Authors: Geert Mak
In Europe (17 page)
At the Queen Victoria's Rifles Café, the tables still bear long rows of
vues stéréoscopiques
from the 1920s. For three quarters of a century the proprietor has been earning a handful of francs from his selection of the grisliest stereo photographs: corpses caught in the barbed wire, decapitated Germans, part of a horse in a tree. Today, this has all been raised to perfection. In the Yser Tower at Diksmuide you can stick your nose in a machine and smell the gas. Chlorine gas actually does smell a bit like bleach, mustard gas a little like mustard. At the impressive In Flanders Field peace museum at Ypres you can enter a darkened room for a trip through noman's-land, complete with snatches of dreams: what was going on in the mind of a German or British soldier as he went over the top? The room is full of noise and death rattles, full of images of running soldiers, phantoms from a peaceful life before the war: ‘Why me? Why us?’ Using a computer programme, you can pick out a soldier at will and trace the course of his life. I adopt Charles Hamilton Sorley, reading Greats at Oxford. He was killed at Loos, ‘a bullet through the head’.
There are other approaches as well. At the new Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, all the glory and illusions have been stripped away. The military uniforms and equipment are not displayed upright, but on the floor, like fallen men. Of course, that's how it was, almost everything here once belonged to the dead. But I am afraid the Historial will remain the lone exception. Today little cars trundle on rails through the old citadel of Verdun, like in an amusement park ride, and I am sure in twenty years’ time they will be trundling everywhere, through cunning replicas of the trenches complete with rats, excrement and the smell of corpses, the whinnying of dying horses and the cries of the mortally wounded. Slowly the feeling shifts from one of solidarity to one of curiosity.
Along the autoroute from Lille to Paris, the Battle of the Somme is only a tap of the accelerator. In late summer 1916, 1.2 million people died here, between two exits. The motorway runs at a slight distance from the eastern boundary of the battlefield. Drivers are kept informed of that as well, on big brown signs along the road,
LA GRANDE GUERRE
, the way a
famous chateau or a pleasant vintage might be pointed out elsewhere. Then they flash by, back into the serenity of present-day Picardy.
Here the war has already entered the next phase, that of a popular tourist attraction, a mainstay of the region's commercial infrastructure. Everywhere one finds folders promoting these centres of infernal attraction; staying at my hotel – it is 15 February, the heart of winter – there are at least three couples touring the front lines. The museums compete by offering even more audio and visual effects. For the first time in ages, I can receive Dutch channels on the TV in my room. On the news they are interviewing tourists who were stranded for a few days in a snow-bound Swiss village. ‘What we've been through!’ one tanned woman says. ‘We felt just like refugees.’ Another one cries ‘Everything, we've lost everything!’ She's talking about a suitcase full of skling outfits and make-up.
It is foggy outside, and as the day progresses the fog grows thicker. I drive carefully to the Somme. The blue contours of a ship are barely visible at the locks on the Canal du Nord. Close by is a stand of black willows, a few coots are swimming around, then all this dissolves again into silence and greyness. All the trenches, all the craters, all the forgotten remnants, all the lost bodies are covered in a white veil from sky to earth.
The Somme was the battle of total planning. On paper, there was no way this offensive could go wrong. The confrontation had been on the drawing boards for months on either side of the front, while at least a million soldiers and 200,000 horses, along with untold quantities of rifles, cannons and munitions, were being assembled. The countless tents, field kitchens, field hospitals, command posts and halting-places looked like little cities. ‘It was one big anthill,’ Louis Barthas wrote on 9 October, 1916, when he arrived at the Somme halfway through the battle. ‘There were convoys driving back and forth along the roads that passed through the camp, heavy munitions trucks, ambulances and all manner of military vehicles. Railway tracks had also been built, along which massive convoys of supplies, ammunition and food were transported …The camp was too big to be taken in at a glance. All you could hear was the noisy hubbub, mixed with the thundering of cannons in the distance.’
The British had even built a special bunker along the front line for Geoffrey Malins, the man assigned to make their victory film. The Germans,
supposedly wiped out by days of shelling, nevertheless proved to be alive and kicking at the start of the battle. Their barbed-wire barriers, their strong positions, their machine guns, all were still intact. It was the greatest slaughter in British military history. Of the 100,000 men who moved out that day, more than 19,000 had been killed by noon. Forty thousand were wounded. General Sir Beauvoir de Lisle reported: ‘It was a remarkable display of training and discipline, and the attack failed only because dead men cannot move on.’
It took weeks before the British were able to recover the bodies of their comrades. ‘Wounded, they had crawled into shell craters, wrapped themselves in their waterproof blankets, pulled out their bibles and died like that.’
Thanks to tips from Lyn MacDonald's veterans, I am able to find Malin's cinematic vantage point. It is, in all probability, this large hollow beside the Scottish monument at Beaumont Hamel, now covered in tall grass but an excellent place indeed for a camera. I squat down in it and see the images in my mind's eye. A group of soldiers has taken cover against the shoulder of the rutted road in front of me, ready for a renewed attack. They are young boys, half calm, half tense, one of them turns and looks boldly into the lens, another moves off camera, some are fussing with their equipment and take a swig from a canteen. One is casually smoking a cigarette, while another lies in the foreground, acting tough, showing off. One final draw on the cigarette, a signal sounds, the bayonets are mounted on the rifles, and then it all breaks loose.
What the film does not show is how it ended: less than two minutes later, all these men were dead.
I take the bus along the old infantry lines. The war cemeteries stand like orchards along the farmers’ roads, stop by stop. I visit the field where almost the entire Royal Newfoundland Regiment was mown down during a senseless attack, a case of collective suicide that even today could serve as an example for Muslim fundamentalists. No fewer than 700 boys. Their desperate passage can still be precisely traced. Sheep graze around the bomb craters and trenches. The barbed wire is gone, the bodies have vanished, but the Canadian fir trees planted here make a fearsome noise: hear their branches talking in the wind.
I am reminded of a conversation that Vera Brittain, as an army nurse, overheard in a hospital ward. A sergeant told of a fantastic captain he had had, an officer who always got his boys out of a tight spot. He was killed at the Somme, and they had mourned him like a brother. ‘But a while back, just before the Krauts came into Albert, we were in a bit of a fix and I was doing all I could to get us out of it, and suddenly I see him, with his clear eyes and his old grin, bringing up the rear. So, Will, he says, that was a close shave. And I go to answer him, and suddenly he's gone.’ Then someone else in the ward began to talk about a couple of stretcher-bearers, a top crew. ‘One day one of those coal bins comes whistling down and they're gone. But last week a few of our boys saw them again, carrying a couple of wounded fellows down the trench. And in the train I met a boy who swears they carried him out of it.’
Robert Graves mentions a similar experience. During a banquet held for his company, he wrote, he saw at the window one of his soldiers, a fellow by the name of Challonner. ‘There was no mistaking him or the cap badge he was wearing. I jumped up and looked out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag end smoking on the pavement.’ Challoner had been killed a month earlier.
Vera Brittain tended not to put much stock in it, but her men were adamant. ‘That's right, Sister, they're dead. But they were our mates when they were killed at the Somme in ‘16, and it's a fact: they still fight alongside us.’
The next day I ride through gentle, rolling countryside, the weekend-house country of Paris, green and modest. In the fields ploughed red I can still see the vague, whitish traces of trenches. This is a region of gradualness. The towns and villages display no grand movements, they contain no huge monuments, no shocking modernities.
In the little roadside restaurants everyone is served the menu of the day, no option: soup, chicken, cheese, pudding, coffee. The men know each other well, they shake hands after their meal and then climb back into their trucks or vans. I find a hotel with a grandma knitting and a chambermaid with big eyes. Later, in the corridor, I see her again with a mobile phone, and all she says into it is ‘
Je t'aime … oui, je t'aime … merci … mais je t'aime …
’
Verdun is a peaceful town, and contains the most horrible war memorial I have ever seen. It is a tower, atop which a knight glowers threat-eningly across the rooftops. If I were a three-year-old citizen of Verdun, I would be afraid to close my eyes at night. At the knight's feet lies a museum, marked by the usual pride and pomp, the same drive for glory that almost destroyed the French Army. The Battle of Verdun began on 21 February, 1916 and lasted ten months. It accounted for 260,000 lives, almost one a minute. In the long run no one got much further because of it, but that did not bother German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn. What he wanted, above all, was bodies. He knew that the fortifications of Verdun had long been the gateway to France, that the city had always had a special symbolic significance for the French, and he wanted them literally to ‘bleed to death’ here. The German code name for the attack on Verdun was ‘Gericht’, the place of execution.
Falkenhayn understood the mentality of the French generals very well. They threw everyone and everything they had into the fray, thinking only of glorious attacks, and were barely concerned with the lives of their troops. That is reflected in what remains of the French trenches: shallow and makeshift, in contrast to the German concrete. Verdun was a trap for the French Army, with pride and glory as its bait.
The only supply line, the legendary Voie Sacrée, remained intact, but that too was part of the German plan: to bleed to death, one needs an artery. The French foot soldiers called Verdun ‘the big sausage machine’, and as they came marching up they could see from afar the stinking hell of rumbling and flame, a gaping maw signifying the end of everything. For the German soldier, in fact, it was hardly different: 330,000 of them would be killed or wounded, compared to 360,000 Frenchmen. Verdun was much more traumatic for the average Frenchman, however, because the French Army worked by rotation. Most French soldiers, therefore, had a chance to become personally acquainted with ‘the big sausage machine’, even if only for a while, with all the accompanying physical and psychological consequences.
Corporal Barthas’ company arrived at Verdun on 12 May, 1916. They were to relieve the troops of the 125th Regiment. When they entered the trenches, all they found was ‘one huge pile of ripped-apart human flesh’. The day before, it seems, there had been a massive mortar attack.
‘Everywhere lay wreckage, ruined rifles, torn knapsacks from which tender letters and carefully cherished memories had fallen and were scattered in the wind. There were also shattered canteens, shoulder bags torn to shreds, all bearing the insignia of the 125th Regiment.’
One day later they were allowed to leave again, in a terrible nighttime journey on foot across the battlefield, ‘across barbed wire, poles, split sandbags, corpses and assorted wreckage … After each lightning flash of mortar fire, the darkness seemed only blacker.’
Across those same fields today hangs a thick, cold layer of fog. The landscape, in Barthas’ day shelled into barrenness, is now covered with gaunt trees. Until not so very long ago, nothing would grow here at all, except the hardy Canadian firs. Trenches and shell craters are still visible everywhere, filled with brown meltwater. All the war sights are indicated with large signs. I work my way quickly past all the highlights of this macabre Disneyland: the monument, the charnel house, the firebombed village, the fortress of glory, the sacred trench with the bayonets of seventeen stalwart soldiers who, according to legend, were buried alive in a mortar attack. (Sticking a bayonet into the ground was a quick way to mark the grave of a few poor sods, but of course no one here cares to hear about that.)
The Douaumount ossuary rises up from the mist. The enormous grey charnel house, the size of a large secondary school, contains the bones of more than 130,000 of the fallen. You can see them through the little half-misted windows at the back of the building; here and there some orderly soul has neatly piled them up: femurs with femurs, ribs with ribs, arms with arms, whole and half skulls, all with lovely young teeth.
The fog makes everything quiet and introverted. The snow melting off the roof drips on and on into the gutters, and that is the only sound.
Versailles
LOUIS BARTHAS, EARLY AUGUST 1916, AT THE FRONT IN CHAMPAGNE
: ‘Two days later, our 6th Group went to occupy Guard Post Number Ten. It was only a normal barricade in an old corridor connecting the German lines. Six metres from our barricade, the Germans had set up one of their own. Barbed wire had been scattered between the two, but only four leaps separated the two peoples, two races bent on exterminating each other. How amazed, how perturbed patriotic civilians would have been to see how calm and peaceful it was there. One soldier would be smoking, the other would be reading or writing. Some were arguing without lowering their voices. Their amazement would turn to dismay if they saw the French and German sentries sitting on their breastworks, calmly smoking a pipe and, from time to time, taking a breath of fresh air and sharing a little small talk, like good neighbours.’
What our corporal describes here is a situation that in no way fits the commonly accepted view of suffering and heroism. It does not correspond to the military historians’ dissertations on strategy, or with the official accounts of battles and bloodshed. Little research has been done into such ‘live and let live’ situations. Still, they must have presented themselves rather often, between battles and along the endless stretches of front line where nothing ever happened.
There was always a certain sense of understanding between the enemies: foot soldiers, whether German, British, French or Belgian, all die in the same way, and they knew that. They had, after a certain fashion, respect for each other. And they came to their enemy's defence when the home front characterised them as ‘cowardly’ or ‘stupid’.
In his autobiographical novel
Le feu
, Henri Barbusse speaks of two
different worlds: the front, ‘where there are too many of the unfortunate’, and the hinterland, ‘where too much good fortune exists’. In the former world, mutual understanding occasionally led to outbursts of fraternisation. At the spot where the Yser Tower now stands, at Diksmuide in Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914. The Germans plied the Belgians with schnapps. A German officer returned a stolen monstrance. Elsewhere during those days there were also large-scale displays of brotherhood. In one sector, nine British divisions had organised a ceasefire along a front almost fifty kilometres in length. ‘On New Year's Eve we counted off the minutes back and forth, and agreed to fire volleys at midnight,’ a German student wrote to his parents. ‘We sang, they applauded (we were sixty or seventy metres apart) … Then I shouted to ask them whether they had any musical instruments over there, upon which they produced a pair of bagpipes (it was a Scottish regiment, barelegged in short skirts). They played their poetic Scottish songs and sang.’
One German soldier was not at all amused: the enigmatic, fanatical corporal Adolf Hitler. ‘This should not be allowed to happen during a war,’ the
Gefreiter
fulminated.
One year later, in the soaking wet December of 1915, ad hoc cease-fires were once again held along the front in northern France. On the dreary morning of 12 December, with trenches on both sides filled with water, Ernst Jünger saw the dreary no-man's-land suddenly transformed into ‘a county fair’. Between the rolls of barbed wire, ‘lively bartering had begun for schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons and other things.’ Jünger quickly put an end to it. After a brief gentlemen's consultation with a British officer on the other side, it was decided to resume the war in exactly three minutes.
In Barthas’ sector, where the same thing happened, the fraternisation lasted for days: ‘We smiled at each other, began talking, shaking hands, trading tobacco, coffee and wine. If only we had spoken the same language!’ The Socialist International, betrayed and forgotten in 1914, seemed to have been revived by the war. Barthas:‘One day, a huge German fellow climbed up onto a hillock and delivered a speech, the words of which only the Germans understood, but the meaning of which we understood very well indeed, for he took his rifle and broke it in two
against a tree trunk. Applause sounded from both sides, and both sides raised the Internationale.’
Such open signs of brotherly feeling were relatively rare, however, and each one can be offset by countless tales of atrocity. ‘Mucking about with the enemy’ was taboo. Yet these were no isolated incidents. Life in the trenches was for many soldiers only tolerable because of a number of tacit agreements with their partners in adversity on the other side of the line. Despite its enormity, the First World War was, in that sense, old-fashioned; it was a war of proximity, of looking the enemy in the eye, a war in which the specialist, modern technology and push-button killing were already making their appearance, but were not yet totally decisive.
In many areas along the front, for example, the rule was to leave each other alone as much as possible at meal times, during the retrieval of the wounded from no-man's-land, and during night patrols. Any number of diarists make mention of the ‘immunity’ of mobile field kitchens, in accordance with the same indisputable logic: if you blow up the enemy's kitchen, in five minutes’ time you yourself will be without dinner. Interesting too was the tacit agreement between the opposing military engineers, as witnessed by Barthas: the enemy's tunnels were only to be blown up between two at night and six in the morning; during those hours, therefore, no one ever worked on the tunnels. This rule saved the lives of a great many military engineers.
Here and there, things were taken one step further. Vera Brittain relates the story of a Scottish sergeant who had been posted across from a Saxon regiment at Ypres. These two forces had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a great deal of noise, an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. The battle was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans.
Other letters and diaries make mention of this system as well. ‘They're quiet fellows, the Saxons, they don't want to fight any more than we do, so there is a kind of understanding between us,’ wrote one British officer. Another said: ‘On the front we were on, the Boche signals when the artillery is going to fire and shows us the no. of rounds by holding fingers up.’ Robert Graves witnessed letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: ‘Your little dog has run over to us and we are
keeping it safe here.’ Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion.
Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’. That was all. The makeshift bridges across a nearby river were held under fire by enemy machine-gunners. Shots were rarely ever fired though, except when Barthas ventured out onto one of the bridges carrying a cane and a pair of binoculars, and the Germans mistook him for an officer. Then the bullets flew past his ears.
This incident is indicative of the increasing social tension on both sides of the front. Almost everyone had abandoned the socialist class struggle back in 1914, but the frustration at the front gradually revived it with a vengeance. The British referred to their commander-in-chief, Haig, as ‘the Butcher of the Somme’. The pacifist movement was growing. Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon publicly announced that he no longer wished to serve in the army: ‘I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.’ German graffiti on trains going to the front read: ‘Wilhelm and Sons, Cannon Fodder’. In his diaries, Barthas reported an increasing number of incidents: German and French soldiers singing the ‘Internationale’ together from their respective trenches, orders being ignored, mutinous units which were then pounded to a pulp by their own artillery. Sometimes the men bleated like sheep as they marched to the slaughterhouse of the front lines.
For French soldiers at the front, Verdun was an emotional turning point. On a village square in May 1916, Barthas heard a soldier bark at a major: ‘I'm telling you that we didn't see any of you on Hill 304 [during the battle]. There will be no more saluting here.’ Shortly before this, medals had been passed out to the ‘heroes of the fatherland’, complete with a ‘patriotic kiss’ from the general. The poilus rolled on the ground in laughter. They had no more respect for anyone or anything.
One year later, within the space of several months in spring 1917, more than 100,000 soldiers were senselessly killed on the Chemin des Dames, but still the French generals wanted to push on. Furloughs promised were postponed again and again. During those same months, more and
more rumours began filtering in about Russian mutinies. In late May 1917, Barthas was at a meeting of hundreds of soldiers in the courtyard of an inn. The soldiers were in their cups, and a corporal began singing a protest song about the dismal life in the trenches. The entire crowd joined in on the refrain, ‘and when it was finished they applauded wildly, shouting slogans such as “Peace or Revolution!”, “Down with the war!” and “Furlough, furlough!”’ The next evening, ‘the “Internationale” rose up like a hurricane’.
On the following Sunday, the soldiers decided to seize control of the regiment and set up a ‘soviet’. Barthas was chosen to be its chairman. ‘I refused of course, for I had no desire to become acquainted with the firing squad simply for the sake of some childish imitation of the Russians.’ He agreed, however, to write a manifesto concerning the postponed leaves of absence. It never went any further than that.
In other regiments, however, the soldiers went much further than that. They stopped fighting, set up soldiers’ councils, raised the red flag and even hijacked trains. Officers were intimidated, and when orders were disobeyed they looked the other way. At its peak the French mutiny involved 30–40,000 soldiers. The army was in a state of disorder for months, the British had to take over parts of the French front, and the French never completely recovered. The commanders no longer dared to issue orders for major attacks.
Barthas’ regiment was placed under strict disciplinary constraint, but also received a breather. Some 350 mutineers were exiled to Devil's Island and 550 were condemned to death, of whom 49 were actually executed by order of the newly appointed commander-in-chief Philippe Pétain. On several occasions soldiers refused to take part in firing squads. In protest, they merely fired their shots over the condemned men's heads, leaving the commanding officer to perform the execution himself.
The French command did have one bit of good luck, though: the Germans never found out how extensive the mutiny really was. The French authorities never brought up the matter again.
In the long run, the war was decided not by events along the fronts, but by a slowly shifting balance of economic and technological power. What young Jean Monnet had predicted did indeed come to pass. All participants
were weakened by the struggle. In France, infant mortality rose by one fifth. In England, cases of tuberculosis rose by twenty-five per cent. Yet Germany suffered even more.
Due to the Allied blockade of all German shipping, the country received far too few staples. The first food riots took place in Berlin in April 1917. In January 1918, a strike by half a million workers closed down the metal and munitions industry. Food rations — 2,000 calories under normal conditions – had been reduced to 1,000. The German arms industry began breaking down, particularly when it came to modern weaponry. In 1918 the Germans had only one quarter of the number of trucks available to the Allies. The ‘land cruiser’, of which Winston Churchill had already dreamed in 1914, a vehicle that could roll right over the trenches ‘and everything in them’, this monstrous ‘tank’, had meanwhile been developed by the Allies into a serious weapon. They had 800 of them. The Germans had ten.
Illustrative of the mood in Germany was the popular song by the young poet Bertolt Brecht about a soldier who had long since died ‘a hero's death’, but who was exhumed by the doctors and passed the physical ‘because this soldier died before his time’. Then he was made to drink ‘fiery schnapps’, smothered in incense to mask the smell of decay, received a nurse on each arm and ‘a half-naked dame’, the music blared and there the soldier went marching off, ‘with oompah-pah and hurrah’, on his way to another ‘hero's death’.
In summer 1918, Brecht's soldier also came down with Spanish flu. In early July, Käthe Kollwitz reported that her husband's practice in Berlin was suddenly swamped with more than a hundred cases of influenza. This unknown illness was particularly virulent, and the exhausted continent was struck hard. The outbreak of Spanish flu probably took place all over the world at the same time, but it was in neutral Spain that medical publications first mentioned it; hence its name.
Few events in the twentieth century were as disastrous for the people of Europe, and at the same time so quickly forgotten. Still, almost every village cemetery today contains the traces of this epidemic; my own father, as a student, caught Spanish flu and barely survived. It is estimated that between forty and a hundred million people died worldwide. It probably
claimed more lives in Europe than the entire First World War. What is certain is that the wave of influenza was one of the factors that made the Germans break off their final offensive in July 1918, and then lose the war. It was against this background that the struggle took place during the last eighteen months of the conflict.
In the same month in which Louis Barthas narrowly missed being catapulted to chairman of a soviet of soldiers, the first American troops landed in France in May 1917. The American Congress had hesitated for a long time, but finally lost patience when the Germans torpedoed five American ships in March 1917; war was declared on Germany on 6 April. It remains unclear why President Woodrow Wilson abandoned his attempts to move the Allies and the Central Europeans towards a ‘peace without victory’. The ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, however, may have played a major role. In that telegram, sent to the German ambassador in Mexico on 16 January, 1917, the German minister of foreign affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, announced the launch of a full scale submarine war against the United States. He also proposed the idea of joining with Mexico in a war against America, which would allow the Mexicans, with profuse German support, to retake the territories they had lost in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by the British, decoded and sent to the Americans. After several weeks of hesitation, Zimmermann confessed to an American correspondent that the telegram was not a fake.