Back to the Front (17 page)

As I cross the main highway, which leads straight as an arrow from Amiens to St. Quentin, a teeming cloud of black birds rises
from the wood and heads east. I am surprised when I realize that they are ravens. If they continue their route for a few miles,
past the beet sugar mill, the tacky roadside hotel, and the expressway cloverleaf, they will reach Belloy-en-Santerre, a "disputed
barricade" in the Battle of the Somme. The phrase belongs to the first verse of a once-admired poem:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air —

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

Its author, Alan Seeger, an American in the French Foreign Legion, attacked across the fields between Estrees and Belloy on
the last day of his life. By dying in battle, he posthumously captured the imagination of his countrymen as they weighed their
decision to go to war. A sometime poet and full-time bohemian on graduating from Harvard in 1910, the handsome Seeger had
sought a life of dash and valor that his circle of literary friends in New York's Greenwich Village could not provide. Aimless
in Europe when the shots rang out in Sarajevo, Seeger marched with the first band of American volunteers through the streets
of Paris in 1914. Others emulated him, the most famous being the young American pilots who formed the Lafayette Squadron of
the French air force. By 1916, it was still possible for an American to be idealistic about the war, given his country's clean
hands and unbloodied hearths. Seeger's rhymes roused many to clamor for an end to what they viewed as national cowardice in
a time of world crisis. Taste in poetry would change once American casualty lists grew.

Seeger marked a messianistic, ail-American moment—he was still writing about apple blossoms and destiny while the battle-worn
Rosenberg and his peers were composing apostrophes to rats. When Seeger raced to his death across the Santerre, he came not
only as the older, rasher brother of the literary Lost Generation but also as the harbinger of the new American century. It
was not his fault that his successors might be more self-interested or levelheaded; Seeger set an idealistic, macho standard
that would come to grief a few generations later in Southeast Asia. Unlike the soon-to-be-disabused patriots who volunteered
for Vietnam, he was not "born on the Fourth of July." Alan Seeger
died
on the Fourth of July. It was in 1916, and he must have been happy.

I
HAVE WALKED
too far today, and see no end in sight. The land south of Estrees has been a succession of dusty villages and
barking dogs. At the German and French cemeteries that punctuate this limitless battlefield, the friable soil of the flatland
has whipped up and begun to eddy around the graves. Not that I care—it is nearly seven o'clock, and my feet ache. Animal discomfort
can easily overwhelm the duties of the observant traveler.

I must be trudging quite tragically, for the unbelievable occurs. A man on a moto-scooter pulls over on the roadway and hollers
across the field at me. At first I take him to be a tetchy farmer, then I realize that he is offering me a lift. I can't believe
my luck as I move across the dry earth toward him — I have been spotted by the only person in the entire departement capable
of such a generous gesture. He's wearing sunglasses, a dirty brown suitcoat, a moth-eaten sweater, gray stretch slacks and
red running shoes, and he hasn't shaved in at least four days. There is a crazy intensity in his eyes. He's obviously not
all there. We make a good pair.

His moped is towing a little wagon open to the four winds, barely larger than a child's toy. I believe the correct name for
it is a dog cart. Gratefully, I squeeze my rear end down onto the cart's platform and leave my tired legs hanging akimbo over
the road. It is an enjoyable two-mile ride into central Chaulnes, a small market town in the heart of the farm country. Housewives
heading home from the
boulangerie
frown in undisguised horror at the sight of us—the local eccentric putt-putting his way into town with an ungainly trophy
found wandering the fields. Gallic good ole boys at cafe tables shout encouragement as we pass, small children burst out laughing.
We arrive at the central esplanade beneath a statue of a stern Enlightenment grammarian.

My benefactor pulls me to my feet and firmly rejects my offer of a drink. "No! No! No!" he says in a gravelly voice. "When
you're on the road you don't give anything! Understand?" I must not look convinced, so he continues. "If you're given something,
that's okay, but you're not to give anything. Understand? Understand?"

I nod. His face creases into a toothless smile and he pats my shoulder. "Look, I won't wish you a good journey, so I'll just
say
merde.
Understand?"

It's my turn to smile.

"Merde!"

With that, the Angel of Chaulnes fires up his moped and trundles off into the evening light.

4. The Noyon Salient

The Noyon Salient was a large bulge in the German lines, a blunted belly of destruction and menace that hung over Paris, some
sixty miles to the south. The Front, as one walks down it from Flanders and Artois, turns left in this part of Picardy and
heads east toward Champagne. Noyon, as befits a turning point, has the distinction of being a palindrome. Sex at Noyon taxes.

The word play is not mere whimsy—Noyon is also the birthplace of John Calvin, the man whose followers would make income a
metaphysical come-on. And Calvin's unexpected appearance in Noyon, in turn, coincides nicely with Ypres's relation to Cornelius
Jansen. Oddly, two great Christian reformers are associated with the two great salients of the Western Front, two catalysts
of religious renewal connected to two catalysts of deicidal disbelief. It's as if St. Francis came from Antietam, twice.

All of the towns and villages within an immediate southerly radius of Noyon were deliberately destroyed in the spring of 1917,
when the Germans evacuated the bulge and fell back on the
Siegfriedstellung,
or Hindenburg Line, a fortified defensive position that allowed them to shorten their trenches. The Germans laid waste to
hundreds of square miles of land when they made their surprise withdrawal from the salient around Noyon. It was one of the
greatest property crimes ever perpetrated on France—farmland was ravaged, towns dynamited, wells poisoned, churches and castles
destroyed, and the resulting rubble booby-trapped. Until then, the Noyon Salient had been a relatively quiet sector of the
Front. But quiet—especially "all quiet" — is a loaded term. In those times when no great offensives were being held, it is
estimated that the French army alone lost 100,000 men a month. For end-of-the-century ears, the number sounds impossibly,
unimaginably large.

My walk through this part of Picardy inspires little more than a few consecutive days of irritation. A province of France
rich in cathedrals and supposedly redolent of medieval glory, Picardy south of the Santerre reveals itself to be a blanket
of rural bleakness made even more disagreeable to the walker by impassable thruways and fenced-off train lines. The express
from Paris to the northern city of Valenciennes once derailed in this washed-out Pissarro landscape because of a sudden track
subsidence. The railbed, at the point where it crossed the Front, collapsed into an unseen and unsuspected underground hollow
made by an old trench. For once history had undermined engineering, rather than the other way around.

I look at my route map. Fouquescourt, Damery, Beauvraignes, Crapeaumesnil. Lackadaisical little villages file by in the shuttered-up
silence of midafternoon, their only structure of note the inevitable and usually dramatic war memorial. A maiden weeps, a
soldier falls, a cock crows—all decisions made by town councilors when a postwar French government decreed the erection of
a monument to the war dead a legal obligation. The eternal duet of small-town France—
mairie
vs. church—was joined by a mute third party, so that even the most insignificant collection of houses now has a memorial in
its midst. It is said that the political complexion of a town after the war can be divined by its monument: sober or regretful
means socialist or anticlerical, triumphalist or bloodthirsty translates as conservative or nationalist, Pieta-like or angel-filled
almost always tips off a militant Catholic or right-winger. A French hamlet might not have a water tower, a baker, or even
a store, but it will always have a list of the dead chiseled in stone. The Great War added a dash of lugubrious kitsch to
every village of France that no amount of romanticizing about arty country living can erase. For the French, the Great War
is an immutable presence, like Church and State.

The war did, however, change its name. For a while it was known as
la grande guerre
or
la der des der
(short for
la dernihe des dernihes
—the last of the last) until the debacle of 1940 showed it to be just another conflict in France's long inventory of inconclusive
bloodletting. Now it's called, with actuarial breeziness,
la guerre de quatorze,
and is usually shrugged off as a necessary nightmare over which too much time has been spent and too much ink spilt. The expression
"C'est reparti comme en
quatorze"
(roughly: It's 1914 all over again), a reference to the war hysteria that swept the country at the prospect of a rematch with
the Germans (the first round was in 1870), survives in the French language to describe any activity enthusiastically taken
up again. The kickoff of a soccer match between rivals, the reconciliation of a quarreling couple, even the onset of a rainstorm—all
are good pretexts for dunking a sugar cube into your demitasse and uttering, knowingly, "C'est reparti comme en quatorze."

Of all the cliches and bywords related to the Great War, there are few that have lived on through to the end of the century.
Most are fairly musty, but it is surprising how many linger on somewhere in the recesses of memory. Below is a short list
from the lexicon of World War I commonplaces:

The powder keg of Europe               Shell shock

The Balkan tinderbox                        Dogfight

The war to end all wars                          Peace without victory

The war to make the world               
Gott strafe England

safe for democracy                      Hang the Kaiser!

The Fourteen Points                      
On les aural!

Trench coat                    Freedom of the seas

The Western Front                    
La fleur au fusil

Tommy                    Home before Christmas

Poilu
                    The miracle on the Marne

Doughboy                    The taxis of the Marne

Feldgrau
                    
La Vote Sacree

Fritz                    The Big Push

Jerry                    
La Madelon

Heine                    Over there

Boche
                    
Wacht am Rhein

Hun                    
No-man's-land

Jack Johnson                    Over the top

Big Bertha                    Go west

Creeping barrage                     Buy the farm

Some are too obvious to explain, others not. A Tommy, for example, is a British soldier, derived from the name Thomas Atkins,
the John Doe chosen during the Napoleonic Wars to show infantrymen how to fill out an army paybook. Similarly,
poilu
(hairy) is the name of a French infantryman, taken from prewar slang for any male acquaintance. The German equivalent,
Feldgrau,
refers to his field-gray uniform. (The Germans had other words for the infantryman:
Kilometerschwein
and
Lakenpatscher,
respectively, "kilometer pig" and "puddle splasher.") The American doughboy is more of a mystery: depending on the source
one consults, the word is either a corruption of "adobe" or a tribute to a dumpling. As for the words that follow it in the
list, everything from Fritz to Hun counts as an anti-German slur.

Jack Johnson, the black boxer, was the undefeated world heavyweight champ from 1908 to 1915—hence the name given to a certain
type of concussive shell emitting black smoke. Bertha, after whom a massive long-range gun was called, was Bertha Antoinette
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the heiress to the Krupp armaments empire. The expressions of hostility are more straightforward:
for the Germans' famous "God Punish England/' there is Prime Minister David Lloyd George's "Hang the Kaiser!", General Philippe
Petain's
"On les aura!"
("We'll get 'em!"), and President Woodrow Wilson's "Peace without victory," his idea for a winner-take-nothing peace.

La fleur au fusil
(flower in the rifle) refers to the raucous sendoff given to troops marching off to war in 1914. Old newsreel footage shows
young Parisiennes rushing out and planting kisses on soldiers' cheeks as they headed to almost certain death. Whether this
was staged for propaganda purposes is still debated by historians. "Home before Christmas" indicates the expected length of
the war at its outset. The Allied victory at the Marne in September 1914 was transformed by myth-making publicists into a
miracle—as indeed it may have been, given the blundering that had preceded it—and the taxis in question were Parisian cabs
requisitioned as troop transport.
La Voie Sacree
(the sacred road) was the thirty-three-mile route from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun that, in 1916, kept the French side of the killing
ground supplied with men and munitions. The Big Push occurred in 1918, as the Allies kept attacking until the Germans gave
way.

The next titles in the list could be called the Great War Greatest Hits. "Over There" is American and, naturally enough, self-assured;
"Madelon,"
French and convivial; "The Rhine Watch," German and soulful. "No-man's-land," although an expression dating back to the Middle
Ages, came to be almost exclusively associated with the treacherous, shell-shattered clearing between the underground armies
of the Great War. "Over the top," the locution used to describe climbing out of the safety of a trench to attack, has shaken
off the war and come to mean off the wall, out of bounds or, simply, beyond the reasonable. The last two in the lexicon —
"go west" and "buy the farm"—are ways to express what going over the top into no-man's-land often meant: getting killed. Wordplay
is not always innocent.