Back to the Front (15 page)

The surroundings are varied. The Ancre flows south to meet the River Somme near Albert, the two meandering waterways having
cut marshy valleys in the chalky plateaus and escarpments to the east of town. On the heights above these converging river
depressions, little peekaboo pleats in the land form finger valleys, charming now, deadly then. In between occasional stands
of trees, large fields of wheat alternate with sugar beet, forming what resembles a motley flag that is just settling unevenly
on the ground. The biggest "crease" in this flag is a narrow crest of land, reminiscent of the ridge at Ypres, that runs southeast
for a few miles from the village of Pozieres to just beyond the hamlet of Guillemont. This long lozenge of high ground was
the center of the battlefield, which I hope to reach before saddle sores or spells of callow inattentiveness make me turn
my bike back toward Albert.

In the morning, I coast down toward the northern reaches of the 1916 Front, where the disaster of July 1 was unredeemed by
any gain in ground, however minuscule. The Ancre, a lethargic little river hemmed in by reedy flats and a couple of characterless
campgrounds backing out onto a railroad track, does not look the part of world-historical awfulness. A young boy and girl
float by in an inflated inner tube, the picture of pacific childhood. At Hamel, a mile or so farther on, things begin to look
more congruously squalid. The village, which sat on the British front line, consists of two filthy streets permeated with
the essence of pig. The stench is remarkable.

I pedal harder to escape it, past the dual rows of mud-spattered redbrick houses and uphill toward the fields of no-man's-land,
a few hundred yards away. Near the crest of the ridge a military bus, its gunmetal green grill smiling maliciously, appears
suddenly at a blind turn and barrels down on me. A horn blares; I skedaddle sideways into the ditch and wipe out. A close
call. I wrench myself around to yell out a curse but see instead a flapping banner hung on the rear window of the bus. In
red letters is the slogan
Versöhnung über den Gräbern
—
Arbeit fur den Frieden
(Reconciliation over the Tombs—Work for Peace). This juggernaut's passengers, I realize, are students who spend their summer
vacation sprucing up the German graveyards of the Western Front. I wonder how many of the living they take out with their
big fat bus on the tiny country lanes of France.

They have just come from a visit to one of the most remarkable battlefield sites on the entire Western Front: the Newfoundland
Memorial Park. A rectangular parcel of land located between the villages of Hamel, Beaumont, and Auchonvillers (or "Ocean
Villas," as it was wittily called by the British), the park has been left in its wartime state.
Trenches snake across the now grassy land, and shell craters pockmark the ground. The story of the Newfoundland battalion
that met its doom here on July 1, 1916, is movingly told in David Macfarlane's
The Danger
Tree,
a masterly account of one family's experience of the First World War. Blindly ordered to try again where the initial attack
had utterly failed, the 752 men of the battalion climbed out of a support trench—the communication trenches leading forward
were too clogged with the dead and the wounded—and walked three hundred yards above ground toward their front line. They were
alone up there—no artillery shells flew overhead to cover them, and no other units on either side of their position joined
in their attack. There was no protection whatsoever. Many of the attackers never even made it to no-man's-land. Some of the
German machine gunners, complacently watching the exposed advance coming closer, held their deadly fire until the Newfoundlanders
bunched up to file through the gaps in their own barbed wire. Then the bullets flew fast and thick. The few who managed to
get free slogged on the last three hundred yards toward the German trenches. According to one eyewitness cited by Macfarlane,
"Instinctively, they tucked their chins into an advanced shoulder, as they had so often done when fighting their way home
against a blizzard in some little outport in far-off Newfoundland." Some 91 percent of the men — 684 of 752—were wounded or
killed. It was a shocking waste, and a devastating heartbreak for a small island community. When Newfoundland became a part
of Canada in 1949, the crudest irony of all ensured that the islanders' new national holiday—July 1 is also Canada Day—coincided
with the anniversary of their bleakest collective memory.

Today a statue of a caribou overlooks the scene. On the perimeter, trees and bushes native to Newfoundland have been planted.
The place is not only a stranger in time but also a foreigner in space. Nothing here looks like the surrounding countryside.
The visitor to this park feels like some lunatic suburban surveyor crossing a particularly misbehaved lawn, but eventually
the fading scars in the ground work their quiet effect. For me, a pilgrim of the invisible, the park offers a tantalizing
moment of tangibility. This is the Western Front unimagined, in its dotage, seventy or eighty years on. On either side of
this plot of land, the invisible Front takes over again, a pulverized band of ditches and craters hidden under farmers' fields
and village streets, stretching from the sea to the mountains. Here, the Front has come out into the bright light of day.

Last week it was Vimy, now it's Beaumont Hamel. It is odd that Canada specializes in caretaking these battlefields of the
First World War, that a country with so much space should make a point of preserving a few forlorn acres in France. For other
countries, memorials in stone suffice. Canada tries to keep its imprint in the earth itself, as if that were somehow a more
durable way to glorify its dead. Yet the passage of time softens even the worst scores in the land. Deep craters grow more
dimplelike, and once jagged, saw-toothed trenches become shallow, indistinct depressions. The protean earth pushes up, a great
leveler in the literal sense, and the furrowed record of sorrow becomes an even plane again. The canvas is blank, the slate
is clean. In the Newfoundland park, this slow leveling is well under way, the progress of the flattening inspiring an irresistible
parallel to the workings of memory. The land of the Front, if left alone by farmers and custodians and others of their ilk,
will eventually forget, just as surely as we who are now alive have—and will be, in our turn — forgotten.

Beyond the park I walk across a farmer's field to look at a mine crater. The explosives underneath a German position known
as the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt were blown at 7:20 on the morning of July 1, one of the eleven mines that went up a few minutes
before the 66,000 attackers in the first wave scrambled up their ladders and out of the trenches. I'm here out of televisual
duty—of all the things that I have read or heard about the Great War, this explosion is the only one I've actually seen take
place. It was on TV, therefore it exists. A motion picture camera caught the mine as it went up, and the image, a great shower
of loose earth flying upward in the grainy light of early cinema, has become the signature documentary footage of the Somme,
if not the entire war. Middle-aged men addicted to war specials on cable TV have probably seen the Hawthorn cloud of debris
so often as to have absorbed it as a childhood memory.

As is usually the case with life, reality is a letdown. The once dramatic crater looks like an overgrown rookery. Shrubs and
brushwood hide the lip of the pit, and careful plowing all around has made the surroundings as innocuous-looking as any farm
field in France. In the nearby hollow leading to the village of Serre, an enormous graveyard attests to how far from innocuous
this countryside is. The indispensable Martin Middlebrook, in his
First Day on the Somme,
cites at length one Karl Blenk, a German infantryman who was manning the trenches in front of the village at 7:30 that morning:

When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as though they must overrun our trenches. We were very
surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. I could see them everywhere; there were hundreds. The officers
were in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing, we just had to load
and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run, they
would have overwhelmed us.

The hundreds who fell were buried in the Serre Road Cemetery Number 2, which would later become improbably useful for something
other than the expression of grief. During the Second World War, the cemetery's toolshed was used as a hiding place for Allied
flyers who had been shot down over France and were being smuggled back to safety by the Resistance. Thirty-two airmen stopped
for shelter this way, concealed by their deceased predecessors. The cemetery was, in effect, recycled and made into an underground
railway station.

On my way back to the Newfoundland park, I stoop down to pluck an old bullet from between two chalk pebbles. I look carefully
around me —pieces of rusted barbed wire lie innocently on the ground two furrows away. The field, freshly plowed, is yielding
its usual harvest of scrap metal from the war. From the air it must exhibit the chalk scar of my imagined no-man's-land. A
few hundred yards away from where I stand the great British humorist Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote his misanthropic little
gems under the pen name of Saki, once walked and talked in the trenches that cut through this field. In the cold mists of
the morning of November 14, 1916, as he and his men rested in a shell hole, Saki was mortally wounded by a sniper. Seconds
before that moment, his last, irritated utterance had been "Put that bloody cigarette out."

I pocket the bullet and head back to my bike.

T
HE OTHER BANK
of the Ancre slopes up toward the heart of the Somme battlefield. In a large wood just above the river, I poke
around tentatively to get a look at the crazy upheaval of heavily shelled land. There is really nothing more evocative of
the war than this frozen violence. All of the woods in this region have the same obscene, unnatural floors—no one thought
it useful, or wise, to plow under the traces of the fighting when, immediately after the war, these copses were just random
patches of blackened stumps. Here at Thiepval Wood, the remnant of the British front-line trench can still be clearly traced,
bracken-covered and humpbacked, swimming its way through the trees like some slow-moving sea monster.

This countryside cannot let the past escape. Above the lane leading to the village of Thiepval looms the massive British memorial
to the Somme. Aside from the fanciful accounts produced by historians paid to get the British military command off the hook,
this structure is the official response to the catastrophe. It is an eye-opener. The closer you get to the oft-glimpsed edifice,
the more repulsive it becomes in its Lego-like gigantism. One hundred and forty-one feet tall, the multiarched redbrick structure,
designed by Edwin Lutyens and inaugurated in 1934, must have been intended as an eyesore, a Cyclopean blight on an already
blighted landscape. If not, that is definitely the purpose it serves now—and the honesty is refreshing. From most points on
the battlefield, its profile slouches on the horizon, or rears up above the treetops, or spoils a perspective. The mammoth
block of stone and brick is an in-your-face reminder that something hideous occurred in the vicinity. There is no nationalism
here, as at Vimy, or any of the faintly ridiculous stone lions found padding around other British monuments. Just ungainly
mass and unforgiving volume.

As I approach the Thiepval arch over a putting-green lawn, it occurs to me that the thing looks like a huge horseshoe magnet,
held forever to the earth by the attraction of a million skeletons. (It is now estimated that there were 1,300,000 Allied
and German casualties on the Somme in 1916.) In its central arch and numerous bays, there is the familiar sight of names upon
names upon names, the ledgers of vertigo drawn up by a shamefaced establishment. Here, the stone letters spell out the names
of the doomed soldiers of the British and South African armies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, and India built
their own monuments to the missing) who died on the Somme in the years 1915-17 and whose bodies were never recovered or identified.
There are 73,412 of them. The memorial's inscription reads, "The Missing of the Somme"; it could just as well say the sum
of the missing. The magnitude of the number is too large to comprehend, just as at the Menin Gate. Like there too, the trick
of absolution through accountancy is attempted—only here it works. The spectator, alone and vulnerable on the Thiepval ridge,
feels oppressed by the weight of the engraved stone, as if it got there through some insensate natural force, ordained by
an unkind universe rather than by the blunders of the powerful.

The first time I saw this monument, on my winter visit to the Somme, I thought these names were like cuneiform, the indecipherable
scratchings of a dimly remembered civilization. Today is different. Both the detachment I felt at the fetish-house interior
of Ypres's St. George's Memorial Church and the anti-imperial scorn that came over me in Ploegsteert Wood have vanished. They
have been replaced by an uneasy urge to connect. I try summoning up my grandfathers, Daniel and Bartholomew, who are, in a
sense, just names to me. They were the contemporaries of these names at Thiepval; perhaps they knew or soldiered alongside
some of them. As was the case in front of the Madonna of Albert, the speculation leads nowhere, to a failed seance at the
foot of a monument. My grandfathers are now among the missing. I return instead to Private Cadogan, my man in Flanders, a
fleeting, occasional presence beside me during this past month walking down the Front. Surely he can help me understand this
place. Or Musketier Leopold Aronsohn, the man from La Targette. But they too remain maddeningly out of reach. Weary and defeated,
I walk out of the grounds of the memorial and set off to the crossroads outside the village.