to say the least, called attention to themselves. The enemy then thickened its defenses where needed. Furthermore, the shelling tore up no-man’s-land, so that assault parties, instead of rushing forward, floundered in shell holes, while the enemy shot them down. In one typical outcome, Graves’s comrades “were stopped by machine-gun fire before they had got through our own entanglements.”

  However perilous it was to “go over the top,” the defensive positions were themselves hardly safe. Graves writes time and time again about witnessing the deaths of his comrades right there in the earthworks. He feared rifle bullets more than shells, because they “gave no warning.” On the opposite side of the front, Hitler emoted: “In these months I felt for the first time the whole malice of Destiny which kept me at the front in a position where every n—— might accidentally shoot me to bits.”

  And so their various armored immobilities stalemated the belligerents. The British were losing as many as 5,000 soldiers a week in what they called “normal wastage.” Unable to go forward, unwilling to retreat, the adversaries tried to speed up normal wastage. That is why, as early as the fall of 1915, the French and British decided on a quota of 200,000 Germans killed or wounded per month.

  “Thus it went on year after year; but the romance of battle had been replaced by horror.” That was Hitler again. He, of course, remained “calm and determined.”

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  The German assault at Verdun announced itself on February 21, 1916, with the detonation of more than a thousand cannons. Something like 33 German munitions trains rolled in each day. In a photo of a second-line casualty station, we see a wounded Frenchman sitting crookedly on his crude stretcher, which rests in the dark mud. His boots are black with filth; likewise his coat up to his waist and beyond. A white bandage goes bonnet-like around his head, the top of it dark with blood. His slender, grubby hands are part folded across his waist. His head is leaning, his eyes almost closed.

  In a bunker near Verdun 100 years later I came upon a chamber whose rusty ladder ascended to a cone outlined with light, which silhouetted something like a giant mantis’s desiccated corpse: the under chassis of a machine gun. Nearby ran another emplacement that Sylvestre Bresson thought must be part of the Maginot Line, thanks to its newer concrete. (I should remind the reader that this latter imposing bulwark was intended, decades later, to use all of World War I’s advantages of entrenched defense against that World War II aggressor, Hitler. For why wouldn’t war haunt this same ground over and over again?)

  A Russian offensive against the Austrians in the east, followed by a French attack at the Somme in July, finally forced the Germans to disengage from Verdun. In October the French retook its most massive fort. The battle, the longest of World War I, finally ended on December 15. Then what? Mud, corpses, duckboards, trenches, broken trees. French and German casualties each exceeded 300,000 men.

  But why disparage all this mutual effort? If its object was to kill multitudes of human beings, let’s call it a triumph, as evidenced by the French National Necropolis at Fleury-devant-Douaumont. Driving down the hill, we came upon 15,000 white crosses flashing in the sun. I went out to wander those tombstones on the down-slanting grass where crimson-petaled rose beds ran along each row. Up at the chapel, French soldiers in uniform stood gazing down across the stones, the occasion being a change of commander. “For us this is the most sacred site,” Bresson remarked. “If France could keep only one memorial to World War I, it would be this one.”

  These 15,000 dead men were all French, but nearly 10 times the amount of remains, both French and German, broken and commingled, lay in the nearby ossuary. Looking in through the many ground-level windows, I saw heaps of bones and skulls in the darkness. Some yellow-brown fragments had been combined into almost decorative columns, as in the Paris catacombs.

  In the edifice above them stood a Catholic chapel with stained-glass windows, and in a glass case, relics from the churches of destroyed villages. This forest meadow bore stone markers to commemorate the former farm buildings, washhouses, grocery stores. Maples and cypresses had grown 102 years high. I saw dark water in the deeper shell holes, grass in the shallower ones. The grass was ingrown with daisies, dandelions, and clover. Birds were singing.

  5

  As for the First Battle of the Somme—which was, more accurately, a dozen smaller battles, playing out over 141 days in 1916, from July to November—that accomplished kindred wonders. Liddell Hart remembered the year as “the nadir of infantry attacks,” the assaulters being “almost shoulder to shoulder, in a symmetrical, well-dressed alignment, and taught to advance steadily upright at a slow walk.” How convenient for the artillerists!

  In 2018, Bresson, who lived in the Somme, enlightened me about the residue: “The bomb disposal squad comes twice a week. Twice a week, even now! You know, if there was some live shell in Paris, it would be on the news. But in the country, nobody cares. The farmers, they just carry it into the road.”

  The Battle of the Somme marked the war’s first deployment of tanks (on September 15, by the British), but they were introduced in dribs and drabs, their surprise effect mostly wasted, their potential nearly invisible. On October 7, Hitler, his potential equally unforeseeable, was wounded in the thigh, but he was not out of action long.

  The Somme came to be referred to as “the muddy grave of the German field army,” for German casualties were up to 650,000 killed, wounded, and missing. But the muddy grave was more international than that. Its local commemorators called it un espace mondial, “a world-inclusive space.” The British took 420,000 casualties; the battle’s first day has been called “the bloodiest day in British history.” The French lost 200,000 men. Although General Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, claimed an attritional victory, David Lloyd George, Britain’s soon-to-be prime minister, called it “a bloody and disastrous failure.”

  In 1918 this churned-up wasteland, well irrigated with trench-blood and fertilized with flesh, would be viciously contested all over again.

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  You may recall that 1916 was the year when the Russians broke through the Austrian defenses on the Eastern Front, causing the Germans to halt their assault on Verdun. But the Russians could only get so far. The czar’s army had already lost half its strength in the previous year, and the new assault cost them more than a million casualties. According to Liddell Hart, this latest bloodbath “completed the virtual ruin of Russia’s military power.” In July 1917, the Russian Army shot its last bolt.

  That previous winter, bled weak by Verdun and the Somme, the Germans prepared a strategic withdrawal from a 20-mile salient between Arras and Soissons in northern France. A salient is in essence a bulge into enemy lines—a reified hope of breakthrough. Abandoning one may be a sad business, but also prudent, because any such position is vulnerable on two or three sides.

  Hence Operation Alberich, whose first step would be the construction of the best-fortified redoubt in Europe: the Siegfried Line, or, as the British called it, the Hindenburg Line, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg being the new German commander in chief: grizzled, calm, soldierly-looking, maybe even statesmanlike. (In 1933, the same Hindenburg, now a grandly senile old figurehead—and president of the young, doomed Weimar Republic—would appoint Hitler as chancellor.)

  Hindenburg’s First Quartermaster, and in many ways the guiding partner, was General Erich von Ludendorff, humorless and irascible, who five years after the war would march beside Hitler in the sordid “Beer Hall Putsch.” (Hitler later proclaimed Ludendorff “leader, and chief with dictatorial power, of the German national army.”) Since it is to Ludendorff that accounts of this period generally assign agency, I shall
do the same.

  The Hindenburg Line has been called “the war’s greatest feat of engineering.” Its various belts, which bore such mythological names as “Kriemhild” and “Freya,” ran for 300 miles. Half a million laborers toiled for four months to make them, dispersing the cargoes of 1,250 trains. The line began with an antitank ditch, followed by “at least” five walls of barbed wire; “next came a line of defense anchored by forts and blockhouses bristling with machine guns, and the final major barrier boasted an intricate system of zigzag trenches designed to prevent enfilading fire”—and this ominous description, courtesy of The Oxford Companion to Military History, leaves out the St. Quentin Canal, a waterway that was up to 35 feet wide and 50 to 60 feet deep. Two artillery lines brooded in the rear.

  The withdrawal took place in February 1917. The Germans left behind them what one officer called “a desolate, dead desert,” Ludendorff having determined to make it into “a totally barren land” in which Allied “maneuverability was to be critically impaired.” First they removed anything they could use. Then they razed every building, mined every street, poisoned every well, dammed every creek, burned everything that would burn. The vileness of this policy remains a matter of opinion. Bresson assured me: “You know, we did the same thing when we left Gallipoli, in 1915.” Hart described the withdrawal as “a consummate maneuver, if unnecessarily brutal in application.” But he was one of those realists who did not consider chlorine gas especially cruel.

  And so the front was not merely frozen, but steel-frozen. Thus it went through most of 1917, the year when President Woodrow Wilson proposed, and the kaiser rejected, “peace without victory.”

  Unlocking the Front

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  What finally destroyed the long primacy of immobile armored defense? First of all, a British naval blockade, which had been in effect since before the first battle of 1914, began to starve the two adjacent Central Powers of essential materials like rubber and brass. By 1916 the starvation was becoming literal. In a German photo from the late war years we see kerchiefed, long-skirted women bending over a rubbish heap, pickaxing its filth in search of anything nourishing to go in a grimy bucket. The protagonists of the German veteran Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, weakening on their “turnip jam,” count themselves lucky whenever they can snatch up butter and corned beef from the French positions they’ve assaulted.

  Attack technologies now also began to render machine-gun nests and barbed-wired trenches, if not yet obsolete, at least penetrable. Planes had barely begun to prove themselves, but the prospect of a pack of high-flying bombing and strafing machines took on nerve-racking plausibility.

  Tanks, after their first faltering foray at the Somme, had been improved. One innovator recognized that the fuel tanks should be less vulnerable to direct hits. The British and French commenced mass production. Still, Germany deployed no tanks of its own manufacture until the war’s last year, by which time its enemies possessed 5,000; it had just 45.

  Here is how the German officer Guderian remembered the First Battle of Cambrai, from 1917: “In a few hours the strongest position on the Western Front had been broken,” he lamented. “The bells rang out in London for the first time in the war.”

  One of the British monsters that so obsessed Guderian was named “Deborah,” designated female because “she” sported machine guns instead of six-pounders. I have seen her all alone at the Cambrai Tank 1917 Museum. The poor girl had been buried in muck until 1998. Her rounded-tipped quadrilateral shape challenges description: sort of like a riveted roach or crocodile, but not exactly.

  The museum staff had tastefully enclosed her snout in genuine Great War barbed wire. Her bow and starboard side gaped jaggedly open, offering darkness and the smell of oil; her guts were partly shattered and twisted by the German fire that killed four of her crewmen, who lay in the adjacent cemetery. But in her port flank two service-holes remained, one rectangular, the other perfectly round, so that the gray light of that concrete room shined right through her. Her ripped, rusted, yet surprisingly durable carapace made the horror of the war itself more durable. At her backside lay two wreaths.

  Immediately adjacent to her public sepulcher I found the Flesquières Hill British Cemetery, whose ground had been captured in the Cambrai battle, lost soon after, then retaken in September 1918, at which point it came in handy for new deposits. After looking out from the stone pavilion across the green lawn to the great cross and past two lovely trees toward cloud-shaded fields with wind turbines on the horizon, I opened the heavy door that protected the visitors’ book. One inscription read: To those who gave their lives, and those who keep their memories so well. Another: Thank you all boys RIP. Four days before me, someone had come to visit his fallen grandfather. The most recent inscription was in French: We will never forget you.

  The registry book told another story. This place once lay behind the German Flesquières Soldiers’ Cemetery No. 2. After the armistice, the German graves were moved to a “cemetery extension” (which would itself be relocated in 1924). In their place British plots were erected. Such disrespect must have increased the vanquished’s hatred for the victors, but that was hardly the fault of 28259 PRIVATE JOHN DAVEY CARTER ROYAL LANCASTER REGIMENT 8TH OCTOBER 1918 AGE 27, ON WHOSE SOUL SWEET JESUS HAVE MERCY. I copied these words from his tombstone. Then I stood and took in the red roses, black-eyed Susans, and purple flowers.

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  In the judgment of All Quiet on the Western Front, “The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the most terrible.” Not knowing the outcome as we do, Germany tried to see the sunny side of the barbed wire. “The whole army took fresh hope and fresh courage after the Russian collapse,” Hitler remembered. For after Russia’s soldiers declined to continue prosecuting the war, the weak-willed czar abdicated, and the newly empowered Bolsheviks sued for peace, which the Germans granted at a stringent price in resources and territory. (Thus the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.)

  And so the kaiser could credit himself with the first great conquest of that War to End All Wars. “Out of the wreckage of the czar’s dominions,” as Gary Sheffield wrote in his history Forgotten Victory, grew “a network of client states and spheres of influences that added up to a new German colonial empire with enormous economic potential.”

  Now, wasn’t that something worth invading Belgium for? With Russia imploding into civil war, Ludendorff and Hindenburg could now transfer multitudes of German troops to the Western Front, build new assault groups, strike the French and British at just the right spot, and at long last smash through the stasis of 1914–1917.

  As always, haste would be called for. The operation depended on quick success—before General Pershing got his American troops trained and mobilized.

  3

  The United States, goaded into it by the repeated sea-murder (so we not unreasonably saw it) of our own nationals by U-boats, had declared war on Germany in 1917. American soldiers entered the trenches that October, but didn’t begin leading large-scale operations until 1918, the year when the actors Lawrence Grant starred in To Hell with the Kaiser! and Norman Kaiser changed his name to Norman Kerry. Meanwhile, thanks to Operation Alberich, the Germans had had a year to recuperate their energies and thicken the Hindenburg Line. Secure in defense, they prepared to strike.

  On March 21, 1918, only 18 days after Brest-Litovsk, the Germans began a new campaign, code-named “Michael,” whose artillery barrage could be heard even in England. A German soldier called the noise “incessant and almost musical,” while a British rifleman thought it sounded like “sheer hell.”

  Since massed attacks preannounced by artillery barrages had accomplished so little throughout the war, Ludendorff essayed what had worked so well for T. E. Lawrence against the Turks: infiltration, seeking points of least resistance. The idea was to break the British Army, and thus Allied morale, and so bring about an end to the war.

  Concentrating their forces secretly by night, then advancing through fog and their
own fresh-laid poison gas in small groups of storm troopers over 60 miles of front, the Germans achieved full surprise. A desirable punch-through point was the town of Arras, birthplace of the French Revolution’s ruthlessly “incorruptible” Robespierre, who in obedience to some form of golden rule was himself finally guillotined.

  The train from Amiens droned past an emerald field of white cows, which gave way to rippled ponds, gray clouds, mown grass, white churches, trees. Here came the town of Albert, with a golden figure on its high brickwork tower; then our tracks entered a cut between the trees, came out again, and we glided through that kind of landscape that cliché-mongers call idyllic.

  Disembarking in Arras, I found myself in a cobbled square, walled in by four-story buildings, facing the ornate sweep of the town hall and the pale-yellow Hôtel de Ville, then a clock tower whose hands and Roman numerals were gold, and finally the famous belfry. Outside the Hôtel a monument memorialized Germany’s victims of 1940 and 1944, in this case Resistance fighters; on the square itself two plaques dryly explained that the original belfry dated from 1463 to 1914 and the Hôtel de Ville from 1502 to 1914.

  “Michael” quickly gained a miraculous 37-odd miles, so that it began to seem that the stasis was broken at last. Guderian called the feat “the greatest success achieved on the Western Front since trench warfare had begun.” On March 23 the invaders set up shop in the Laon Salient, close upon Crépy, and began bombarding Paris. The artillerists fired payloads of 200 to 230 pounds every 20 minutes for 139 days. They killed a thousand people and more. Smelling total victory, the kaiser declared a holiday.