Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  The aircraft and munitions factories of France and Britain didn’t prepare for war because nobody really believed it would happen. For one thing, business would suffer. In July 1914, just a month before Europe mobilized, an American journalist lectured the French on its absurdity.

  I have been waiting twenty-five years for your European war. Many a time it has seemed as imminent as this. But it will not come! Europe cannot afford a war. There is today such a close interrelationship between big business in the capitals of Europe that an actual conflict is beyond the realm of possibility. The diplomats will fume and fuss. But they know better than to plunge their countries into a colossal struggle that will ruin Europe and set back civilization.

  The very idea of war, along with its associated technologies, became the plaything of fantasy. Ever since the Franco-Prussian War, writers had speculated about the rise of a militant Germany. In 1871, British writer George Tomkyns Chesney published The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, in which a thinly disguised Germany invaded and defeated Britain. Jules Verne dramatized submarine power in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and H. G. Wells’s 1907 The War in the Air foresaw Germany, joined by China and Japan, bombing the United States and Europe into ruin.

  In France, however, both the public and intellectuals looked on military aviation as an amusing conceit. In the 1880s and 1890s, illustrator Albert Robida anticipated a war in which aircraft played a large part, but readers preferred his jokey suggestions about the French upper classes stepping into private airships rather than carriages. In his 1909 Aeropolis, Belgian Henry Kistemaeckers and French illustrator René Vincent imagined personal aircraft taking off from art nouveau balconies in the more fashionable arrondissements of Paris. At the end of Aeropolis, sinister Japanese arrive to menace Paris, but if anyone in Europe saw this as a warning, they took no notice.

  Aeropolis. Future aviation, as imagined in 1909 by René Vincent

  War did come all the same, with shocking speed and largely by accident. On June 28, 1914, a group of young Serbian anarchists, incensed at Austria’s annexation of their country, swore to kill Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, on a visit to the Bosnian town of Sarajevo. All suffered from tuberculosis, in those days incurable, and so felt they had nothing to lose.

  Armed with bombs and handguns, and with cyanide suicide pills in their pockets, the six lined the motorcade route. Their efforts at assassination were inept. Most lost their nerve. One threw his bomb too late and blew up the car behind the archduke’s. Then he swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the river, intending to drown. The water was only four inches deep and the pill was so old it just made him throw up.

  At the end of the day, the last plotter, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a melancholy idealist, stood eating a sandwich and brooding about the debacle. As the police had switched routes following the first bomb, he’d had no chance even to draw his Browning automatic pistol, let alone fire it.

  At that moment, to his astonishment, the archduke’s car, having taken a wrong turn, entered his street. Trying to back up, the driver stalled right in front of Princip. Dropping his sandwich, he shoved through the crowd and, with two unlucky shots, fatally wounded both Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Blaming the Serbian government, Austria invaded, an act that automatically activated treaties committing France, Britain, and Russia to go to war with the Austro-Hungarian empire and its ally, Germany.

  To fight over Serbia, an insignificant pawn in the international game, was ridiculous. But the killings took place in July. Military and political leaders were on holiday, and governments in recess. A power vacuum existed, and war rushed to fill it. Even then, Germany tried to put on the brakes. Between the kaiser, on holiday on a boat off Norway, and Czar Nicholas II in Saint Petersburg, cables bounced back and forth. In them, Willy urged cousin Nicky not to mobilize his army. Nicky, notoriously weak, stubborn, and not very bright, instead listened to his generals, stood on his dignity, and dithered. Nobody, it seems, knew how to partially mobilize Russia’s enormous but unwieldy army. Finally, on July 31, Nicky wired, “It is technically impossible to stop our military preparations which were obligatory owing to Austria’s mobilization.”

  As diplomacy failed, the German generals saw their chance and activated the Schlieffen plan, their best-kept military secret. Ignoring Belgium’s neutrality and not waiting for the kaiser to sign an official declaration of war, they sent 1.4 million troops speeding there on the new railway system.

  The tiny country on the North Sea became a back door through which they could enter France from the north, bypassing its forts. If, as they anticipated, France surrendered quickly, they planned to attack Russia before its army had assembled. As for Britain, Berlin regarded it as essentially a naval power and no threat on land. Taken completely by surprise, the French armies under General Joffre fell back on Paris. Even as printers were churning out postcards showing Alsatian women tearfully thanking French soldiers for liberating them, they were in full retreat. On September 7, they halted the Germans at the Marne, forty miles outside Paris. With minor variations, the two sides remained in stalemate until November 1918. Strategically, the war was over, at least in Europe. In terms of carnage, however, it had barely begun.

  14

  Archie Agonistes

  There is indescribable enthusiasm and entire unanimity throughout Australia in support of all that tends to provide for the security of the empire in war.

  SIR RONALD CRAUFURD MUNRO-FERGUSON, governor-general of Australia, in a message to the colonial secretary in London, July 1914

  Why would Australians agree to fight in a war on the far side of the world?

  They didn’t. They were never asked. As one historian explained:

  Australia didn’t even have to declare war. Britain, as head of the family, spoke on behalf of her empire. All Australia had to decide was the extent of its participation. Most Australians saw nothing unusual in this. They also saw themselves as Britons, far from home, it was true, and in a strange land where the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves, but they were still Britons and wore three-piece suits in the pitiless sun to prove it.

  No Australian was forced to enlist, least of all my grandfather. Even had the draft existed, he could have claimed exemption as a family man. But he volunteered anyway. Nobody knows his reasons at first hand, since just as our family never talked to one another, they also seldom wrote letters or kept diaries. Once you know the Baxter character, however, some pieces of evidence speak more loudly than any words.

  One is another early photograph of Archie. It was taken on his wedding day in 1906. Clutching a pair of white gloves in one hand, he is a picture of exquisite discomfort in his first formal suit. He’s irresistibly reminiscent of the barrow boy hero in the popular dialect poem of C. J. Dennis, The Sentimental Bloke, suffering through afternoon tea with the family of his middle-class sweetheart, Doreen.

  Wedding photograph of Archie and Stella, 1906

  Me cuffs kep’ playin’ wiv me nervis fears

  Me patent leathers nearly brought the tears

  An’ there I sits wiv “Yes, mum. Thanks. Indeed?”

  Me stand-up collar sorin’ orf me ears.

  Archie’s other arm is linked with that of Stella Madden, his Doreen. Her steel-rimmed spectacles and prim mouth suggest the same inflexible disposition as the mother in Dennis’s poem. Cousins and friends flank them, but the eye is drawn to a truculent gent with a bushy mustache, seated to one side. He’s John Madden, father of the bride.

  Both Madden and his daughter exhibit the same no-nonsense mouth, the unflinching gaze. In contrast, Archie, big-eared, wide-eyed, trusting, looks as rural as the town where he was born. Burrawang, in dense bushland eighty miles from Sydney, is the classic mountain village. Anyone raised in the Ozarks or the Blue Ridge, on a Swiss hillside, or in the forests of the Auvergne would instantly be at home among its thick-walled houses of local sandstone, their roofs steeply pitched to shed snow. There was even a l
ocal version of the troll, that monster of the European forests imported by emigrants to scare the children. The Burrawang bunyip lurked in a swamp, killing cattle by night but disappearing the moment anyone set out to catch it.

  Bunyips notwithstanding, my great-grandfather James Baxter, a Scot from around Aberdeen, liked Burrawang and did well there. Back in Scotland, a branch of the Baxter family operated a lucrative business producing high-end canned goods: grouse, pheasant, poacher’s broth, and haggis soup. Encouraged, James started a bacon factory. It flourished, but it also helped kill him. His obituary in the local paper, The Scrutineer of August 28, 1891, described how “some twelve month ago he began to feel the effects of constant and undue pressure upon his stomach leaning over the edge of the bacon curing vats.”

  James fathered nine daughters and three sons. On his death, the bacon factory and his two-hundred-acre farm with ninety cattle and six horses went to his widow, Eliza, and, after she died, to his eldest, Archie. He liquidated his father’s property and moved to Sydney.

  With the profits of the sale in his pocket, Archie was a catch. And caught he was, by the Madden family, in the person of Margaret Stella Isabella Madden, always known as Stella. Continuing our family’s involvement with food, Archie took a job as a “canvasser,” or traveling salesman, in his case for groceries, and bought a spacious house in the inner-city suburb of Leichhardt. The couple moved in. So, however, did Stella’s father, and her brother, Claude.

  Few recipes for disaster are more poisonous than living with one’s in-laws. (I could only nod in agreement at the line in the film Field of Dreams: “We lived with my wife’s parents as long as we could, almost an entire afternoon.”) There’s a certain irony, as well as a sense of the inevitability that runs through our family, that, as children, we should have shared the same house with our in-laws, and soon been at one another’s throats.

  Did Archie feel himself caught in the same trap? Historian Peter Stanley, analyzing the makeup of the first volunteers to the AIF, cites “evading domestic responsibilities” as a significant motive for wanting to leave the country. Whatever his reasons, Archie appears to have needed little urging to abandon his family and, in particular, Stella’s, to fight someone else’s battles on the far side of the world. As Pasternak says in Doctor Zhivago, “Happy men don’t volunteer.”

  15

  The Call to Arms

  We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do

  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.

  E. H. MCDERMOTT

  But why would he do that?” Marie-Dominique asked.

  “Maybe Archie just wanted to escape.”

  She looked doubtful. “You would never leave us to go and fight in Australia—would you?”

  I knew enough of France and married life not to answer that question.

  Convinced of France’s superiority to all other countries, the French don’t understand why anyone would want to leave, even to fight on its behalf. Rather than send Frenchmen to defend their colonies in Asia and Africa, they farmed out the job. The Légion Etrangère, the French Foreign Legion, accepted, indeed invited, the world’s toughest nuts. You could enlist under whatever name you chose. Nobody asked about your reasons. The Foreign Legion, in the words of one writer, “developed into a collective exercise in convenient amnesia, acquiring a reputation as a haven for cut-throats, crooks and sundry fugitives from justice. Few questions were put to new recruits, making it an ideal repository for the scum of the earth. And with the scum came the romantics, men searching for a way to dull the pain of doomed love.”

  Doomed love? Might that be why Archie left? Was there another woman? I wouldn’t have been surprised. Abrupt marriages, divorces, and quixotic romantic gestures pepper our family history. Two aunts married American servicemen during World War II. Both returned soon after, each with a child. My own father wasn’t married to my mother when I was born. For good measure, he had been married before. That I was fifty years old before he told me says something about the Baxters’ chronic inability to communicate.

  Or had Archie simply felt the same nationalist euphoria as Britain? Britons needed no more excuse to join up than the ground beneath their feet. When Eleanor Farjeon asked the poet Edward Thomas why he chose to enlist, he stooped, scooped up a handful of earth, and said, “Literally, for this.” Many in Britain accepted the propaganda maps, supposedly discovered by British spies, showing how postwar Europe would look if the Germans won: a Gross-Deutschland extending from Saint Petersburg to the Spanish border, with the British Isles as a Deutsche-Kolonie. Britain a colony of Germany? Unthinkable.

  Even without any mystical love of the soil, one could imagine Australians responding to a similar nationalism. Australia had only existed as a nation since its six states federated in 1901, which made it barely older than the united Germany. One couldn’t fight for one’s country if one didn’t have a country, but now that they did, both Aussies and Germans found patriotism a novel and exciting concept.

  I tried to imagine Archie metaphorically wrapped in the flag of the Southern Cross. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t seem the type. But what was the type?

  The “digger” image of the Great War was largely the creation of a single artist, Norman Lindsay. He was one of those belligerent little men whom Australia finds both admirable and exasperating. Billy Hughes, the wartime prime minister, was another, compensating for poor health and short stature with a furious output of work. Historian Les Carlyon described Hughes as “cranky and deaf and dyspeptic, but still bustling with energy, cracking out abuse to his hapless typists, carried along by the fever of war.”

  Though Lindsay was less than half Hughes’s age, he had the same arrogance. Bigotry came naturally to him. Fanatically nationalist, he was also anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-gay—probably anti-Eskimo too, had anyone thought to ask. Though almost the same age as Pablo Picasso and James Joyce, he loathed the work of both and detested anything in art or literature that smelled of modernism—a prejudice he shared with Kaiser Wilhelm, who feared the new in everything but instruments of war.

  Lindsay’s style, rooted in nineteenth-century French history painting, ran mostly to female nudes with Amazonian breasts and wrestlers’ thighs. When, however, in 1914 the popular weekly The Bulletin asked for anti-German cartoons, he leaped to the drawing board to create the archetypal Hun. A drooling beast, half-naked, always in the pointed helmet known as a pickelhaube, these monsters rampaged through his drawings, raping buxom Belgians and trampling babies underfoot. For good measure they sometimes carried a hatchet or meat cleaver, dripping blood.

  Norman Lindsay. Monsters of Depravity and Children of Light.

  At the same time, he created the archetypal Aussie: clean-cut, sturdy, muscular, white, a model of Aryan supremacy in skin-tight khaki shirt, riding boots, jodhpurs, and a slouch hat—the very antithesis of the real digger, often slouching, untidy, and belligerent. Art historian Bernard Smith acknowledged that Lindsay’s war cartoons “invariably presented Germans as monsters of depravity, the Allies as the children of light.” The propagandizing was almost too flagrant. During World War II, when it seemed the Nazis and Japanese might overwhelm even Australia, his wife, fearing Germans with long memories, urged him to flee to America.

  Might Archie have been moved by such crude flag-waving? It wasn’t so great a stretch, since I admired Lindsay myself, for his technique rather than his subject matter, and owned some of his less bellicose work. He lived in the same mountains outside Sydney as my parents, and I often drove down the bush lane that ran past his house, slowing to read the sign NO PAINTINGS FOR SALE on the gate. After his death, his house became a museum. We could inspect at leisure his spacious canvases and stroll in his garden, dotted with life-sized sculptures of husky nudes, incongruously molded in gray cement.

  I was still puzzling over Archie’s possible motives when another old friend came to the rescue.

  I met Michael when we were asked by one of the
cinema bureaucracies to distribute funds to makers of Australian short films. During a week of interviews with greedy, argumentative, and only occasionally gifted applicants, we’d come to feel like soldiers trapped in a shell hole during an artillery barrage.

  Michael became a military historian and producer of films about Australia’s war effort. When he passed through France, I shamelessly picked his brain.

  “When did your grandfather enlist?”

  “May 1916.”

  “Hmmm. That was a low point. We’d lost twenty-eight thousand at Ypres and just as many at Gallipoli, but the British were pushing for more men.”

  Prime Minister Hughes wanted conscription, but only if voters approved: many Australians still resented the governor-general’s automatic assumption in 1914 that they would fight with Britain. Twice Hughes took the question to the country in a plebiscite; twice it was rejected. Even troops on the front line in France, who stood to benefit most from reinforcements, refused to support compulsory military service. “I wouldn’t wish this place on my worst enemy,” said one.

  “What surprises me,” I said, “is the fact that Archie enlisted even though he had a wife and child. Who was supposed to look after them?”

  “Australian soldiers got very good pay. Some of his would have gone to his wife. Enough to live on. And the recruiters wouldn’t have discouraged him. They took pretty well anyone.”

  Michael explained the new tools now available to the researcher into Australia’s military history. Almost as much as the French, the Australians, it seemed, had embraced their patrimoine, particularly if it carried a rifle.

  “Just go into the site of the Australian War Memorial or the National Archives and put in his name. Everything that ever happened to an Australian serviceman is cataloged five different ways.” He smiled. “Even the lice have serial numbers.”