In Europe (15 page)

The letter sent by the British government to the family of those who died in battle contained the following standard phrase: ‘He was killed by a bullet, straight to the heart.’ In reality, however, only very few were fortunate enough for that. Countless soldiers bled to death between the front lines, where no one could help them, amid the dying donkeys and whinnying horses. After the first day of the Battle of the Somme, as the British Lieutenant Hornshaw reported, an unearthly wailing and groaning rose up from no-man's-land, ‘a sound like moist fingers being dragged down an enormous windowpane’.

After the first year of the war, Corporal Louis Barthas noted that only three of his 13th Group's old guard were left. The others had all been wounded or killed. In Berlin, Käthe Kollwitz saw a uniformed boy, no older than fifteen, wearing the Iron Cross. Boys of that age were apparently being sent to the front.

By late 1915 the number of Allied soldiers who had been killed or
wounded on the Western Front amounted to more than two million. The Germans had lost 900,000. The field hospitals on both sides of the front resembled meat-processing plants. In Berlin I stumbled upon the story of the Jewish hospital train
Viktoria Louise
, dispatched by the Jüdisches Krankenhaus with the best surgeons on board. The train even had its own operating car. More than 100,000 of the country's 500,000 Jews fought in the war, proportionally more than of any other ethnic group. The war brought equality at last. That, however, is not how the German military staff saw it: in late 1916, orders were passed down that all Jews were to be registered separately. About 15,000 German Jews died in the war.

Everywhere the troops were weakened by malnutrition, shelling and the grim conditions in the trenches, but life was harder on the Allied side. The Germans, bent on defending their positions, dug in solidly. The French and British positions still to be seen today resemble little more than overgrown ditches. During the winter months they were mostly muddy, stinking, open sewers along which soldiers were shuttled back and forth, without much in the way of rest and with almost no protection. Corporal Barthas kept careful note of where he slept during those years: in a cellar, on the podium of a ballroom, in a pigsty, beneath a tarpaulin on a street, in a church, in a draughty attic, under a cart, in the ruins of a house and often simply in a hole in the ground. Notorious among the British was ‘trench foot’, a condition caused by weeks of walking around in wet footwear. The disease caused the feet to swell, after which the skin changed colour, the toes died and the feet had to be amputated.

The troops suffered from mental problems as well, something mentioned in every war diary. According to Ernst Jünger, the roar of a nonstop nocturnal artillery attack was so disturbing that soldiers would forget their own names or how to count to three. He likened the permanent fear of death to a sense of being tied up and having someone swing a sledgehammer past your head again and again, knowing that your skull could be smashed any moment. Towards the end of the war he lost almost half his company, more than sixty men, to one direct hit. The seasoned veteran Jünger broke down and cried in front of the survivors.

Barthas described a trench immediately after a direct hit: a decapitated soldier, a badly mutilated body, a pile of German corpses, the dead body
of a young soldier who looked as though he were asleep, a few survivors staring apathetically into space. Then, suddenly another round came in: ‘The trench was aflame … I heard whistling and cracking, but also terrible screams of pain. Sergeant Vergès’ eyes were burned. Two poor bastards were rolling around on the ground at my feet … they had been turned into human torches.’ He himself blacked out. ‘They say I was staring vacantly and talking gibberish.’

Nervous collapses were so common that each army had its own term for them. The Belgians called it ‘
d'n klop
’, the Germans spoke of ‘
Kriegsneurose
’ or ‘
Granatfieber
’, the French called it ‘
choque traumatique
’, but in the end the English phrase ‘shell shock’ was adopted for the phenomenon. Whatever the language, the symptoms remained the same: uncontrollable weeping, extreme fatigue and panic attacks. Foot soldiers were also subject to a hysterical form of shell shock, accompanied by paralysis, muteness, deafness and facial tics.

At the town hall in Poperinge one can still view the cells reserved for soldiers charged with ‘desertion’ and ‘cowardice’. According to a secret British Army directive, the only proper punishment for cowardice was death, and medical reasons were not considered extenuating. Later studies of court documents have shown that many of the ‘pansies’ were probably psychiatric patients. The French executed an estimated 1,600 of their own soldiers, the British 300, the Germans 50. Later, a new tactic was invented: jolts of electricity through the brain were used to get ‘cowards’ back on their feet, quickly and radically.

Amid these cruelties, soldiers and officers did all they could to preserve a few remnants of ‘normal’ existence. ‘I often sat with a feeling of comfortable security at the table in my little bunker, the wooden walls of which were hung with weapons and reminded one of the Wild West,’ Ernst Jünger wrote. ‘I would drink a cup of tea, smoke and read, while my steward fussed with the little wood stove spreading the aroma of toast.’

Corporal Barthas reported that the French shelters close to Vermelles sometimes resembled little villas. Even along the front lines,‘sparks, flames and smoke’ rose up day and night ‘from the hundreds of little chimneys’. In the war museum at Péronne, one can see a British officer's complete set of ‘field’ tea-service accoutrements, pleasingly arranged in a wicker
basket. Beside it lies a German accordion with a makeshift songbook written by one M. Erdmeier,
Allerhand Schützgrabengestanzl
. Other Germans planted garden plots with rhododendron, snowdrops and
Parole-uhren
, little windmills that milled away the hours. The Belgians formed ‘families’, with a ‘father’ who referred to his bunkmate as his
wuf
, wife.

In the British trenches a special newspaper was distributed, the blackly humorous
Wipers Times
, published by a writer and printer who had found an old printing press in a ruin. The 8 September, 1917 edition shows an elderly British soldier, still in the trenches. The caption reads: ‘He stroked his hoary snow-white beard / And gazed with eyes now long since bleared …’ Another sketch shows ‘The Trenches, in the year 1950’. All this bears witness to the unbearable suspicion that was taking hold of more and more soldiers: that no solution would ever be found to this deadlock.

Perhaps it was courage born of desperation, the urge to move at any price, that led again and again to mass suicide attacks. Passchendaele, a wet and muddy hamlet not far from Ypres, was renamed Passion Dale by the British, because it had to be attacked again and again. Estimates are that some 60,000 men, a quarter of all those who died, drowned in the treacherous bogs around the handful of houses. They sank into the mud, disappeared into the thousands of holes and craters left by the artillery shells. ‘See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backwards a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.’

Meanwhile, the nineteenth century's final traces of innocence were disappearing fast. The Belgian Army had entered the war with uniforms that looked as though they came from a school play: shakos, clogs, capotes, felt caps, rucksacks made of dog skins, huge blue coats that absorbed all the water of Ypres. The Scottish Highland Regiment vehemently insisted on wearing their kilts, until it turned out that mustard gas could have a disastrous effect on intimate body parts. The German lancers wore huge, shiny eagles on their hats, and leather helmets you could push a bullet through with your thumb. The French proudly wore their red uniform
caps, blue coats and red trousers. No one had ever thought about camouflage or other practical matters: these were uniforms of honour and rank. Early in 1915, steel helmets and grey and khaki uniforms began appearing at the front, the pragmatic forms of the new century. The British toy manufacturer Meccano followed the technical developments closely. Examples can be seen today in London's Imperial War Museum: model 713, a machine gun mounted on a tripod; model 6.42, a complete battleship, and model 710: the Aeroscope, a kind of tall crane used to view the front from on high.

But, as is usually the case, it took a long time for all these new technological developments to win a place in the imaginations of the generals, politicians and others. The magnitude of the killing between 1914–18 was due largely to the persistent combination of old strategies with ultra-modern technologies. At first, almost no one understood that such modernities as the machine gun, poison gas, the airplane and later the tank called for an entirely new way of waging war. The common foot soldier at the front was often the first to become aware of this technical mismatch. He found himself having been sent to war with antiquated equipment, he found himself withstanding a mustard-gas attack with only a urine-drenched rag held over his mouth and nose, he saw his comrades during a bayonet attack being mowed down by newfangled machine guns, and his bitterness grew.

A British officer, William Pressey, reported seeing 200 French cavalrymen advancing across a hilltop close to Amiens, a stirring sight with their plumed helmets and gleaming lances. ‘They laughed and waved their lances at us, shouting “
Le Bosch fini
”, “Death to the Kraut!”’ Just after they disappeared from sight he heard the dry rattle of machine guns. Only a few stray horses came back.

At Houthulst, where these days St Christoffel Church organises weekend masses and the blessing of automobiles, there is a huge Belgian war cemetery. Schoolchildren have hung letters on the bluish slabs. To the dead they have written: ‘You were given only five bullets a day. Too bad it happened. But you fought well.’ And: ‘If another war comes, you won't be there to see it. But I hope a war never comes. See you in heaven.’

I hear a dull thud. A blue mist comes floating across the frosty fields.
In the field behind the cemetery, the DOVO, the Belgian War Munition Demolition Service, has blown up another heap of First World War ammunition. They do it twice a day, one and a half tons a year. When the farmers find grenades they leave them at the base of the utility masts, and the miners collect them. And so it goes on here. Generation after generation, this soil continues to vomit up grenades, buttons, buckles, knives, skulls, bottles, rifles, sometimes even a whole tank. The Great War never ends.

THIS PLACE SHOULD BE VISITED IN NOVEMBER, OR IN FEBRUARY
, when no grass, wheat or barley is growing, when the ground has returned to earth again, damp, muddy, full of puddles and wet snow. Late in the afternoon I drive to Cassel, just across the French border. The sun is hanging low over rolling fields, a huge orange ball about to sink into the ground. After that the sky turns a very fragile light blue with little pink clouds. Then darkness falls.

Hôtel de Schoebeque has, they say, changed little since the French commander-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, and King George V stayed here. Here sat the switchmen of fate, the chiefs of staff, the men who encountered the tens of thousands of dead only in statistics. The gate is locked. I hop over the fence and wander through the gardens, and in the last light of day I see what they saw: the plain stretching out past Ypres, with all the roads, fields and hedgerows like a chessboard at your feet.

The First World War already had a few of the characteristics that would make the next one so murderous: the massive scale, the technology, the alienation, the anonymity. The civilian, though, was still being spared: only five per cent of the victims of the First World War were civilians, compared with fifty per cent in the Second World War. The war, though not yet about race, was about origin, nationality and rank. And everywhere the governing classes willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of farm boys, workers and office clerks, without mercy, on behalf of a few vague moves on the chessboard.

From all those soldiers’ humiliating experiences at the front there gradually rose new social and rebellious movements, each with its own tone and its own appearance in every country. The fronts became in this way
the breeding grounds for a series of mass movements that would dominate European politics for decades, varying from angry veterans in Italy to frustrated officers in Germany to hard line pacifist-socialists in France and Belgium.

An almost aristocratic distance was maintained between French officers and their men. Maréchal Joseph Joffre refused to be told how many soldiers had been killed, for this would only ‘distract’ him. Corporal Barthas regularly describes the comfort enjoyed by French officers, while exhausted soldiers marched through the countryside like ‘cattle’, ‘slaves’ or ‘lepers’, hacked away at trenches and slept among the rats. But the British commander-in-chief, Earl Haig, was the most ruthless strategist.

Some later characterised Haig as ‘the Scot who seized the opportunity to liquidate more Englishmen than anyone before him’. But during the war years he was idolised. No matter how you looked at it, within only a few years he had succeeded in whipping the little British Army of regulars into an excellently trained military force with millions of troops, and so saved the British Empire. Here too, the technological lag played a role. The only wise place for a general to be in modern warfare is, in fact, behind the lines, at the end of a bundle of telephone wires. Fighting generals – fifty-six British generals were killed during the war – were brave, they were good for morale, but otherwise they simply got in the way. At the same time, the first telephones and other communications systems were still too unreliable to allow generals to work in this way, especially during combat.