by Robert Fisk
The rain had lifted and I pulled Bill’s postcards from the envelope. The bookshop was in the Rue St. Jacques and one of Bill’s pictures showed the same street before the Great War. There was a tramline, a cart and more than thirty people— many of them women in long white aprons—standing on the pavement and in the street. In the postcard, the street bent to the left, just as it did in front of me. A three-storey building to the left of the street bore an extraordinary wooden balcony, a big carved trellis that hung over the tramline. And there it still was. The building was decayed, the windows dirty, but the balcony was still there. This was still, conceivably, Bill’s Douai. I walked along the canal. Again, Bill’s postcard of the same canal showed several Flemish-style buildings identical to those along the quai upon which I was walking. I turned left into a cobbled street, its low cottages clearly untouched for a century. Did Bill and his fellow soldiers march down this street in October 1918?
It began to rain again and the cobbles turned shiny. I buried the postcards back in their envelope. There are times when journalists want to be film directors, to re-create history from both archives and experience. I could see the King’s Liverpool Regiment moving down this street in the rain, their helmets shiny, the smoke of shelled buildings rising behind the houses, the few civilians allowed to remain in the city by the Germans waving to the British soldiers who had freed them. Would Bill, innocent nineteen-year-old Bill, have waved back? Of course he would. He was a liberator, a hero. He must have felt that. It must have been good to be a British soldier in Douai in 1918.
Did he know its history? Did Bill realise that eight hundred years before he arrived in this city, its liege-lords had set off on the Crusades to the Middle East, to liberate Jerusalem? Surely he could never have known that a family of Crusaders of this city would eventually settle north of Jerusalem, in the country we now call Lebanon, would intermarry with local Christians to form a Lebanese family which is today the “Douaihy” family? Why, just over a quarter of a century ago, I tried to question the leader of another Lebanese Crusader family, old Sulieman Franjieh— “Franj” comes from “French” and is the Arabic for “foreigner” or even “Westerner”—about his participation in the machine-gun massacre of members of the Douaihy family in the Lebanese town of Zghorta in 1957. They were shot down in a Lebanese church, but old Sulieman refused to discuss this with me. His militiamen fingered their Kalashnikov rifles when I pressed the subject, and so I never discovered what lay behind his cold, French Crusader savagery. In Lebanon, even when challenged by overwhelming Muslim power, the Christians have always fought each other.
And history’s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence. Europe and the Middle East, the “West” and the Arab world, are so inextricably entangled that even in modern-day Douai, I can be confronted by my own journalistic story. For in a narrow lane-way opposite the canal, I stop a young man and ask him for directions to the city archives. He promises to help me, tells me we will go to his university to find the address, apologises for his lack of local knowledge because he is—at this point I suddenly recognised his accent as we spoke French—Lebanese. Raymond Haddad was a Lebanese Christian from the Beirut suburb of Ashrafieh, his father a police officer who spent weeks trying to arrange a civil war ceasefire between the Christian Phalangist militia and General Michel Aoun, the messianic Christian Maronite army commander who claimed in 1988 that he was the Lebanese prime minister. I had spent more than two years reporting this absurd, pointless, bloody inter-Christian conflict and here I was, more than 3,000 kilometres away, seeking help from a Lebanese Christian as I tried to walk in my father’s footsteps through a far more terrible, more horrific war. Raymond Haddad listened to Bill’s story— those who have experienced war show understanding of such historical research, if not always a lot of sympathy—and eventually took me to the Hôtel de Ville whose great clock tower dominated many of Bill’s postcards.
A woman in the town hall immediately identified the street with the cross on the pavement that marked Bill’s mess in 1918. The arch in the photograph had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944 but it was easy to find the buildings on the right of the picture. They were identical: the balconies, the mock-château steeples on the top, the curve in the pavement, the elaborate stone frames around the windows. Long ago, the authorities had plastered over some gashes in the stonework of the walls—the shrapnel marks of the 1944 bombing that destroyed the arch—but the street was otherwise untouched. I rang the doorbell of number 1606 in the passage. Bill had walked over this doorstep, I told myself. Not the middle-aged Bill I remembered as a child, not the angry old man who would intimidate my mother, but a young Bill who believed in life and happiness and patriotism and, maybe, in love.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Did I think that 2nd Lieutenant Fisk would open the door to me, that a fifty-seven-year-old son would meet his nineteen-year-old father, still wearing the khaki uniform in which he had been photographed at Arras in August of 1918? The door opened—the same door which had led to Bill’s mess—and a small, friendly Frenchman greeted me with suburban politesse, a lawyer, I imagined—I was right—who expressed appropriate but not over-enthusiastic interest in my story. Yes, this was clearly the same house in which Bill’s mess had been located. M. Michel Leroy was an avocat and expressed himself with precision. His wrought-iron balcony, with its lower railing bulging towards the narrow street, was clearly the same as the one in Bill’s postcard. But everything inside had changed. He had remodelled the rooms—which had themselves been internally reconstructed long after the First World War—when he had bought the house eight years ago. His parents now lived in the long, low room where Bill and his fellow junior officers had drunk their pints and smoked their pipes in their mess. M. Leroy looked at my bearded Lebanese friend—who had survived his own war—and then at me—who had survived Raymond’s war and several others—and thanked me formally for my interest in his home.
But why should a citizen of Douai have shown any more sympathy towards me? In the Second World War, British and American air attacks had killed 342 civilians in the town on one night alone, 11 August 1944, and left many ancient buildings—including the school of artillery that Bill had photographed just over a quarter of a century earlier—in ruins. Some of the dead must have been liberated by Bill and his fellow soldiers in 1918, only to be killed by his countrymen twenty-six years later. Bill must have liberated some of the thirteen French Jews of Douai who were deported by the Nazis in 1942. Several of Douai’s citizens were to die under Gestapo torture; the local resistance had been strongly supported by local miners, many of whom were communists.
So what was Bill’s war worth? I asked myself as my TGV slid back towards Paris through the dripping countryside of the Somme. My train crossed the line of the old Western Front, from German-occupied France into British-held France. For four years, tens of thousands of men died to hold these trenches—mere faint waves in the fields today—and my carriage crossed them in just under ten seconds, a hecatomb gone by in a sixth of a minute. And as I sipped black coffee in first class, a tiny British military cemetery zipped past so quickly that I could not read “Their Names Liveth for Evermore” beneath the plain cement cross amid the graves.
My father had always told me that when he died, I would inherit his library, two walls of books in his Maidstone home to which he would constantly refer as the years condemned him. “I always have my books,” he would say. He held all of Churchill’s published work, including a two-volume biography of Marlborough which Churchill—through the intercession of a friend in the National Savings Movement—had signed for Bill. I still from time to time take this book from its shelf. “Winston S. Churchill” signed his name with a fountain pen that has slithered across the page with the same self-confidence as it did when its author wrote his reports of action on the Afghan border, when he initialled the decision to land at Gallipoli in 1915, when he wrote his
encomium to the young pilots of the Battle of Britain in 1940. By the time of my father’s death, my own library was much larger than Bill’s—I never told him this, of course—but his vast horde of works on the 1914–18 war and its aftermath was irreplaceable. Some of them would be used as references for this book. The memoirs of Haig and Lloyd George and Allenby—who entered Jerusalem in 1917 only eight months after Maude marched into Baghdad—leaned against weekly picture magazines of the Great War and analyses of the redrawing of the postwar world’s frontiers.
In all, it was to take my father’s generation just twenty-three months to create these artificial borders and the equally artificial nations contained within them. The new state of Great Lebanon was torn from the body of Syria and inaugurated by General Henri Gouraud on 30 August 1920. The constitution of Yugoslavia, the so-called Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was promulgated on 28 June 1921. And the Anglo-Irish Treaty that partitioned Ireland was signed less than six months later, on 6 December. The League of Nations approved Britain’s Palestine Mandate—incorporating the terms of the Balfour agreement—on 22 July 1922, eleven months after King Feisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, was set up by the British as king of Iraq. And it is, as I often reflect, a grim fact of my own life that my career as a journalist—first in Ireland, then in the Middle East and the Balkans—has been entirely spent in reporting the burning of these frontiers, the collapse of the statelets that my father’s war allowed us to create, and the killing of their peoples. It is still a quaint reflection on the spirit of that age that most of the redrawing of maps and setting up of nations was supposedly done on behalf of minorities, minorities who in almost every case but two—that of the Jews of Mandate Palestine and the Protestants of Northern Ireland—did not want their maps redrawn at all.
Croats and Serbs fell out at once. Fierce sectarian rioting broke out in Ireland while Irish nationalists embarked upon a brutal civil war among themselves. The French destroyed the Arab army of Syria, executed its defence minister and cruelly put down revolts across both Syria and Lebanon. Britain was faced by a nationalist insurrection in Iraq. And by the 1930s, the British in Palestine were fighting a revolt by Arabs incensed that their land was to be divided and given to Jews as a homeland. The promises of independence that T. E. Lawrence had made to the Arabs were of no worth. Lord Balfour’s 1917 declaration on Palestine specifically stated that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with a throwaway addendum that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” In reality, Balfour had no interest in consulting the Arabs of Palestine as to their future. Indeed, the same Lord Balfour took an almost equally complacent—though somewhat more open—attitude towards Northern Ireland. Balfour gave vital cabinet support to Belfast prime minister James Craig’s proposal that, in view of the number of Catholics who might serve in the new Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary Protestant force should be formed from the old sectarian Ulster Volunteer Force. A sectarian Palestine and a sectarian Northern Ireland, a sectarian Lebanon—founded upon the power of a thin minority of Christian Maronites—and a Syria and an Iraq divided and ruled by sects and tribes, and a Yugoslavia based upon ethnic suspicion: these were among the gifts my father’s war bestowed upon the world.
Even while the conflict was still entombing its generations, the empires— victors and losers-to-be—used their colonial subjects as cannon fodder. Alongside my father on the Somme fought the Indians. Alongside the French at Verdun fought the Algerians and the Moroccans. In the Ottoman armies fought the Syrians and Palestinians and the soon-to-be Lebanese. My Lebanese driver, Abed Moghrabi, would often recall how his father was taken from his marriage only hours after his wedding night to serve in Turkish uniform against Allenby in Palestine. The Somme, where my father spent the last months of the war, had already soaked up the blood of tens of thousands of Catholic Irishmen who had fought and been cut down in British uniforms while their brothers died under British gunfire—or before a British firing squad—in Dublin.68 Padraig Pearse and James Connolly and John McBride—and, yes, Eamon de Valera—all indirectly helped to save Bill Fisk’s life. In the aftermath of their Easter Rising of 1916, my father was sent to Ireland rather than to France, where he might well have died on the first days of the Somme. He was to fight Sinn Fein—the “Shinners”—rather than the “Bosche.” At least for now.
A quarter of a century ago, I travelled with a young Irishwoman to the Belgian city of Ypres, where in stone upon the Menin Gate are inscribed the names of those 54,896 men who fought in the same British army uniform as my father— but whose bodies were never found. They were fighting, they believed, for little Belgium—little Catholic Belgium—which had been invaded by the German armies in 1914. Looking at all those names on the Gate, the young woman was moved by how many of them were Irish. “Why in God’s name,” she asked, “was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?”
After a few minutes, an elderly man approached, holding a visitor’s book. He asked if she would like to sign it. This was long before an economically powerful and self-confident Irish Republic would face up to the sacrifice its pre-independence soldiers made in British uniform. So my friend looked at the British army’s insignia on the memorial book with considerable distaste. The Crown glimmered on the cover in the evening light. Belgian firemen—as they do every night—were about to play the Last Post within the gaunt interior of the Menin Gate. There was not much time to decide. But my friend could not forget the young man from Tralee. She was facing history, which was not as easy and comforting and comprehensible for her as it can be for those of us who always consider ourselves the winners of wars. In the end, she wrote in the book, in Irish, do thiortha beaga—“for little countries.” How carefully she eased the dead Irish soldier’s desire to help Little Belgium—one of my father’s reasons for going to war— into the memory of a tragedy of another little country, how she was able to conflate Ireland into Flanders without losing the integrity of her own feelings.
I admired her for this. It is easy to sign up for war, to support “the boys,” to editorialise the need to stand up to aggression, invasion, “terrorism,” “evil”—and the First World War was replete with definitions of “evil”—but quite another thing to sign o f on war, to shake free of history’s grasp, of the dead hand which catches us by the arm and reminds us that there is work still to be done, anger to be used up, ferocity to be assuaged, ambitions to be fulfilled, frontiers to be redrawn, states to be created, peoples to be ruled—or destroyed. Thus the First World War and the Gallipoli landings, which helped to provide an excuse for Turkey’s unparalleled genocide against the Armenian people—the first holocaust of the twentieth century—left those same Armenian people abandoned when peace was agreed at Versailles. It did the same to the people of Kurdistan. In Bill’s Great War, we Europeans used chemical weapons for the first time, another development we would bequeath to the Middle East. And how easily do we forget that the West’s first defeat by Islamic arms in the modern age came not at the hands of Arabs but of the Turks, at Gallipoli and at Kut al-Amara in Iraq.
The European superpowers were blind to so many of the realities that they were creating. One is reminded of Lloyd George’s description of Lord Kitchener. “He was like one of those revolving lighthouses,” he wrote, “which radiate momentary gleams of revealing light far out into the surrounding gloom and then suddenly relapse into complete darkness.” For many Britons, the Great War is an addiction, a moment to reflect upon the passing of generations, of pointless sacrifice, the collapse of empire, the war our fathers—or our grandfathers—fought. In my case, it was the war of my father and my great-grandfather. But it was the results of Bill Fisk’s war that sent me to Ireland and Yugoslavia and the Middle East. The victorious mapmakers were not all of one mind. The border of Northern Ireland was a sign of imperial decl
ine, the frontiers of the Middle East a last attempt by Britain and France to hold imperial power. No, Bill could not be blamed for the lies and broken promises and venality of the men of Versailles. But it was his world that shaped mine, the empires of his day that created our catastrophe in the Middle East. His postcards were not the only inheritance passed on to me by my father.
So how much further could I go in my search for Bill’s life amid those gas attacks and shelling and raids mentioned in the war diaries—across the very same no-man’s-land that was portrayed so vividly in the tiny snapshot I had received from my father?
In his battalion war diaries, under the date 10–11 November 1918, my father had written the following: “At 07.30 11th instant message from XVII Corps received via Bde [Brigade] that Hostilities will cease at 11.0 today—line reached at that hour by Advanced troops to remain stationary.” Then, later: “Billets in Louvencourt reached at 18.00 hours.” My father had arrived at the barnlike cabin that was to be his home until the end of the following January. I turned again to the notes my mother had taken from him before he died. “There was a château [at Louvencourt],” he said. “And most of the officers were billeted in the château because the occupants had gone and the junior officers were put in these scruffy little farm houses. I found myself in a derelict cottage and to get into my room, I had to go through a room where an old ‘biddy’ was in bed. Every morning I had to go through her room . . . she was always sitting in bed smoking a pipe.”
