Back to the Front (14 page)

I nod, embarrassed. Marie-Claude steals a glance at her friend, impressed by her erudition. The friend is shaking her head
in an eternal gesture of womanly condescension. I don't even try to explain. I could have mentioned the little boy's bike
on the trenches and craters of La Boisselle, but I don't. Not now.

Patrick returns, humming the song "Venus."

N
INETEEN-SIXTEEN, I
should have told her, marked the turning point. Before that year, the intelligent and sensitive might
have seen a reason for the war, might have had confidence in their country's leadership, might have placed faith in the army
hierarchy. Afterward, that was impossible. It was the year that finally polished off the certainties of the nineteenth century,
that made hope laughable, that sent God reeling in the minds of the ordinary man and woman. Before that time, poets could
write about the nobility of sacrifice, parsons about the divinity of the cause, and propagandists about the imminence of victory,
with a fairly reasonable expectation that their readerships would believe them. After 1916, skepticism and cynicism emerged
triumphant. Nineteen-sixteen was the year that Fitzgerald's "great gust of high-explosive love" blew one last time across
the continent of Europe. Thereafter, it was just the explosives.

The year began in the usual Great War manner. Joffre's general staff, seeing that no good had come of their costly offensives
of 1915, decided to repeat their mistakes. The British, chastened by catastrophe at Gallipoli, agreed to follow Joffre's lead
and concentrate all their efforts on the Western Front. A Loos-like operation would be tried again, on a larger scale. Thus,
the Allies planned to launch massed attacks on fortified German positions and suffer astronomical casualties in the hope of
pushing the invaders back a few miles. A poor, pathetic, inept, murderous strategy, but it was all that they had.

Falkenhayn, chief of the German war machine, produced a far more diabolical variant of Haig and Joffre's dreary offensive
credo. He wanted neither to advance nor to retreat—he simply wanted to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, thereby demoralizing
his opponents and forcing them to come to terms at the negotiating table. To his credit, Falkenhayn planned on sparing the
lives of his own soldiers, a revolutionary concept among the spendthrift generals who commanded the millions in the trenches.
In order, as he blithely put it, "to bleed France white," Falkenhayn chose to attack the point of the Western Front that he
guessed the French would move heaven and earth to defend: the hills above Verdun. The story of 1916 thus shifts away from
Picardy, east to Lorraine. As a symbol of French territorial integrity, the northeastern city of Verdun, the age-old divide
between Latins and Germans, was peerless. Falkenhayn had no intention of taking Verdun; he just wanted the French to die in
front of it. Attrition, a nice, inoffensive Latinate word derived from the idea of wearing down through rubbing, is the term
used to cover this horrendous reality.

On February 21, the German army took the initiative away from the Allies for 1916. After an unexpected stream of explosive
metal had rained down on the exposed French trenches, the Germans raced across the snowy hills to finish off the stunned survivors
in the front line. French conscripts fell back in confused retreat, outmanned and outgunned. Verdun was in danger. Would the
French fight back to protect it?

That question is not as stupid as it seems. The sad truth was that the town of Verdun and its fortifications served no appreciable
military purpose in trench warfare—and the French generals knew this. The fate of Belgium's forts in 1914, isolation and then
encirclement, had shown French military planners that their forts to the north of Verdun were more of a death trap than a
defense. But Falkenhayn gambled that the French would throw good sense to the winds and perish in droves in defense of a symbol.

The assumption was correct. Pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night for the only time during the entire four and
a half years of war, Joffre was ordered by Prime Minister Aristide Briand of France to hold Verdun, no matter what the cost.
The French would fight for a trope. Almost 400,000 would die. The French decision to take back every sorry shell crater north
of the city represents the most grotesque example of style winning out over substance in modern history. Not surprisingly,
it has been held responsible for many of the ills that beset France in the decades that followed. The French collapse of 1940
and the subsequent disgraceful adherence to Petain's brand of fascism have been rightly laid on Verdun's doorstep. From there,
it is but a small step to see Verdun at the root of an immature political culture that elevated another general to the status
of godhead and still prefers fanciful pronouncement to factual achievement. Verdun was the original lie of France in the twentieth
century, and the biggest lie of a war whose sheer volume of untruths ended up shaking the beliefs of all but the most benighted.

Nineteen-sixteen thundered on. As if obeying some dadaist urge, German commanders eventually wandered into the same bog of
irrationality. Falkenhayn's original strategy of attrition was abandoned. The armies of the Kaiser were ordered to take Verdun.
The result: 400,000 Germans dead for a militarily insignificant goal, and Verdun remained in French hands.

As France and Germany sank deeper into this pit of pointless self-destruction during the spring of 1916, the other major player
of the Western Front, Great Britain, remained unscathed. This would change with a vengeance. Joffre, his armies bleeding for
a metaphor, called on Haig to launch the great joint Allied offensive originally planned for early in the year. The Somme,
a difficult terrain over which to attack, was selected because it was the region where the British lines hooked up with the
French. Even if, given the mess at Verdun, there wasn't going to be a large French contingent involved, the need for a show
of Allied unity overrode any strategic considerations. Appearances, the curse of 1916 and of an Old World gone senile, had
to be maintained.

The initial attack took place on July 1, at 7:30 A.M. Subsequent waves of soldiers were ordered over the top throughout the
morning. It was the biggest fiasco in British military history. No amount of apologetic casuistry can ever absolve its authors,
Generals Henry Rawlinson and the ever-reliable Douglas Haig. Within a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, 40,000 British soldiers
had been wounded and 21,000 killed, many of them within sight of their own trenches. No fighting force on the Western Front
would ever lose so many so quickly, and for so little. Eighty years of ever-increasing detachment now separates us from that
astounding morning, yet it still beggars understanding that the murderous boobs in charge of the British army were allowed
to go unpunished. The war crime of Passchendaele still remained fifteen months in the future, yet the result of Rawlinson's
and Haig's willful ignorance of trench warfare, even after the disaster at Loos, was plain to see. By noon, all along the
narrow swath of no-man's-land from Gommecourt and Hébuterne to the River Somme, 60,000 young men lay wounded, dying, or dead,
a carpet of bloodied khaki that writhed and moaned in the sullen sunlight. Optimism began to drain from a culture that had
conquered a world.

In many ways, the Somme was like the Kindermord at Langemarck two years earlier. There, the men mowed down by machine guns
had been student volunteers; here, they were eager recruits who had signed up with their friends at the behest of Lord Kitchener
and his famous mustachioed face on the recruitment poster reading, "Your Country Needs YOU." Much of the huge British army
at the Somme were Pals Battalions, civilians from a village, a workplace, a town who joined the army en masse on the condition
that they could go to war together. For John Keegan, whose
Face of Battle
remains the most stimulating book of military history available to the nonspecialist, the nationwide enthusiasm for the Pals
movement showed "the inarticulate elitism of an imperial power's working class."

The Pals of the Somme trained, often without so much as a rifle between them, throughout 1915 and the beginning of 1916. They
were marched and drilled incessantly. Such parade-ground training would come in handy for their suicidal foray into no-man's-land;
orders called for them to march in regular formations, at a slow and orderly pace, toward the German trenches. The professionals
of the British army judged its citizen soldiers too dim-witted to do anything else.

The planners of the fiasco assumed that the artillery barrage prior to the attack would obliterate all opponents. The Germans
survived because they had dug into the welcoming chalk of the Somme a network of subterranean shelters—in some places more
than forty feet deep—and thus had sat out the seven days of deafening detonation. There was, in fact, less artillery per meter
of front attacked than at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle a year earlier. This was known at headquarters, but General Rawlinson
quashed all suggestions that the effects of his artillery campaign should be gauged. No one on his staff checked to see if
it had, indeed, worked. Instead, Rawlinson sent tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers walking into no-man's-land. The terrible
midday scene of July i was the outcome.

It might be thought that the wastefulness ended there, but that would be underestimating the wretched excess of 1916. Death
rattles are violent, and the First World War's destruction of nineteenth-century verities would require much more than just
the few bad months that lay in between the French decision of late February and the British debacle of early July. There was
still the summer and autumn. It was as if tight-laced, tight-lipped imperial Europe had become a roaring lush seeking oblivion.
French and German commands continued the bloodletting at Verdun, while British military leaders had the insane temerity to
proclaim that progress had been made on the Somme. The "push" would therefore continue, as if the towering losses of that
first day constituted a proof of victory. The magnitude of the screwup led the British brass to persevere in the hope that
future achievement might erase present calamity.

Nothing of the sort occurred, of course. Generals pushed their men forward in assaults that rivaled each other as exercises
in meaninglessness. "A battle fought from July to November 1916," historian Denis Winter succinctly notes in defining the
Somme, "saw the British and German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties between
them in an area just seven miles square." It took months for the British to reach objectives originally intended to be captured
on the first day. Dominion troops—South Africans at Longueval, Canadians at Courcelette, Australians at Pozièes—got sucked
into the maelstrom, ordered to attack or hold flattened villages that had no other military merit than that of occupying a
spot on Haig's map. According to Australian historian Peter Charlton, the senseless attacks ordered of the Aussies in the
summer of 1916 brought to fruition the sentiment that had germinated at Gallipoli. Charlton, quoted in Richard Holmes's
Fatal
Avenue,
writes: "If Australians wish to trace their modern suspicion and resentment of the British to a date and a place, then July-August
1916 and the ruined village of Pozieres are useful points of departure. Australia was never the same again."

By the last murderous push at the end of November, the same might be said of the entire army. Ever the weather vane of future
sentiment, the gifted generation of British soldier poets now celebrated squalor and decried futile suffering. No one emulated
the noble sentiments of Rupert Brooke any longer. The acid acuity of Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfrid
Owen became the Zeitgeist—and not just among the British. The French and the Germans, whose vicious struggle at Verdun ended
in the late autumn, were just as shell-shocked and embittered. By November 1916, enthusiasm had vanished, idealism had crumbled,
and mistrust prevailed. Rosenberg, a brilliant Londoner who would die in battle during the spring of 1918, captured the mood
of nihilistic resignation in an arresting poem, "Break of Day in the Trenches." Gone are appeals to patriotism or high-flown
ideals. Instead, the soldier talks to a rat:

The darkness crumbles away—

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

Only a live thing leaps my hand—

A queer sardonic rat—

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German —

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man's veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe,

Just a little white with the dust.

2. Beaumont Hamel to Thiepval to Guillemont

The Somme. The wind in my hair, the sun in my face, the silent fields. Hackneyed, but true. My bicycle, rented for the day
from a suspicious local merchant through the intercession of Patrick and Marie-Claude, wings me north of Albert, downhill
toward the River Ancre. I plan on making a great clockwise loop of the battlefield, a Tour de Somme. Throughout the furious
fights of 1916, the British lines slowly bulged forward, by increments of about seventy-five yards a day, so that the swath
of destruction broadened like a stain over the rolling Picard countryside. The lunar scene created by war eventually reverted
to a mix of farmland and open-air exhibition of the monument maker's art.