In Europe

by Geert Mak

  At the town hall in Poperinge one can still view the cells reserved for soldiers charged with ‘desertion’ and ‘cowardice’. According to a secret British Army directive, the only proper punishment for cowardice was death, and medical reasons were not considered extenuating. Later studies of court documents have shown that many of the ‘pansies’ were probably psychiatric patients. The French executed an estimated 1,600 of their own soldiers, the British 300, the Germans 50. Later, a new tactic was invented: jolts of electricity through the brain were used to get ‘cowards’ back on their feet, quickly and radically.

  Amid these cruelties, soldiers and officers did all they could to preserve a few remnants of ‘normal’ existence. ‘I often sat with a feeling of comfortable security at the table in my little bunker, the wooden walls of which were hung with weapons and reminded one of the Wild West,’ Ernst Jünger wrote. ‘I would drink a cup of tea, smoke and read, while my steward fussed with the little wood stove spreading the aroma of toast.’

  Corporal Barthas reported that the French shelters close to Vermelles sometimes resembled little villas. Even along the front lines,‘sparks, flames and smoke’ rose up day and night ‘from the hundreds of little chimneys’. In the war museum at Péronne, one can see a British officer's complete set of ‘field’ tea-service accoutrements, pleasingly arranged in a wicker basket. Beside it lies a German accordion with a makeshift songbook written by one M. Erdmeier, Allerhand Schützgrabengestanzl. Other Germans planted garden plots with rhododendron, snowdrops and Parole-uhren, little windmills that milled away the hours. The Belgians formed ‘families’, with a ‘father’ who referred to his bunkmate as his wuf, wife.

  In the British trenches a special newspaper was distributed, the blackly humorous Wipers Times, published by a writer and printer who had found an old printing press in a ruin. The 8 September, 1917 edition shows an elderly British soldier, still in the trenches. The caption reads: ‘He stroked his hoary snow-white beard / And gazed with eyes now long since bleared …’ Another sketch shows ‘The Trenches, in the year 1950’. All this bears witness to the unbearable suspicion that was taking hold of more and more soldiers: that no solution would ever be found to this deadlock.

  Perhaps it was courage born of desperation, the urge to move at any price, that led again and again to mass suicide attacks. Passchendaele, a wet and muddy hamlet not far from Ypres, was renamed Passion Dale by the British, because it had to be attacked again and again. Estimates are that some 60,000 men, a quarter of all those who died, drowned in the treacherous bogs around the handful of houses. They sank into the mud, disappeared into the thousands of holes and craters left by the artillery shells. ‘See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backwards a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.’

  Meanwhile, the nineteenth century's final traces of innocence were disappearing fast. The Belgian Army had entered the war with uniforms that looked as though they came from a school play: shakos, clogs, capotes, felt caps, rucksacks made of dog skins, huge blue coats that absorbed all the water of Ypres. The Scottish Highland Regiment vehemently insisted on wearing their kilts, until it turned out that mustard gas could have a disastrous effect on intimate body parts. The German lancers wore huge, shiny eagles on their hats, and leather helmets you could push a bullet through with your thumb. The French proudly wore their red uniform caps, blue coats and red trousers. No one had ever thought about camouflage or other practical matters: these were uniforms of honour and rank. Early in 1915, steel helmets and grey and khaki uniforms began appearing at the front, the pragmatic forms of the new century. The British toy manufacturer Meccano followed the technical developments closely. Examples can be seen today in London's Imperial War Museum: model 713, a machine gun mounted on a tripod; model 6.42, a complete battleship, and model 710: the Aeroscope, a kind of tall crane used to view the front from on high.

  But, as is usually the case, it took a long time for all these new technological developments to win a place in the imaginations of the generals, politicians and others. The magnitude of the killing between 1914–18 was due largely to the persistent combination of old strategies with ultra-modern technologies. At first, almost no one understood that such modernities as the machine gun, poison gas, the airplane and later the tank called for an entirely new way of waging war. The common foot soldier at the front was often the first to become aware of this technical mismatch. He found himself having been sent to war with antiquated equipment, he found himself withstanding a mustard-gas attack with only a urine-drenched rag held over his mouth and nose, he saw his comrades during a bayonet attack being mowed down by newfangled machine guns, and his bitterness grew.

  A British officer, William Pressey, reported seeing 200 French cavalrymen advancing across a hilltop close to Amiens, a stirring sight with their plumed helmets and gleaming lances. ‘They laughed and waved their lances at us, shouting “Le Bosch fini”, “Death to the Kraut!”’ Just after they disappeared from sight he heard the dry rattle of machine guns. Only a few stray horses came back.

  At Houthulst, where these days St Christoffel Church organises weekend masses and the blessing of automobiles, there is a huge Belgian war cemetery. Schoolchildren have hung letters on the bluish slabs. To the dead they have written: ‘You were given only five bullets a day. Too bad it happened. But you fought well.’ And: ‘If another war comes, you won't be there to see it. But I hope a war never comes. See you in heaven.’

  I hear a dull thud. A blue mist comes floating across the frosty fields. In the field behind the cemetery, the DOVO, the Belgian War Munition Demolition Service, has blown up another heap of First World War ammunition. They do it twice a day, one and a half tons a year. When the farmers find grenades they leave them at the base of the utility masts, and the miners collect them. And so it goes on here. Generation after generation, this soil continues to vomit up grenades, buttons, buckles, knives, skulls, bottles, rifles, sometimes even a whole tank. The Great War never ends.

  Chapter EIGHT

  Cassel

  THIS PLACE SHOULD BE VISITED IN NOVEMBER, OR IN FEBRUARY, when no grass, wheat or barley is growing, when the ground has returned to earth again, damp, muddy, full of puddles and wet snow. Late in the afternoon I drive to Cassel, just across the French border. The sun is hanging low over rolling fields, a huge orange ball about to sink into the ground. After that the sky turns a very fragile light blue with little pink clouds. Then darkness falls.

  Hôtel de Schoebeque has, they say, changed little since the French commander-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, and King George V stayed here. Here sat the switchmen of fate, the chiefs of staff, the men who encountered the tens of thousands of dead only in statistics. The gate is locked. I hop over the fence and wander through the gardens, and in the last light of day I see what they saw: the plain stretching out past Ypres, with all the roads, fields and hedgerows like a chessboard at your feet.

  The First World War already had a few of the characteristics that would make the next one so murderous: the massive scale, the technology, the alienation, the anonymity. The civilian, though, was still being spared: only five per cent of the victims of the First World War were civilians, compared with fifty per cent in the Second World War. The war, though not yet about race, was about origin, nationality and rank. And everywhere the governing classes willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of farm boys, workers and office clerks, without mercy, on behalf of a few vague moves on the chessboard.

  From all those soldiers’ humiliating experiences at the front there gradually rose new social and rebellious movements, each with its own tone and its own appearance in every country. The fronts became in this way the breeding grounds for a series of mass movements that would dominate European politics for decades, varying from angry veterans in Italy to frustrated officers in G
ermany to hard line pacifist-socialists in France and Belgium.

  An almost aristocratic distance was maintained between French officers and their men. Maréchal Joseph Joffre refused to be told how many soldiers had been killed, for this would only ‘distract’ him. Corporal Barthas regularly describes the comfort enjoyed by French officers, while exhausted soldiers marched through the countryside like ‘cattle’, ‘slaves’ or ‘lepers’, hacked away at trenches and slept among the rats. But the British commander-in-chief, Earl Haig, was the most ruthless strategist.

  Some later characterised Haig as ‘the Scot who seized the opportunity to liquidate more Englishmen than anyone before him’. But during the war years he was idolised. No matter how you looked at it, within only a few years he had succeeded in whipping the little British Army of regulars into an excellently trained military force with millions of troops, and so saved the British Empire. Here too, the technological lag played a role. The only wise place for a general to be in modern warfare is, in fact, behind the lines, at the end of a bundle of telephone wires. Fighting generals – fifty-six British generals were killed during the war – were brave, they were good for morale, but otherwise they simply got in the way. At the same time, the first telephones and other communications systems were still too unreliable to allow generals to work in this way, especially during combat.

  Were there actually switchmen of fate, working behind the scenes? There certainly were. First of all, one had the French brandy merchant Jean Monnet, whom we met earlier in the City of London. As soon as he heard that war had broken out, he asked for a meeting with the prime minister, René Viviani, a friend of a friend. Monnet, twenty-six at the time, raised a matter with Viviani which, as he wrote later, he would probably not have mentioned had he been older and wiser. It was a new kind of problem, a twentieth-century problem. For this mass war, Monnet reasoned, all of the warring nations’ resources had to be brought to bear, and that required new forms of organisation and cooperation.

  War was no longer simply a matter for the battlefield. Winning a modern war involved less heroic things as well, such as supply chains and shipping capacity. Germany, with its massive industrial base, seemed significantly better prepared for such warfare than either Great Britain or France. It was vitally important, therefore, that the two countries combine their economies, ‘as though forming a single nation’. Following on the heels of decades of overblown nationalism, this was an outright revolutionary idea.

  The French prime minister agreed with him. Monnet succeeded in convincing the British as well – he had vast connections due to his business – and there arose an Allied Transport Pool and a Wheat Executive. These bodies focused, for the first time in European history, on common interests rather than on national ones.

  Without the Wheat Executive, France would almost certainly have starved. Without the Allied Transport Pool, the German submarines would have been able to cut off all supply lines to the continent, as they almost succeeded in doing in the spring of 1917. When faced with the same problems in 1940, Great Britain and France established similar cooperative ties, but then in the service of a more ambitious ideal: their possible continuation in times of peace as well. In a certain sense, the Wheat Executive and the Allied Transport Pool were the kernel of what would later develop into the European Union.

  There were other switchmen of fate: Karel Cogge, a Belgian lock-keeper, for example, along with a constantly inebriated ship's mate Hendrik Geeraerd and a local historian, Emeric Feys. It was Feys who found, in his archives, old plans for the inundation of the local marshlands. And it was on his instructions, in late October 1914, that Cogge opened the sluices at Veurne-Sas. When the water did not rise quickly enough, it was Geeraerd who, under cover of night, succeeded in prying open the abandoned and overgrown sluice doors in the Noordvaart canal. In this way they were able, at the very last moment, to flood the plain around the Yser. To this trio belongs the credit for halting the German advance at Nieuwpoort.

  There are still two Cogges in the Nieuwpoort phone book: Kurt and Georges. I call Georges. ‘Yes, he was my great-uncle, my grandmother told me about it once. No, no one knows any more about it, they're all dead. Kurt? He's my son! And I have a grandson, too!’

  And so the Cogges of Nieuwpoort live on, completely undaunted by history.

  During the Great War, the town of Poperinge was the first relatively quiet spot behind the lines. Believe it or not, a sign still hangs in the square which reads SAFE or UNSAFE – depending on where the wind was coming from during a gas attack – but that didn't stop the fun. This was where one found the first glass, and the much-sung last woman:

  After the war fini

  English soldiers parti

  Mademoiselles de Poperinge vont pleurer

  Avec plenty bébé!

  The stately Talbot House stood outside that whirl of activity. It was an Everyman's club, where soldiers from any rank and class could find rest for a while. That egalitarian atmosphere still prevails, around the staircases, the furniture, the candelabras, the books, the paintings, the water jugs, the piano the men sang at. Until the late 1980s, veterans still came to stay here. Even the tranquil garden has remained unchanged, including the sign inviting one to ‘Come into the garden and forget about the war.’

  I drink tea at the kitchen table, talk a little with a young Scotsman, look at all the empty chairs around us, muse over the boys from back then. In London I had met Lyn MacDonald, an expert on the First World War, a writer who traced and interviewed hundreds of veterans before it was too late, the mother confessor of the last survivors.

  She told me how she had become intrigued by all those little clubs of old men who got together regularly in the 1960s and 1970s to raise a glass and sing a song. ‘The mere fact that they were together, that was enough. No one who hadn't been through the war could really understand what that meant.’

  MacDonald always spoke of them as ‘the boys’. ‘When I interviewed them, I quickly found myself talking, not to extremely old men, but to very young men from 1914. To them, that war was often more real than the rest of their lives. As one of them put it: “I lived my entire life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the rest was only the credits.”’

  During our conversation, she warned me against judging too hastily: ‘That generation wasn't mad, they were fantastic people. But they had very different ideals: patriotism, a sense of duty, service, self-sacrifice. They were typical Victorians, and after the war they came back to a world where they felt less and less at home.’

  But still, what drove them? What drove all those men to take part in collective suicide? Lyn MacDonald told me about a man who was wounded, fell, and all he could think was:‘What a waste! All those months of expensive training, and I haven't even fired a shot!’ Everything in him wanted to fight, to prove himself.

  ‘Going over the top’, the leap from the trenches, was the definitive experience of the First World War, and at the same time the most terrifying: endless waiting, the passing round of rum, vomiting from nerves, the count, the whistles, out of the trenches, towards the enemy, through the barbed wire, running for your life in an unimaginable pandemonium of bullets, mines and mortars, and then shooting, burning, stabbing, killing. ‘Over the top, boys, come on, over the top.’ And they went.

  Friends, neighbours, fellow villagers all volunteered together, were trained together and went over the top together. ‘You went, right, it was your duty, you'd signed up for it,’ said Arthur Wagstaff (b.1898) in the BBC documentary mentioned earlier. Tommy Gay: ‘Me and my mate were always together, the first time we went over the top we went together, but I never saw him after that. There was nothing but bullets. But not one of them had my name on it!’ Robbie Burns (b.1897): ‘Before every major attack you had the feeling this could be the very last time. You didn't let it show, you didn't talk about it, you kept it to yourself.’

  At the start of the Battle of the Somme, even the most hardened soldiers fouled themselves when
they realised that their commander had made a fatal mistake: ten minutes before the attack, he had stopped the shelling of the German positions. That gave the Germans, as they well knew, enough time to run from their bunkers, man their machine guns and slaughter the attackers. And that is exactly what happened. But they still went when the whistle blew.

  All manner of explanations can of course be given for this phenomenon, varying from the patriotism on the home front to the strong sense of camaraderie and the tight discipline within the British and German armies. Barthas describes the start of an absurd attack in Northern France, in the early hours of 17 December, 1914, straight into the German machine guns with no cover. A major had given the order. At first the captain refused to pass it along, the two men fought, then the captain climbed out of the trench and was shot down after taking a few steps. Barthas: ‘In the trenches the men were moaning and begging “But I have three children.” Or they screamed “Mama, Mama.” Another soldier begged for mercy. But the major, revolver in hand and beside himself with rage, threatened to shoot anyone who hesitated.’ Finally, they went, just a little more afraid of their major than they were of the enemy.

  There is also another side to the story. The soldiers had not, after all, gone to war to ‘die for their fatherland’, but to kill, to wound, to mutilate. In most of the letters and diaries from the front, however, this subject is carefully avoided. Emphasis is always placed on the suffering and the dying, but one reads little about the actual experience of killing.

  What was the motive? After a year of war, Barthas said he never wanted to hear the word ‘patriotic’ again: ‘It was very simple: we were forced to do it as victims of an unrelenting fate … We had lost our sense of values and our humanity. We were degraded to the status of pack animals: indifferent, unfeeling and deadened.’ Barthas was a committed socialist and humanist, and found his own solution to the problem: he fired only in self-defence, never for any other reason.