Back to the Front (19 page)

"See any skulls?"

"At least it's not crowded."

"Where'd you say this place was again?"

The home front is, as always, difficult to understand. A middle-aged French friend shakes her head and says sorrowfully,
"La boue, la boue, la
boue"
— as if repeating the word "mud" like a mantra sufficed. It reminds me of the pitch for the war porn place near the Menin
Road.

Perhaps my going out to the Front is an exercise in doomed voyeurism. Might it not be possible that there is nothing to see?
That you can't go back to where you've never been? That it would be better to stay here, in my Paris apartment, digesting
a dozen snails and expectorating the word "mud" over a cognac? I think of the amusement park at Ypres, the diesel fumes at
Loos, the hollow sky of the Santerre, the hailstones of Nampcel. I think of becoming a deserter. Pilgrims, unlike soldiers,
need to believe in something.

T
HE NEXT MORNING I
reluctantly pick through the mail that has accumulated over the past few weeks. Bills, bank statements.
The usual, except for a small envelope with an Irish stamp. The postmark reads Baile Atha Cliath, which is the Celtically
correct way of saying "town of the hurdle ford," or Dublin. Someone has used India ink to address the envelope; old-fashioned
penmanship gives tails to many of the letters and leaves the p's unclosed so that they look like umbrella handles. I recognize
the handwriting from childhood, when our grandmother used to send harp and shamrock badges for her Canadian grandsons to wear
on St. Patrick's Day.

Inside the envelope is a small card, slightly bigger than a business card. There is no salutation, no accompanying note, no
signature, just the words "Thomas Conlon. Guillemont Road Cemetery," written in the same decorous hand. I look at the card
in bewilderment. I know a Thomas Conlon—he is Uncle Tommy, my mother's bachelor brother, a quiet, witty Dubliner to whom I
owe my middle name, Thomas. There is obviously a connection here that I am missing.

The place name looks familiar as well. I consult my guidebooks, peruse the hiker's journal I've been keeping. My jaw drops
open. I reread what I had written: "Let's make a movie: to the immediate right, the black pointed spires of Guillemont and
Longueval piercing the level of the trees . . ." Of course! The cemetery near "The Greatest Thing in the World." Of the scores
of cemeteries passed and ignored, the roads not taken, the fields left untrod, could I have stumbled unknowingly into the
sole graveyard on the Western Front that bears some connection to my family? For I did visit a graveyard on the Guillemont
Road—that is where I was sitting when I wrote the entry in the journal. The bucolic loveliness of the view made me stop my
frantic pedaling. I then remember seeing a Celtic cross in the village. Could that have something to do with my uncle Tommy's
namesake?

No one in Ireland is answering his phone. It's too early to call Canada. The train for Amiens, with a connection to Albert,
leaves the Gare du Nord at noon. My watch shows eleven o'clock. It's a half-hour metro ride to the train station. My backpack
is hurriedly refilled, my walking boots are laced up, and my urge to desert is, well,
history.
I'm going back to the Front.

T
HE 2,255 GRAVES
of the Guillemont Road Cemetery stand pallid in the failing light of the day. Were it not for old photographs,
it would be impossible to imagine the surrounding countryside as a battlefield. Yet it was obviously a savage place in 1916,
for fully two-thirds of the graves here contain unidentifiable bodies. A picture taken in September of that year shows a couple
of trucks, their canvas coverings emblazoned with shamrocks, carting the wounded from an advanced dressing station, itself
nothing more than a couple of shell craters in a limitless lunar mudscape. The trucks, juddering down the pitted surface of
the Guillemont Road back to Albert, must have caused agony to the wounded men stretched out in their vans.

Those who couldn't make the journey are buried here. The land in front of the village of Guillemont had been the scene of
pointless attacks since midsummer. One of the dead was Raymond Asquith, the thirty-seven year-old son of British Prime Minister
Herbert Asquith. It is said that Guillemont broke the older man and allowed the allies of David Lloyd George to take control
of the government that much sooner. The younger Asquith's grave in the Guillemont cemetery reads: "Small time but in that
small most greatly lived this star of England." Like Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Asquith began to question the wisdom of sending
so many young men to die once he had lost a son. In Kipling's case, the disappearance of his eighteen-year-old son near Loos
brought forth a bitter couplet: "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied."

A few rows over from Asquith, between the graves of a Captain G. M. Shufflebothan and a Private Gilham, I find my man. The
inscription is simple:

23914 Private

T. Conlon

Royal Dublin Fusiliers

6th September 1916 Age 20

My great-uncle Tommy? I look around: I am standing no more than ten paces from the spot where I sat down to write in my journal
during my Tour de Somme. A coincidental near-miss becomes an uncanny reunion. The entry in the cemetery registrar, with the
name of my greatgrandfather the farmer printed on the yellowing page, seals the encounter: "Son of Richard Conlon, of Duleek,
Co. Meath." I have read so many names—at Thiepval, the Menin Gate, Notre Dame de Lorette, La Targette—yet here the force of
the forgotten assumes a shape I can begin to see. A twenty-year-old Tommy Conlon, the younger brother of my grandfather Bartholomew,
running down this slope with rifle aloft and fear in his heart, in pursuit of a meaningless objective during a misconceived
campaign of a needless war. A shellburst, then blackness. The life of one young Irishman gone, barely begun. Fresh out of
school at Drogheda, fed the usual lies, obliterated. One family's anti-militarism was born in this field and passed down to
their descendants, who would share it across time and oceans.

I stand in front of the Commonwealth-issue headstone, smoking a cigarette in the twilight, the first member of Tommy Conlon's
family to have come to France and visited his grave since his death in 1916. He's like a grown-up cousin that one meets for
the first time at a wedding. I don't know what to do, what to say—so I invite him along. Henceforth, Private Cadogan and Musketier
Aronsohn will have company as we walk the Front.

The downlands in front of Albert darken and the stars start to come out.
It will take me a good two and half hours to walk back to my hotel in town, I set out on the Guillemont Road, this time unconcerned
about hailing a ride. There is no one out on these country roads on this summer night.

Tommy Conlon was not the only Tommy or indeed the only Thomas to die in Guillemont. One of the commanding officers of the
Royal Dublin Fusiliers was Tom Kettle, a beloved orator, Irish nationalist politician, essayist, and poet. He is said to have
served James Joyce as a model for the character Hughes in
Stephen Hero.
Kettle was shot and killed between Guillemont and Ginchy on September 9, 1916, and his body was never identified for burial.
Doubtless his is one of the nameless tombstones in the Guillemont Road Cemetery. Kettle, shortly before he joined Tommy Conlon,
Raymond Asquith, and two thousand others underground, wrote at length about the legacy of the Great War. He is quoted in Tim
Cross's invaluable
The
Lost Voices of World War I:

When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it [the war], with its wounds and weariness and flesh
stabbing and bone pulverizing and lunacies and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battlefields,
two landmarks in human progress will be revealed. The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase,
of the soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war.

It's difficult to say whether Kettle, or any other soldier on the Somme, would be shocked about how low his war has sunk on
the horizon of general consciousness. How it has truly gone "beyond all phrase" and turned into mute monument and unread indignation.
What was all-consuming, in the literal as well as the figurative sense, is now the stuff of solitary musing on a long walk
through a starry night. The battlefields are silent; my footfalls don't awaken any presences. Voltaire, of all people, once
admonished: "We owe respect to the living; but to the dead we owe nothing but the truth."

Home leave is over. The walk east must resume.

7.
Soupir

The early-morning mist accompanies me along the right bank of the River Aisne. Soissons and its grimy streets, which I reached
via an intercity bus ride across Picardy, fade into memory. My route out of town follows that taken by Joan of Arc when she
was dragging the ineffectual Dauphin to Reims to be crowned King Charles VII. Sesquicentennial plaques mark the way, done
in the Art Deco style popular in 1929. The commemorative signposts were no doubt a sop to historic decency thrown by a French
state and army that, through gross incompetence, had caused massacres and mutinies along this stretch of the Front only a
decade or so earlier. What better way to forget the criminal behavior of the immediate past than by harking back to a halcyon
time of martial, mystic grandeur?

The banks of the Aisne are covered with lush, impenetrable shrubs and vines that bar access to the river to any nonresident
bather. The fog has dulled the flowering bushes along the roadside into vegetable monotony, which is a shame, for the locals
here seem to take great pride in competing to see who can create the most colorful rock garden. At Vailly-sur-Aisne, a picturesquely
situated place framed between blackwater river to the south and wooded height to the north, the sun eventually burns off the
lingering mist, revealing an artfully rebuilt town that does not betray its past as the site of furious fighting in 1914,
1917, and 1918. On the outskirts of Vailly, where ramparts must once have stood, midway rides have been set up. The carnies,
in their mobile homes, are gathered around their television sets, awaiting the opening of the fair and the coming of customers.
Tomorrow is the Assumption holiday, yet another anomalous religious festival on the official calendar of agnostic France.
That day—August 15 — marks the moment when, impossibly, the glacial pace of country life slows down even further. Traditionally
the hottest day of the summer, it is also the absolute zero of social and business activity. As if rehearsing for the big
sleep on the morrow, the main market street of Vailly is devoid of life at ten o'clock this morning.

I continue eastward through the stillness. Even the cars must be snoozing in the building heat; the traffic is nonexistent.
At the village of Chavonne, I pass French and British military cemeteries on my way to a crossroads pointing to a place called
Soupir. I'm attracted to the name, for
soupir
is the French word for "sigh." In yet another instance of toponymic irony like that at La Targette, the countryside around
Soupir is a landscape of sighs, a place of cosmopolitan bereavement. Near the tombs of the French and the British are German
and Italian war graves, all casualties of the last two years of the war. Beyond them and the village itself, another casualty
awaits. The wrought-iron gates to the Chateau de Soupir swing open, leading into a field empty of any construction save a
triumphal arch standing improbably alone, bereft of the large mansion to which it once belonged. The Picard bishop and man
of letters, Francois de Fenelon, is supposed to have stayed here several centuries ago, when this arch looked out onto a formal
French garden with its rational mastery of space and perspective. Now the remnant of the Chateau de Soupir looks forlorn and
faintly ridiculous in its neat field of hay, like an arch of defeat.

Unlike Shelley's Ozymandias, Soupir is an instant ruin, divorced from the Romantic ideal of ruination that required deliquescence
over centuries. This chateau or others like it inhabited the world and the imaginations of our grandparents and great-grandparents,
those with whom we might have been contemporaries for a few short years. It disappeared overnight. The ruination was what
Lutyens partly conveyed with his Thiepval memorial — an evocation of defeat and disappearance. I know that across the road,
in the wooded hills called Mont de Sapins and Les Gouttes d'Or, the ground is scored with the usual awful undulations of the
Great War, yet here the violence is done through absence, by what is suddenly missing and gone forever. Alone in its field,
the shattered manor has become a gnomon in a large sundial, the shadow of the freestanding wall turning endlessly on itself
with the passage of each day. It is in and out of time, a grandfather clock in a forgotten room. In Soupir I have found my
monument for the Western Front, my link to Tommy and Cadogan and Aronsohn and Daniel and Bartholomew and all our grandfathers.
The wind in the grass sighs.

I am not alone. The grandfathers of the Great War have come back to haunt contemporary writing long after my afternoon in
Soupir. Sebastian Faulks's
Birdsong,
Jean Rouaud's
Les Champs d'Honneur (Fields of Glory)
— both are novels in which people of the present era seek out truth about their grandfathers' experience of World War I. Geoff
Dyer's smart nonfiction
Missing of the Somme
begins thus, "When I was a boy my grandfather took me to the Museum of Natural History," and soon thereafter goes into the
old man's war history. Pat Barker, whose superb Great War fiction trilogy—
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door,
and
The Ghost Road
—has no such reminiscing from the modern day to the past, nonetheless cannot escape the lure of the grandfather clause. In
The Ghost Road,
her ambivalent, bisexual hero Billy Prior goes back to the trenches for a third tour of duty. He meets a young officer there
who has come to the hell of the Front for the first time. The imagery is inescapable: