by Simon Winder
Kilomètre 0
Most maps of the Western Front in books, to show the trench line in sufficient detail, tend to leave off the most southern part of the battlefield. Very little happened here, but I have always been curious: if the trenches in the north ended in a quagmire of opened sluices and the sea, how did they end in the south? A brilliantly detailed and thoughtful new French map, created for the 1914 centenary, which should be compulsory for all Great War obsessives, showed the precise spot and I thought it was an appropriate way to end research on this book to drive from Basle to southern Alsace and visit ‘Kilomètre 0’, hiking around whatever survived.
Europe is dotted with strange geographical anomalies. My favourite is a German-owned oblong of forest and farm, some 50 metres wide and 350 metres deep south-west of Aachen, which sticks into Belgian territory. Perhaps understandably, nowhere have I found an explanation. It makes no sense whatsoever and I can only hope there is a reader out there who has the answer. A similar, if very slightly larger, oddity sits at Kilomètre 0 – a block of Swiss land known as ‘the Duck’s Beak’, some 400 metres wide which sticks out east for a kilometre or so into French territory (then, in 1914, German). The tip of the beak was where the trenches ended, some 700 kilometres from the English Channel. As I had hoped, it could not have been more atmospheric, with a local group of enthusiasts having rebuilt some small pieces of trench and put up interesting information boards.
The Germans planted trees to camouflage their concrete bunkers and these trees, now massive, have torn the bunkers apart with their roots, in one case crushing a chunk of concrete into a ball. It was midsummer and everything was clogged with moss and ivy. There was an almost Amazonian level of birdsong, with charismatic woodpeckers scooting overhead plus an eldritch beech martin putting in a fleeting appearance. At one point the war’s changing technology is perfectly preserved. Two machine-gun bunkers remain, trained on the small bridge over a stream. One night in 1917 a group of Germans ran forward and blew up the current bridge’s ancestor: as tanks had just been invented, for the first time in human history someone could cross the bridge and rush the bunkers without being mown down.
The very furthest point of the German trench system (setting aside the great bales of barbed wire which have long been cleared away) is a large, reinforced dome, now in pieces, which had once held a Revolvierkanone – a formidable sort of Gatling gun, a ‘stopper’ to end things with a flourish. On Swiss territory the army has rebuilt to mark the centenary a wooden bunker of the type used to defend the Duck’s Beak during the War. Swiss neutrality was guaranteed by an army in 1914 of some 250,000 men, more than enough to dissuade either side from trying to slip round the bottom of the trench line. The bunkers were wooden so that they could protect Swiss troops from the shrapnel and stray bullets happening a few yards off, but also to express their neutrality – it would not have been difficult to destroy such a bunker but it could not be ignored. The area is so interesting it deserves its own book. The 1743 border markers remain; one side shows an attractively carved Bear of Bern (the then overlords of the Beak), but on the other the sovereignty has changed so often that pretty crests are long gone, gouged and battered from repeated updates. Presumably after 1945, someone has decisively chiselled in a large, crude F.
Very early in the war Kilomètre 0 became a backwater, with fighting moving ever further north. Once the Germans had begun to retreat in the face of French counter-attacks on the Marne they found it very hard to stop. They kept trying to ‘fix’ French forces in front of trenches so that German troops further west could hook behind them. These tiny versions of the Schlieffen plan failed too and as each side tried the same manoeuvre the only response was more trenches, first just scratches in the ground or pre-existing railway embankments, but soon thickening up. Eventually both sides reached the Channel and ran out of room. The Belgians secured a tiny block of national territory on the coast by flooding in front of it and hunkering down, never surrendering. It is hard to exaggerate the damage the Belgians did to German war plans. This was Germany’s fault in that it had been a mere idle assumption that Belgium would surrender, just as it was idly assumed Britain would remain neutral. The complications of this campaign, it could be argued, saved the Entente. Some sixty thousand German troops were diverted to besiege Antwerp. This created a range of moral problems around Dutch neutrality because of the famous Dutch ownership of the mouth of the Scheldt. Both Berlin and London dithered about whether or not military logic forced them now to attack Dutch territory. For Berlin it meant further diversion of resources and for London it was a bit awkward, given that the war had begun for the defence of a plucky neutral.
The decision to let the Dutch remain untouched had huge repercussions. The Germans intended to win a brief war by destroying the French army, having herded it into a pocket against the borders of Lorraine in a variant on what they had achieved at Sedan. Once this failed, a series of reckless improvisations made Antwerp for a few days the focus of Europe. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, in an amazingly impetuous move, left his office and rushed to Antwerp, diverting naval troops to its defence. It was all futile as the Germans simply swamped the area with men. In the Army Museum in Vienna, one of the most alarming exhibits is a reinforced cupola from the Antwerp forts with an appalling dent from one of the Škoda siege guns that destroyed it. Control of the great port could lead to nothing without a declaration of war on the Netherlands to break through the Scheldt and neither side had the extra troops or political capital to do this. Historically-minded Antwerpers must have rolled their eyes to find themselves once again blockaded in. This diversion of German troops northwards meant that the British and French were able to secure Dunkirk and Calais, and communications between the two countries, through the Royal Navy and ever more elaborate minefields and patrols, were never broken by the Germans – another completely unresolvable and fatal problem unanticipated by Berlin. A fair case could be made for saying that this little sequence of events meant the Germans had already lost the war.
Throughout the rest of the conflict, through this series of accidents, the Germans therefore only controlled the short Belgian coast. Bruges emerged with some surprise from its medieval torpor to become a U-boat base, with its canals able to feed submarines through Ostend and Zeebrugge. This made it comparable to seventeenth-century Dunkirk, with no Allied technology which could properly neutralize it. Towards the end of the war the British tried to block its exits by sinking ships, but this was initially thwarted by the German commander, using a dodge made famous by the Dutch back in the sixteenth century. He simply and cheaply moved the navigation buoys so that the British expedition was led directly onto a huge sandbank. Bruges was never important though, as the Germans were so closely hedged in by British countermeasures. If the long, many-harboured and powerfully resourced ports and rivers of the Dutch coast had been available to the Germans it would have been a different story – and in 1940 the Germans did not make the same mistake, although they made a different one instead.
The rest of the war in the west consisted of a series of attempts to end the strange accident of the trench line. On the whole whoever attacked lost somewhat more men than whoever defended, but the enormous numbers of casualties could be replaced when the next year’s worth of men became the right age to put on uniform. The balance of forces mocked all strategic novelties. The Germans were helped by being on the defensive. They could rationalize a future win by simply keeping hold of Belgium, Luxembourg and industrial northern France. The Allies had actively to expel them in order to win. Most of the land fought over had in itself no value. In early 1917 the Germans carried out ‘Operation Alberich’, a retreat across a large section of the line to massively reinforced, shorter, more rational new positions some five to ten miles east: the Siegfried or Hindenburg Line. As they retreated they took 125,000 French civilians with them to work in the Reich, blew up every house, cut down most of the trees, poisoned all the wells and strewed mines and booby-trap
s throughout the ruins. The following March, Ludendorff’s vast surprise attack on the British spent much of its energy simply retaking the same ground. Every attack was either annihilated by entrenched opposition (the First Battle of the Somme) or became a mutually flaying horror (Verdun) or, during rare actual breakthroughs (the March 1918 offensive), simply presenting flanks which could be crushed by the enemy’s reinforcements pinching in the mouth of the developing ‘sack’ of advancing troops.
For the British, Ypres (‘Wipers’ – a further anglicizing readjustment in a process going back many centuries) and Arras became the key towns anchoring their line, with both places eradicated during the fighting.2 Arras is still the home today of one of the many ingenious attempts to break the deadlock: the old limestone quarries south of the town, the ‘Carrières Wellington’. I had idly assumed these were named for the Duke of Wellington, but this was true only indirectly as it was some 500 New Zealand miners who named them for their capital city. In a good example of the war’s slowness, it took six months to prepare these quarries which then allowed thousands of men to be funnelled forward to initiate the April/May 1917 Battle of Arras. After the initial shock of the British blowing up huge mines and men leaping from the tunnels, the same horrific logic set in, with the British suffering some 158,000 casualties to the Germans’ 125,000.
Everywhere commanders struggled with the impossibility of their situation. In 1918 Ludendorff’s decision to attack resulted in his taking casualties on such a monstrous scale (some 700,000 by the time the offensives had petered out) that the German army at last began to malfunction. Immense numbers of American troops had been landing all year and this combination made the German position impossible. Much of the American Expeditionary Force was spread between Verdun and Nancy, and the Meuse–Argonne offensives involved well over a million US troops. Again, dotted around were the men of the future: Truman, Patton, Marshall, with Eisenhower still waiting to be shipped when the war ended and Bogart one of the sailors taking them back from Europe. The combined series of French, British and American offensives crushed the Germans who, facing revolution at home, sued for an armistice. At that point Lille, Tournai, Courtrai, Bruges and Ostend had been liberated and the British were at Ghent. The Americans broke the Kriemhilde Line and the French, in a perfect bit of timing, liberated Sedan a week before the Armistice was signed.
Red, yellow and blue
Through my own language failures and panic in the face of schematic transport maps, much of the research for this and my other books has been carried out through long, involuntary walks through various suburbs. At a specific level of tiredness I convince myself that I know how to get back to the bed-and-breakfast which, as it proves, was so cheap online because so remote from the town centre. This has provoked in me much interesting inward mulling over the nature of human consciousness and the tragedy of our having no external referee to adjudicate on our internal stupidity. Completely exhausted, with the rain coming down ever harder, I would repeatedly delude myself that I was practically born and raised in Zutphen or Namur or Konstanz and head off at a confident loping pace, like a native tracker, towards my distant goal, as it got dark. On almost every research trip I would find myself stumbling into bus stations, sports fields and industrial estates or puzzling over a canal seemingly moved from somewhere else. Cursing my lack of a smartphone, I would fail to notice the slight but fatal curve in a road that meant I was now travelling south rather than west, itself a compass point only established by a vague smudge of light attributed – wrongly – to the setting sun. I was good at the geography in my head but terrible at interpreting it, but I always ended up in the right place, never actually having to slump despairingly into an uneasy sleep in the yard of a wire-and-cable factory, for example: a distinct possibility on one occasion.
Altogether entire days’ worth of time must have been frittered in this way, but unless it was raining really hard, or I found myself walking next to the crash-barrier on a dual carriageway, I never felt downhearted. To escape from all the churches, marketplaces, guildhalls and museums was to re-emerge in the world of actual private life: of battered housing projects, wittily named hairdressers, garages, coffee shops and graveyards that made everywhere into a variant on my own home in south-west London. These walks and their mismanagement have been in some ways as important to writing these books as all the reading, conversations and gallery visits. It is hard to convey exactly why, but perhaps these walks formed a sort of prayer-wheel whose turning reminded me over and over again of one key fact: that the first half of the twentieth century reached into all these houses and through war, occupation, economic growth or economic collapse, shaped the lives of everyone in them. Having a house that was small or tucked away down a cul-de-sac or in some remote bit of the countryside exempted none of its inhabitants from a series of regimes which, armed only with card indexes, rubber stamps and signatures, had near-total reach.
More often than not I would find myself wandering through three periods of housing – new estates from the 1920s, post-bombing quick rebuilds from the 1950s or new estates from the 1960s. The first of these soon became a wonderland for me. Hopelessly lost once in the outskirts of Breda, I found myself taking a crash course in the infinite charm, perverseness and variety of post-1918 Dutch domestic architecture: a seemingly inexhaustible use of dark bricks to conjure up strange chimneys, elaborate and characterful doorways and walls, zany windows. This style had many sources but in part at least it springs from De Stijl.
A side effect of the Great War was to trap various people in places they did not intend to be. My favourite has always been Joseph Conrad and his wife, accidentally stuck in Habsburg Galicia as all hell broke loose. One of the slight annoyances in writing this current book has been the habit of talented figures born and raised within Lotharingia’s geographical scope to up and leave for a capital city at the first chance, particularly Paris, taking them out of the narrative. A promising North Brabantine figure like Vincent van Gogh escapes there at the first chance. Post-1918 heroes of mine like Max Ernst and Paul Klee also zoom off, infuriatingly, albeit providing excuses for wonderful later museums where they grew up, in Brühl and near Bern respectively. This was also true of Gelderland-raised Piet Mondrian. But happily for me, Mondrian found himself back from Paris in the Netherlands when war broke out in 1914 and was trapped north of the electric fence that kept the neutral Dutch away from the German-ruled Belgians. The Dutch experience of the war was miserable, spared from the Western Front, but caged in, exhausted and half-starved, their traditional role as Europe’s great entrepôt suspended by the British blockade and by Germany’s stranglehold on their supply of coal. But it was in this unpromising world that De Stijl was born.
The roots of De Stijl are endlessly contested and tangled. Its key figures seem not to have liked each other very much and frequently were only in touch by letter, but by the time the movement finally collapsed in the early 1930s it had conjured up an almost ridiculously enjoyable aesthetic, fragments of which shine from every suburban street. Of course, De Stijl is hardly without competition for the modernist crown (Bauhaus, most obviously) but the group of painters, architects and designers thrown together outside Utrecht by the world war seemed to be working in a frenzy to come up with fresh reasons for admiring European culture in a context in which it had otherwise completely failed. As far as I am aware, there is sadly no film of the deeply odd Mondrian dancing ‘geometrically’, but otherwise De Stijl chairs and houses and posters and food-pack designs still make the world a better place. Mondrian developed the idea that only the colours red, yellow and blue were legitimate, placed in a black and white grid. Theo van Doesburg’s Stained-Glass Composition IV from 1917 has inspired countless painfully neither-here-nor-there church decorations ever since, but in itself has a cheerful bounce infinitely adrift from the military horrors happening a few miles to the south. Just to take van Doesburg’s perky 1919 design for a box of Gouda cheese: this alone should act like a fall-of-Jer
icho aesthetic trumpet-blast. Such pre-war junk as the blowsy neo-Olmec Kaiser Wilhelm equestrian monument at Koblenz (1897) should spontaneously collapse into the Mosel if the cheesebox was simply waved beneath the bronze horse’s nose.
This restless, fiddly Dutch modernity still springs up everywhere today – curvilinear houses, curious murals, school buildings, shop signs, all preserving an inter-war optimism and inventiveness. Too enjoyable to ignore is the great documentary Philips-Radio-Film (1931), directed by Joris Ivens with music by the Surinamese composer Lou Lichtveld. It shows a factory in Eindhoven as a sort of industrial symphony of metal, glass, flames, innumerable little moving parts and strangely artisanal elements, such as men hand-blowing light bulbs. In half an hour it encapsulates everything that was new, fun and surreal about the period, now a world away from 1914 – of thousands of light-industrial jobs and their associated suburbs and green-field sites, of mass consumerism and comforts, the spread of radios, cars, pylons. This was happening everywhere: long-time dozy Rhine towns in France, Germany and Switzerland which had begun to perk up in the 1890s now drastically reshaped themselves: medicines, chemicals, chocolate bars, pills, dyes, fabrics, biscuits.
