Authors: Stephen O'Shea
Back to the Front (13 page)
I. Albert
T
HE SOMME. THE
mere mention of that river has sent generations of writers to their desks, eager to churn out something elegiac
or haunting, a descriptive passage to be read in a whisper on the BBC. It's a convention of sorts—the rain in your eyes, the
wind in your face, the empty, now silent, forever silent, fields. For the British, there is no more ironic landscape on the
European continent. Put in the "S" word and everything becomes ominous, a reference to massacre, to horror and pain. The sun
set over the Somme. The train headed east, toward the Somme. Near the Somme flowers bloomed. The Somme awaited them, tranquil
and inevitable. However bland these sentences, they all possess, as some like to say, a subtext. They bespeak death, waste,
doom, or folly. Somme suggests the fey, in the Scottish sense of one fated to perish soon. To get the same effect, American
English might replace Somme with Little Bighorn, or perhaps My Lai, but these equivalents do not measure up to the psychic
caesura implied in the word Somme. Much more so than Passchendaele, the lone syllable of the Somme sounds a death knell. For
an era, a way of life, a certain optimism, an empire, a world. Somme is short form for Armageddon.
It is fitting that the Battle of the Somme occurred near a town called Albert. Although the town, initially known as Ancre,
was renamed for its seventeenth-century owner, Charles d'Albert, the Duke of Luynes, Albert also happens to be the name of
Queen Victoria's German consort. Prince Albert—in full, Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—was
the man whose death at age forty-two, in 1861, made the black trim of perpetual mourning a badge of social virtue in the drawing
rooms of nineteenth-century Britain. Although originally a steady, old-fashioned, bandstand-in-the-park kind of name, Albert
eventually came to mean something else. From the Albert Memorial to Albert on the Somme, from the German person to the French
place, from mourning to massacre, Albert came to mean British death.
In his
Missing of the Somme,
a meditation on British remembrance, author Geoff Dyer states that "every generation since the armistice has believed that
it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning." There has always been, Dyer points out, a cult of posterity surrounding
the First World War, even as it was taking place. Perhaps that is true only of Britain — in my experience, the urge to eulogize
the calamity of the Great War had sputtered into nothingness long before I reached maturity. Nostalgia for empire had also
vanished. Even while encouraging second-graders in Calgary to go marching to Pretoria, our music teacher neglected to remind
us that we were growing up in the province of
Alberta, &
name that fairly drips with black crepe and stale crumpets. The teacher had overlooked the secret meaning of her surroundings;
we, her eager charges, would never care to know of its existence. If we now cast about for benchmarks, for before-and-after
moments, for the markers of our mental landscape at mid-life, we may talk about Hiroshima, 1945, or Dallas, 1963, or the moon,
1969, or O J. on the freeway, 1994. But the Somme?
T
HE DINING ROOM
of my hotel in Albert proves that it is possible to eat badly in France. Perhaps this is because of the town's
British connection. On my plate a lonely fillet has swum bravely through the doughy chop of a white sauce, only to end up
marooned on a shoal of cold rice. I pout for a moment, then tear at a piece of bread with my teeth, knowing that the theatrics
of self-pity usually make me feel better. I chew, mollified, and become aware that the room is humming. Everywhere there is
the low murmur of grazing Brits.
Eavesdropping reveals that there is serious war buffery abroad in Albert tonight. In the far corner, a tour group of elderly
people engages in a respectful give-and-take with a man whom I guess to be Martin Mid-dlebrook, the former Lincolnshire chicken
farmer who, after first visiting the area on a whim in the late 1960s, became the consummate expert on the battlefields around
Albert. His historical work,
The First Day on the
Somme,
and his guidebook,
The Somme Battlefields
(compiled with his wife, Mary), are staggering in their detail and painstaking research. The group gets up and leaves the
room as one.
Adjacent to my table sit a man and a woman in their late twenties who also seem to be advanced bellicists. I can hear their
subdued argument.
"No, dear," the man says, "the
Minenwerfer
was called the Jack Johnson/'
"Not the whizz-bang, then?"
"That was something else. More like our trench mortar."
"A coal box?"
That' s it.
"Are you sure?"
"'Course I am!"
I learn that these artillery duelists are on their honeymoon. He's a Great War nut, and she, as she confides over rice pudding,
was "cracked" enough to marry him.
"You'll like Verdun," he tells me, describing how taken they had been with the piles of bones on view at the mass grave at
Douaumont. "Very impressive. A hundred and thirty thousand skulls." She nods and smiles encouragement at me.
The lull doesn't last long. Another squabble over firepower flares up as soon as the new bride ventures an opinion about the
caliber of the field guns they saw in a fort near Reims.
"But they were seventy-five millimeter! They had to be!" he says, exasperated. "The most famous artillery pieces of the war!"
"I don't think that they were—"
"They wouldn't bloody well display German cannon, would they?!"
I leave them, honeymooners happy to reenact the guns of August.
A
LBERT TONIGHT LOOKS
much different from my first glimpse of it on a winter evening. Then, flushed and frozen from a December
day spent in the fields, where I had discovered the white scar of the Western Front, my companion and I entered the silent
town just as its streetlights flickered into life. It had been a peculiar day of somber exhilaration and private imagining.
I realized that history existed in space as well as time, that it did not take place in the classroom or on the tube or in
the stacks of a library but in places like these, on the chalky downlands and hedgeless fields between the Somme and Ancre
Rivers.
My companion, the Ohio Boomer with a love of maps, traced our route on a pizza that night: La Boisselle, Contalmaison, Fricourt,
Mametz, then back to his fork, embedded in a cheesy fold at Albert. I listened and watched, amused by his irreverence yet
dimly aware that these names once spelled oceanic grief for people now silenced by the passing of years. They also must have
meant, paradoxically, life, in its most extreme and self-conscious manifestation. "France," Vera Brittain wrote in
Testament of Youth,
"was the scene of titanic, illimitable death, and for this very reason it had become the heart of the fiercest living ever
known to any generation." Such a notion was hard to credit in this deserted town. Albert looked stolidly inert under a cobalt
sky on that cold December night, its
Addams Family
town hall and railway station improbable reminders of its haunted hinterland. We felt no presences in the streets, no sign
of that fierce living that Brittain spoke of—only the deep slumber of small-town France.
Now I'm hoping that the town might disclose a few of its secrets. I've been waiting for this reunion ever since leaving the
shores of the North Sea at Nieuport. The childlike petulance with which I viewed much of Flanders, my adolescent revulsion
on the heights of Vimy—all seem to be a necessary apprenticeship for this encounter with the soul of the Western Front. Surely
I will feel some kinship, after having spent weeks treading a metaphor, with the presences who once made history here.
I slip out into the warm evening air and wander down the main street to Notre Dame de Brebieres, the redbrick pilgrim church
that once displayed one of the Great War's most celebrated travesties. Its tall steeple is crowned by a peculiar statue of
Madonna and Child: Mary stands, holding the baby Jesus above her head, like a soccer player about to throw the ball in from
the sidelines. An ideal target for bored German artillerymen, the statue, through successive bombardments in 1914 and 1915,
gradually leaned farther and farther forward until it was perching precariously below the perpendicular. To put it another
way: If upright mother and upraised child began the war standing at twelve o'clock, they soon teetered over the void at four
o'clock, ready at any moment to topple into the street far below. The two figures stayed that way for most of the war, defying
gravity if not belief. It was only in the spring of 1918, when the Germans were occupying the ruins of the town, that a stray
British shell brought down the Golden Virgin of Albert.
The restored statue remains funny-looking. Mother, now glowing in the last rays of sunset, still seems ready to chuck her
burnished babe into the air. Her posture is supposedly one of presentation, as the child is shown to the shepherds, but resembles
more a moment of separation, of abandonment, a tearing asunder of generations. The latter makes me think of the grandfathers
I never knew, Daniel O'Shea and Bartholomew Conlon, and how their generation must remain a stranger to mine. My grandfathers
must have glimpsed this strange sight too. What did they make of it? The statue, perched high atop its steeple, was visible
from the British and German trenches to the east of town, especially at sunset, when the dying rays of the day picked out
the gold of the statue and etched a fiery silhouette against the horizon. Who knows what they thought, Daniel and Bartholomew,
as they tromped through these streets like so many hundreds of thousands in the British army? Daniel, who spent the entire
war in the trenches, suffered a shrapnel wound in the leg at the Somme that was to bother him for the rest of his life. Later
he would lose his left eye to the war.
Unlike Daniel, Bartholomew Conlon, my mother's father, had been a draftee. Not many in Britain and Ireland would escape the
war's voracious demand for manpower. He had been working in Scotland when the conscription law was passed in 1916. Rebellion
had also broken out in his beloved Dublin on Easter Monday of that same year—the day that Yeats's "terrible beauty" was born
— but Bartholomew, like so many thousands of his countrymen, soon found himself clad in a British uniform. The ambiguities
of being Irish were perhaps never clearer than at that moment. "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" ran the newly
coined Republican byword, yet countless Irishmen endured the hard, murderous slog in the mud of the Somme and the Salient.
Bartholomew was fortunate enough to survive the great German Picardy offensive of 1918. He was interned in a POW camp following
the Battle of Saint Quentin.
After the war, both young men returned home, Daniel to tailoring in Tralee, County Kerry, Bartholomew to drawing pints in
a Dublin pub. The two were discreet to the point of pathological about what they had seen and heard in their years in France,
and no amount of wishful thinking on my part can make it otherwise. The Kerryman died in 1940, the Dubliner in 1955, before
I arrived on the scene, and long before I got it into my head to spend my spare time visiting the sites of their silenced
youth. Here, in Albert, it has begun to dawn on me that the spottiness of memory and of transmitted experience can be put
down not only to the willed timelessness of my generation but also to the deliberate forgetfulness of theirs. They did not
want to talk, neither did we wish to listen. Emigration and the passing of a lifetime did the rest. In Michael Ignatieff's
phrase, we survivors can "mark the spot" of their vanished experience, and not much else.
I walk away from Notre Dame des Brebieres, disappointed now with the weird Madonna on high. At least for the moment, I have
stopped trying to wring affinities out of the unevocative streets of modern Albert. In the central square opposite the town
hall, helping me to get my mind off my failure, a reassuringly loud small-town carnival is being held. The Albertins are out
in force. At one booth a large and unhappy goose is being raffled off in aid of an agricultural charity; at another, a bullet-headed
fellow sells sausage by what appears to be the kilometer. Ever the voyeur, I go to watch the local teens on the bumper cars
and see them enact their concussive country foreplay: I like you, I give you whiplash, let's go neck. Inevitably, "Papa Don't
Preach" blares from an unseen speaker.
At the counter of a cafe-bar called Chez Ginette, I am welcomed into a circle of camaraderie presided over by Patrick and
his leather-laced girlfriend, Marie-Claude. My out-of-town exoticism calls for an immediate round of watery beer, and my status
as a plenipotentiary of the Anglo-Saxon world automatically qualifies me as an expert on music of the sixties and seventies.
Patrick, a thirty-four-year-old roofer disdainful of the present, asks me in quick succession if I like Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Three nods from me set off yet another explosion of hospitality, and two chasers of cognac are set
up in front of us. "They don't know what music is," Patrick says conspiratorially, gesturing to a group of youngsters lost
in a cloud of cigarette smoke near the back of the cafe. "All the good music is in the past." My objections are overruled
as Patrick plays Hendrix's
Star-Spangled Banner
on an air guitar while wailing out the tune through twisted lips.
About half an hour later, when the conversation has stalled somewhere between Procol Harum and The Who and Patrick has retreated
to the men's room, a girlfriend of Marie-Claude's looks up at me and asks, "Why did you come to Albert?"
"Nineteen-sixteen," I reply, gamely.
She looks at Marie-Claude in alarm.
"The Great War," I add.
She turns back to me and says incredulously, "The war of 'fourteen? The English, out there? The dead?!" Her hand sweeps toward
the entrance of the bar.
