Back to the Front (18 page)

T
HE DOGS IN
the Noyon Salient seem uninterested in pouncing on the dusty drifter as he passes. After all, they've seen armies
go by. The war cemeteries in this stretch of the Front grow rarer—not only because it was a quiet sector in 1915-17, but also
because the posthumous gardening instincts of the British have been left behind. Strictly speaking, the Western Front gives
way here to
la ligne des tranchees
or
Die Westfront.
The French and the Germans preferred large national ossuaries to bury their war dead, the former out of a Jacobin urge to
centralize, the latter from the necessity of taking whichever few plots of land were grudgingly allotted to them. Aside from
the suspect prevalence of 1920s-era housing, the traces of war have all but disappeared in the Noyon Salient. I find myself
ashamed at being annoyed at a landscape that has returned to obscurity. To belong to no one—to be no-man's-land—carries a
perverse notoriety, but to belong to a nobody, to have reembraced the discretion of individual ownership, robs a countryside
of cachet.

Not that the newly ahistorical province is devoid of charm. Southwest of the forgettable market town of Roye, the Picard plateau
offers the first signs of relief I have
seen
since bidding good-bye to the sociopathic fishermen on the Somme. Ahead are the forests of the Noyonnais, a region of small
hills that stretches east along the line of the Front. Beet fields are replaced by orchards, swirling dirt by swarms of flies.
In Lassigny, a cheerful red-roofed town just within the departement of the Oise, beauty returns to the world. At Thiescourt,
Lassigny's neighbor along the line of the Front, there is even a handsome, reconstructed Gothic church standing alone on a
rise, looking like a postcard for liturgical bliss. I have become so accustomed to sad villages that I fear I've somehow wandered
off course, to a place unaffected by the gore of the Great War. It's only on seeing a French tricolor float behind the church
above a farmer's field—always a telltale marker of many soldiers' graves—that I realize the Front is still with me, beneath
my boots as I tread the black pavement.

On the way out of Thiescourt, a boy of about seven on a bicycle keeps pace with me on the opposite side of the road. He glances
over warily. I smile in what I hope is an avuncular manner. The rider and his bike sidle ever closer. Curiosity finally wins
the day.

"Monsieur, where are you going?"

"To Ribecourt."

"Are you going to walk there?"

Yes.

"You're going to have sore feet, Monsieur."

5. Ribecourt to Nampcel to Soissons

A slope leads down toward the industrial town of Ribecourt on the River Oise. Behind me, on the crest of the hill, stands
a domesticated forest. Every hundred feet or so some zealous souls have posted signs,
Defense
dEntrer
—
Chasse Gardee,
to underscore the private nature of their private property. This is someone's land. Between the trees near the roadway, the
owners of the different swaths of the forest have seen fit to string barbed wire, so that no stray animals can get in or out
without injury, and no army of picnickers or fornicators can wreak havoc in the undergrowth. There are no stiles here for
scaling fences, no hiking paths for the crosscountry wanderer, and no visible hints that humans are welcome anywhere in the
vicinity. This is not the wilderness—and has not been for a long time. The local government has already put signs up for next
year's celebration of the founding of the French national monarchy:
Oise 987—
1987, il y a mille ans, la naissance de la France!
(A thousand years ago, France was born here!) Oise, appropriately enough, is pronounced "was."

I cross the river and leave Ribecourt's industries behind me. A long row of houses follows the trace of what was the French
front line toward a town called Bailly. Family men stand in their plot of no-man's-land, washing their cars in the driveways
of model homes that resemble oversized shoe boxes topped with steep circumflex accents. The men momentarily stop what they're
doing and look up hopefully at the passing pedestrian. I sense that if I were a nubile young woman, unwanted conversations
might be struck up or unpleasant gestures with the garden hose might be made. As it is, yeti-like canines come gamboling over
lawns toward me, unrestrained by either a leash or a reluctance to drool. It is Sunday morning and this is purgatory.

Relief comes from yet another woodland. The sylvan stretch ahead is an outgrowth of the much larger acreage of greenery known
as the Forest of Compiegne. The city of the same name is a few miles to the south, but my path leads me away from it, away
from the clearing where the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The Front lies due east through the forest towns of
Ollencourt and Tracy-le-Val. At the latter I stop in for a quick coffee, only to remember that Sunday morning is the congregating
time for country drunks throughout France. This place is no exception. Rheumy eyes peer through the cumulus of cigarette smoke
as beers are knocked back and last night's lottery drawing is debated in numbing detail. At cafe counters such as this, the
French language is less enunciated than gulped, usually in brief glottal intakes that would give most other people the hiccups.
Occasionally, one of the debaters lets loose a great hacking gob of a cough that hushes his fellows until the final gurgles
of angry phlegm have trickled off into silence.

My footsteps hasten, as I try to shake off the dog-loving car-washers and tubercular tipplers that inhabit this section of
the Front. In an access of sudden scenic prettiness, the road winds between two bosky hillocks before heading up and out onto
an utterly treeless plateau that stretches for a few miles. The French countryside, a succession of microcosms that make the
continental features of North America seem inhuman in their scale, never ceases to surprise. I had thought myself locked into
a day or two of sourly fenced-off shadiness; instead, I am on an exposed upland with little more than the sky as companion.
A succession of wildflowers — Queen Anne's lace, morning glories, thistles, poppies—leads me into a long low field of sheared
wheat. The road tapers off into a dirt track, then a cowpath, then trampled weeds. A gust of wind ushers a human-sized swirl
of white dust across a neighboring meadow. I begin to sing, from the sheer joy of solitude. The only bump on the horizon is
a large manor farm, placed squarely on a gray crossroads a couple of miles away. I think of Private Cadogan, the dead youth
in Flanders, and how today, right now, there can be no eulogy for him save the wind and the clouds. There is no Western Front
here, just the wide embrace of emptiness. There is no trace of it in the soil, or the sky. I am walking a
tabula rasa.

The plateau, called the Toutvent (Every wind), just happens to conceal its secrets well. After an hour or so of brisk hiking,
the land suddenly dips, as if at the top of an intermediate ski slope. The cavity deepens and the grassy walls of a natural
depression rise higher on either side. Two large German cemeteries of Great War dead, lost amid mature trees the tops of which
are invisible from the plateau, lead even farther down toward the gulley floor. Inevitably, for this is France, a village
has been built in this topographical vulva, a banged-up Brigadoon that war, if nothing else, has managed to find. The road
sign reads, "Nampcel." I check my map, see that I have wandered behind German lines—hence the cemeteries—and that I should
be close to something called
LAbri du Kronprinz
(The Crown Prince's Dugout). A woman in the village waves an irritated hand in one direction when I ask her where it is. Up
a small track, over a rusty gate, and suddenly I see, hidden by the undergrowth like some Mayan monument, a three-story concrete
structure built into the side of the gulley wall.

I pick my way around in the cool semidarkness. The same barely breathable dankness that I came across in Vimy permeates the
lower floor. It is the smell of damp earth, cold stone, and old fear, the clammy musk of the Great War. The structure may
not have been built for the Kaiser's nephew—German fortifications tend to get inflated in importance in local legend—but it
certainly could have housed an entire general's staff. Square, spacious rooms lead off a central corridor on three levels.
Where once heels clicked, confiscated local wine flowed, and telephone operators barked orders to poor subalterns stuck in
the open country at such places as Tracy and Ollencourt, there is now only a bit of lonely graffiti from a later time. The
place is a delinquent's dream — the litter of beer bottles and charred carnpfire remains shows its current vocation. Outside
once again, I can see the cleverness of its location: tucked as it is into the south side of the Nampcel depression, no French
artillery shell could ever have had the boomerang trajectory necessary to hit the place. For those inside the capacious hideout,
the war must have been all sound and fury—and not much else.

Back on the plateau above Nampcel the sky opens. This is my first truly bad moment of the walk. I am caught in wide-open country
as a summer thunderstorm comes dancing over the plain. I hurry on, aware of the inviting electrons coursing through me. I
wonder if being short makes me less appetizing as a spark plug, or if I can find another nook like Nampcel before the business
end of the clouds passes overhead. A motorist approaches,
sees
my plight, drives on. My Francophilia touches bottom. I let loose a long stream of curses — until I feel the hairs rise on
the nape of my neck. Then the world goes blindingly white. There is a tremendous clap of thunder.

I sit on the ground. I am too frightened to feel foolish. "War Buff Found Toasted." "Western Front Strikes Again." "Historical
Hiker a Thing of the Past." I work up headlines for imaginary obits, which takes my mind off the obvious question: Why did
I ever leave the safety of the bunker? The first pellets of hail go bouncing off the road surface and are soon biting into
the canvas expanse of the backpack now perched atop my head. They are followed by a torrent of hailstones, a sustained burst
of icy shrapnel. The air goes white as another electrical discharge crackles over the land. The noise of the falling hail
is smothered under a deafening blanket of thunder. The temperature drops, the rain teems down. I watch as puddles form around
me. They are soon muddy ponds. I can feel the rain through my sodden sweatshirt. The poor poilus.

A car honks its horn. Dutch license plates. I get up — I'm going where they're going.

Q
UI A CASSÉ
la vase de Soissons?
(Who shattered the Soissons vase?) This is, in French folklore, the unanswerable, rhetorical question par excellence. It refers
to a story of misplaced loot and capricious decapitation in Merovingian times—nobody knows the name of the anonymous soldier
who defied his king Clovis and broke the vase, but the conundrum has survived to the present day. A more descriptive question,
given the depredations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would be,
"Qui a
cassé Soissons?"
for the town, once the capital of the Gauls and an important ecclesiastical see, is now a sorry mess. The cathedral is disfigured,
halfheartedly restored, its statuary smashed, its walls covered in an obscene acne of shell and bullet holes. Another large
church in Soissons, belonging to a once thriving monastery, was dismantled in a moment of post-Revolutionary zeal, leaving
only twin Gothic towers to loom over the town as a reminder of former glory. In the other main church, an exhibition entitled
"150 Years of Restoration in Picardy" serves as a nice counterpoint for any sightseer who happens to be marooned here. There
is so much to restore because so much has been wrecked.

As if to underscore the waste, a military parade is being held this drizzly Monday morning. Soissons marks the beginning of
a region of soldiering. All around the town there are military bases and artillery firing ranges, some of them placed smack
in the middle of the Western Front. Thus, an armed-to-the-teeth march can be summoned up at the drop of a kepi. The reason
for today's spectacle, as far as I can tell, seems to be the commissioning of a new commanding officer for some outlying contingent.
Tanks rumble past, and troops too old to be conscripts stride down the main street as if they own it. The morning shoppers
look on impassively, apparently accustomed to such inane muscle-flexing in the middle of modern Europe. It is strange to see
such martial pride in a town that has been robbed of interest and of its heritage by the destruction of war and the collapse
of armies sent to defend it.

6. Home Leave

Soissons gets on my nerves so much that I give myself a furlough. I go on home leave in mid-August, to get away from the Front
and the army. Although most Parisians have their toes in the Med at this time of the year, many of my acquaintances from the
magazine business have already returned to the city. It is the moment to begin churning out hype-filled articles on what to
expect in September when Paris comes to life again.

This is especially true of
Paris Passion,
an English-language monthly run on a shoestring and written for a pittance. In the summer of my walk, it is still an enthusiastic
post-collegiate enterprise staffed by people of unbending principle who just happen to sleep together a lot. I write about
bars and restaurants for the magazine—thus I spend a couple of evenings in both types of places explaining what I've been
doing on my summer vacation. Eyes invariably glaze over, until I produce the bullets and barbed wire picked up along the way.
The reactions are varied.

"You mean this shit is just
lying
out there?"

"You could make earrings out of the bullets. Start a line of no-future jewelry."

"What about the pesticides? Don't you end up covered in pesticide every day?"

"I'd be depressed. I can't stand farms."