by Geert Mak
‘Eighteen months later – how durable love was in times of peace! – she was standing there, she too, amid the clouds of smoke, along the rails at Freight Station 2, the music braying incessantly, train carriages grating, engines screaming, little shivering women hanging like wilted wreaths on the green men, the new uniforms still smelling of the tailors’ blocks, we were a company on the march, destination secret, probably Serbia … Her father never went to the café again; he was already lying in a mass grave.’
Chapter SEVEN
Ypres
TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY, 1999. ACROSS THE FLATS BEHIND DIKSMUIDE, the sky is full of snow. The clouds do not come blowing in but rise up from the land, like a broad, black wall. Behind me the sun is still shining, bright light on the mud in the fields, on the snow in the furrows, the handful of red houses, the steeples in the distance. At the same time, the landscape has something austere about it. Take out a few electric pylons, a couple of pig farms, and you have a battlefield again.
Imagine, I'm a British soldier, we've crossed the Channel in rollicking good cheer, and now here we march: ‘Let the war come, here we are, here we are, here we are at last!’ One of our captains writes home: ‘I love war. It's like a big picnic, but without the pointlessness of a picnic.’ The Germans have moved through Belgium into northern France, but the French have cut them off at the Marne. Now we are going to do the same, in West Flanders.
How would I feel then?
In 1999, there were still some hundred and fifty very old Britons left to talk about it. In November 1998, at the eightieth anniversary of the war's end, I saw them march through London, using canes, sitting in wheelchairs, then came the veterans of Dunkirk, D-Day and the Falklands, then the nurses and the ‘walking wounded’, two, three generations went by, full of blood-soaked ideals and virtues.
A brittle Jack Rogers (b.1895) told BBC television: ‘We had no idea where we were going. But at a certain point we saw flashes in the distance. Then we began hearing noises: thunderclaps, heavier all the time. And then suddenly we realised: we are going into a war!’ Dick Barron (b.1896) talked about what happened soon afterwards: ‘My own mate fell, shot through the head, I tried to push his brains back into the hole, ridiculous of course …’ Tommy Gay (b.1898): ‘You heard the bullets flying past your ears, ping, ping, and all I could think was: what a miracle that they're not hitting me.’
In November 1914 alone, 100,000 men fell in the vicinity of Ypres. In the immediate vicinity, another 400,000 would follow. Norman Collins (b.1898) had the job of burying the dead, who had sometimes been lying on the battlefield for weeks. ‘The first one I saw like that, I touched him, and a rat came running out of his skull. Then you thought: all those ambitions and aspirations, all the things they hoped to change in the world, but in reality they all died within a few minutes.’
Jack Rogers agrees to sing a trench song for the camera, in a high, shaky voice:
I want to go home,
I want to go home,
I don't want to go to the trenches no more
The whiz-bangs and the shrapnel they whistle and roar
I don't want to go over the top any more
Take me over the sea
Where the Allemands can't take me
Oh my, I don't want to die
I want to go home.
Now for the other side. Imagine I'm a boy from Munich. We've all been whipped up by German propaganda, our brief training camp was an exciting interlude in our staid lives, and here we come, 3,000 students strong. This band of soldiers even includes engineers and doctors. No one wants to miss this. ‘Life was magnified a thousandfold in this grand struggle, everything that had once been fell into nothingness,’ one of them wrote later. Thanks to the Big Berthas, our men have destroyed the fortifications at Liège, taken Antwerp, and now we are marching at night against the British at Ypres. I cite this same soldier: ‘Then when the day begins to take shape out of the mist, an iron how-do-you-do suddenly comes whistling over our heads, and with a hard crack drives the little projectiles into our ranks, making the slimy earth spatter up all over; but before the cloud has had time to disperse, the first hurrah from 2,000 throats has already sounded in reply. The author of the letter, Adolf Hitler, writes that as the artillery started to crackle and thunder, all the men began singing. This is probably nonsense, although the students of Munich were crazy enough for it to have been true. Afterwards people would speak of the Murder of the Innocents at Ypres, and Langemark has been called ‘the place the second World War was born’.
The British facing them had been through the Boer War, they were professional. The 3,000 German boys – only a few of them survived into manhood – now lie in a separate section of the war cemetery, surrounded by plaques bearing the names of their student fraternities. One half of Hitler's 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment was killed, approximately 1,800 men. He himself came away unscathed. Later he was wounded, locals say in a wood not far from here, where the faint remains of trenches can still be seen.
Peter Kollwitz, too, fell that week, on the same front, close to RoggeveldEsen. Käthe Kollwitz: ‘I dreamed we were with a lot of people in a big hall. Someone shouted ‘Where is Peter?’ It was he himself who shouted it, I saw his dark silhouette standing against something light. I went to him, embraced him, but didn't dare to look at him, afraid it would turn out not to be him. I looked at his feet and they were his, at his arms, his hands, they were all his, but I knew that if I tried to look at his face, I would know again that he was dead.’
Approaching what was once the West Flanders front, you can tell by the buildings that you're getting close: suddenly, none of the houses and farms along the road date from before 1920.
Ypres is the heart of this rebuilt past. During the First World War, the fortified medieval town was a striking, vulnerable promontory along the front. If the Germans broke through, they could be in Calais and Dunkirk the next day. The British supply lines would be gravely endangered, and the Germans would have a new front that was much easier to defend, and several important harbours in addition.
The fighting at Ypres, in other words, served key military interests. Hundreds of thousands died on the enormous mud flats around the city and the neighbouring villages. At the local museum, In Flanders Fields, a scale model shows what Ypres looked like on 11 November, 1918: one huge grey plain full of knee-high rubble, with the charred ruins of the monumental Lakenhal sticking up like a broken molar. My hotel, Old Tom on the Great Market, has been wiped away as well, from the looks of it. In fact, the Great Market in its entirety has been reduced to dust.
Even today, Ypres has something unreal about it. It resembles a normal old town, but it is obvious: everything here has been reconstructed. Houses and buildings that were two, three, five hundred years old are all replicas built with the greatest care and attention. The crowning glory of this intense predilection for the past is the Lakenhal. The broken molar of 1918 is still in my mind's eye, but the huge hall is so beautiful, so unmistakably ancient, that I stop believing in anything else.
A friend of mine once found in a flea market a pastel drawing of a bare and blasted landscape, with a little steeple in the background and in the foreground a few half-frozen puddles and some barbed wire. There's not a living soul to be seen, but the drawing is covered with a sort of haze that suggests the passing of some huge catastrophe. At the same time the light is frozen, as though everything is in waiting. Beneath it: ‘Février 1917, Pervijze, G. R.’
Where did G. R. stand to draw this? My friend comes down for a day and together we drive through the countryside around Ypres. We view the overfull German cemetery at Langemark: had fate not missed by a hair the addition of one other name to the list of the dead, between Hirsch, Erich von, and Hoch, Bruno, the history of Europe would have been very different indeed. At Zillebeke we visit the Museum Hooge Crater and the Hill 62 Museum, two private collections of the sort found everywhere along the front, full of photographs, rusty helmets, mortar she
lls, rifles, bayonets, old bottles, buckles, bones, pipes. Many of the finds are also for sale. In the garden of Hill 62 there are still a few of the original trenches, now filled with yellow meltwater.
At Houtem we watch a carnival pass by with about sixty children in it, dressed as devils, Chinamen, cats, witches and fairies, a flutter of bright little birds in a grey, quiet street with all the shutters closed.
And then suddenly we find the view from the pastel drawing, along the deserted railway tracks between Diksmuide and Nieuwpoort. It is the same spot, unmistakably, close to where two roads intersect. The scene seems almost unchanged: fields, water, barbed wire, houses and barns stuck loosely to the plain, as though they could be peeled off again at any moment. That same haze is still hanging over the land.
‘Everywhere mud and rats, rats, piles of them! In the winter the sentries had to be carried off because their feet were frozen. And the shooting! A friend of mine, he came from Lier as well. At one point he suddenly said: “I never knew I had such beautiful flesh.” And he grabbed his leg like this. Calm as you please. Then he asked a buddy for a cigarette and sat there smoking it. His leg had been shot off at the knee, it looked like it had been sawed in two!’
Belgian veteran Arthur Wouters (b.1895) is telling his story, probably for the umpteenth time, to a Belgian TV crew. When the war began, the Belgian Army had 200,000 soldiers. A little more than two months later, at the first battle on the Yser, only 75,000 of them were left. By Christmas 1914, 747,000 Germans and 854,000 French had already been killed or wounded, and the original British Expeditionary Forces — 117,000 men in total – had been almost completely decimated.
On 31 August, on the Eastern Front, the Germans had won a bloody battle with 70,000 Russian casualties and 100,000 prisoners taken. Afterwards, this battle at Tannenberg became enveloped in a mist of all manner of Teutonic tales of heroism and whatever else the German Empire had to offer in the way of mythology. The truth was that a high price had to be paid for that victory: the Germans deployed dozens of regiments there which were badly needed on the French front. That is one reason why their western offensive became bogged down. In France, General Alexander von Kluck's 1st Army had to advance an average of twenty kilometres a day over a period of three weeks, with 84,000 horses which required more than a million kilos of feed each day. It was madness to suppose that one could work an army that way for weeks and still have them fresh enough to defeat the French.
But the Allied forces were in bad shape as well. For centuries, the British had been concentrating on the maintenance of their empire. They were equipped for wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but not in Europe. In the years preceding the war their army had served largely as a colonial police force, attuned more to brief skirmishes. In 1914 the British Army had neither the experience nor the troops to fight a modern, large-scale war in Europe. All that still had to be mustered.
The French had suffered grave losses back in August and, to make things worse, the lion's share of their heavy industry had fallen into German hands. But they were fighting on their own soil, amid their own people, and that quickly proved to be a major advantage. On 23 August, 1914 there were twenty-four German divisions opposing seventeen Allied divisions. By 6 September that had changed to twenty-four against forty-one. The French brought everything they had into action, including the entire fleet of Parisian taxis, to get their troops to the Marne on time. The Germans were beaten back, lost a quarter of a million troops, and dug in.
After that the war froze. The soldiers began connecting their foxholes, and both sides of the front were soon marked by enormous networks of muddy hideaways and trenches. No one, no soldier, no strategist, was prepared for such a war. Except for a few minor oscillations, the war would barely move from these positions; it was not until 1918 that a German offensive once again turned things upside down.
For months in 1915, Lieutenant Ernst Jünger kept a diary of the events in the ‘windy little segment of the long front that we have come to regard as home, where we have gradually come to know every overgrown hollow, every dilapidated earthen bunker.’
30 October
Last night, after a cloudburst, the breastworks collapsed and mixed with rainwater into a tough mush that turned the trenches into a quagmire. The only comfort was that the English were no better off, for we could see them energetically bailing water out of their trenches as well. Because we were on somewhat higher ground, we pumped our bilge water in their direction. We watched through our telescopic sights as well. When the walls of the trenches collapsed, it uncovered a row of corpses from last autumn's fighting.
9 November
Among the diversions offered by this post is the hunting of various animals, most particularly the partridges that live in huge numbers in these abandoned fields. Because we have no cartridges with shot, we have no choice but to creep up quietly on the relatively fearless ‘dinner party candidates’ and shoot their heads off, otherwise little of the meat would remain. While doing this, we must take care not to leave our trenches in the heat of the pursuit, for otherwise we would turn from hunters into prey.
28 December
My faithful man August Kettler was killed on the road to Monchy, where he was going to fetch my dinner. He was the first of my many stewards to be struck down by a mortar attack, which threw him to the ground with a piece of shrapnel through his windpipe. When he left with the pans, I said to him:‘August, don't let anything happen to you along the way.’ ‘Oh, Lieutenant, why should anything happen?!’ Now I was summoned and found him gasping on the ground close to our shelter, every breath he took sucked air into his lungs through the wound in his throat. I had him carried back, he died a few days later in the field hospital. For him, as for many others, I found it particularly sad that the victim couldn't talk, only stare desperately at his helpers, like an animal in torment.’
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 pi
gsty, 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.
