Back to the Front (23 page)

Instead, I walk and think, as the chalk pebbles stretch on forever over the tilled brown earth. The countryside is the acme
of trench warfare landscape, the place where photographs were taken of white ditches snaking across a gently rolling, featureless
plain. There was fierce fighting here in every year of the war except for 1916. In 1915, Joffre ordered two calamitous offensives
that budged the lines a few hundred yards and kept the grave diggers busy. The land is so wide open that the French army had
bought large plots of it in 1857 to practice for campaigns of complex maneuver that would never happen. The stationary Front
came to lie across these staging grounds for a war of movement, as if purposely ironical in its positioning. The villages
that had prospered near these grounds—Moronvilliers, Perthes-les-Hurlus, Le Mesnil-les-Hurlus, Tahure, Ripont—were pulverized
into nothingness during the war and never rebuilt afterward. The army obligingly extended its holdings, perhaps to disguise
the damage, so that now the bases of Mourmelon, Suippes, and Moronvilliers sprawl over large sections of the Front. These
are no-go zones, fenced off and accessible only to career soldiers stuck here in this French Canaan. I will have to zigzag
through this swath of no-man's-land, since the army now owns so much of it. It must be a point of honor for them.

T
HE SIZE OF
the emptiness here is impressive. No other spot on the Western Front contains such a broad cinematic sweep, which
is why many war films were once made in this countryside. Most of these are quite rightly forgotten, like the war itself,
but the genre remains an interesting footnote to movie history. The most accomplished, with the exception of Jean Renoir's
La Grande Illusion,
were filmed in the dozen or so years following the war, either in Hollywood or on the unearthly terrain of the Front in Champagne.
To view them today is to step out of time.

Aside from the obscure propaganda films that flourished in the war years, there were perhaps only two movies shot during the
conflict that were worthy of the wide attention they received. Charlie Chaplin's
Shoulder Arms
is a bravely satirical piece filmed in 1918, in which the calvary of trench life is successfully sent up by the genial comedian.
The film's most famous scene had Chaplin and his unfortunate fellow soldiers trying to sleep underwater in a flooded dugout.
In an entirely different register was Abel Gance's
J'Accuse,
an effort supported by the French army's film office despite the implicit pacifist message of its closing sequences. It premiered
just days after the Armistice and, as cultural historian Jay Winter points out in
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,
many of the soldiers who had been given leave in 1917 to play the resurrected dead in the film's final scene were doubtless
actually
dead by the time the movie was released. Their scene, a nightmare moment in which an enormous field of graves suddenly becomes
thronged with the animated cadavers of its occupants, meshed well with the apocalyptic imaginings common in postwar thought,
f'Accuse
also chilled audiences for whom the dead were still a recent, palpable presence in the homes they had left. It is a memorable
sequence. Historian Winter quotes Gance, never the shrinking violet, saying of his film:

Since the great Red Tragedy has not had its Homer and its Rouget de Lisle [composer of "La Marseillaise"], since the tears,
the blood, the widespread suffering, the gestures of the heroes and the starry eyes of the dead have not yet found their sculptors
and their painters, we have tried humbly to create a lyricism of the eye and to make the images sing.

"We" might well include Blaise Cendrars, the co-writer of the film and one of its on-screen contingent of the living dead.
It is hard to get Cendrars out of my mind today, since the empty fields I traverse near Prosnes and Moronvilliers is near
the area in which he lost his arm.

The apocalypse had been such a close call that many conventional European filmmakers preferred not to touch on the topic of
the war once it was over. Even during the years of stalemate at the Front there had been a reaction to the war's invasiveness
of all thought and speech. Hollywood, however, refused to observe any moratorium on the subject, sensing it to be a boundless
source of tear-jerking drama. In 1921, director Rex Ingram's
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
tried with some success to romanticize the war for the first time since 1914. The attempt was overshadowed by the appearance
of a new star, Rudolph Valentino, as a Franco-Argentinian playboy who finds moral salvation in the sacrifice of the trenches.
People flocked to the film to see Valentino dance the tango, not hold a rifle. It was not until four years later and King
Vidor's
Grand
Parade,
one of the most influential silent films made, that the Great War became a staple of the box office. The story, that of yet
another playboy who finds meaning in the noble squalor of the Front, matters less than the film's many imitators. They set
the stage for the great talkie war movies of the early 1930s.

The year 1930 saw the release of two remarkable anti-war films, G. W. Pabst's
Westfront ipi8,
an adaptation of Ernst Johanssen's pacifist novel
Vier von der Infanterie {Four in the Infantry),
and Lewis Milestone's
All
Quiet on the Western Front,
a faithful screen version of Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling work. Two years later the French director Raymond Bernard
made the French equivalent of these German and American efforts:
Les Croix de Bois {The Wooden Crosses),
an adaptation of Roland Dorgeles's novel. The three films, although stylistically different, tell the same story. A closely
knit group of friends faces the horror of the Front and becomes increasingly callous as their number gets reduced by the constant
toll of death in combat. The pacifist message of these films was supposed to have been self-evident, yet many audiences leapt
to their feet and cheered on "their" side in the well-orchestrated battle sequences. In the French film, the terrifying charges
across a Champenois no-man's-land had Paris crowds applauding wildly. In writing of such anti-war war movies, the writer Marcel
Ayme remarked:

To do something truly pacifistic we should offer the spectacle of life, rather than death, in the trenches. The genuine film
of pacifist propaganda would show men stupefied with boredom and fatigue duty, masturbating in the dug-outs, killing their
lice, scraping the mud off their uniforms and looking over the top at some desolate plain where nothing happens. The success
would be perfect if the audience went to sleep in their seats. But nobody would have the courage to go and see such a film.

These movies, then, were diversely appreciated. In America,
All Quiet
won the Oscar for best film; in Germany, the same film was banned for years. Pabst's overtly pacifist movie was disliked at
home but widely applauded in other convalescing European countries.
Les Croix de Bois
regularly provoked jostling in front of movie theaters between white-hot nationalists and long-suffering pacifists. Its title,
a reference to the makeshift wooden crosses of battlefield cemeteries, was known to everyone because of a sardonic marching
song intoned by the disgruntled French army of 1917 and 1918. The gallows humor of doomed soldiers had become a national ditty:

Oui, tu Vauras ta croix, ta croix,

Si c'est pas la croix de guerre,

C'est qu'ca s'ra la croix d'bois!

(Yes, you will win your cross, your cross,

But if it's not the Military Cross

Then it'll be the wooden cross!)

The gentle slope down from the army's "Keep Out" signs at the Moronvilliers camp stretches on endlessly. The white farm track
on which I walk is embedded with rusty strands of barbed wire. My boot strikes something hard. It is the nose of a crusty
old shell, unexploded and no doubt unstable. I'll leave it for the farmer—he, like all his fellows along the Front, must have
a steel shield between himself and his plow. If I am to reach Alsace and the end of the Front, I will need both feet.

At a place called Auberive I wolf down two pate and pickle sandwiches at the village's sole cafe. The bread tastes as if it
dates from the Great War, but I don't care. I've had nothing to eat since my fries and champagne breakfast, having been unpleasantly
surprised in several places today by the absence of any businesses. The car has killed the Champagne village as effectively
as any cannon. People zoom to hypermarkets in the suburbs of the city, then return to their village homes for a blue evening
of TV behind well-fastened shutters. The French call it the "desertification of the country." Here in this flat drivers' paradise,
the process seems unstoppable. Not since leaving Belgium have I seen sadder villages.

I make a long detour south of Auberive to visit a Russian cemetery. There are men from both world wars buried here. An ornate
onion-domed chapel stands in the midst of the graves, although some of the tombs read "Soviet." I suspect that these are not
the soldiers who took part in a Soviet-style mutiny in Champagne during the closing stages of the Great War. Some Russian
emigres who had been fighting alongside the French in their own battalions revolted against their officers and began espousing
the newly triumphant Bolshevik truths after Lenin and his fellows had taken power in the homeland. The French command, terrified
of a new wave of disobedience in its army, diverted a division to surround the would-be revolutionaries' units and eliminate
them. Comrades-in-arms could not also be comrades.

T
HERE IS AN
impeccably dressed young lady swirling around and around in the white dust of midday. Her partner is a youthful
soldier, clad in formal red, lips pursed from the effort of leading the dance.

I lose the thought . . .

The stars are bright in the night sky. A moon just off the horizon illuminates the white chalk of the soil. Nightfall has
caught me in a field to the east of Auberive and St. Hilaire, following the trace of the Front as it uncoils to the east.
My map says that I also have been following the line of an old Roman road, but somehow I doubt it. This arrow-straight dirt
track looks as if it was made by John Deere, not Julius Caesar. Still, on a night like this I could easily convince myself
that the distant tramp of the legions can be faintly heard.

A shooting star crosses the vault of the heavens. I'm lying on my back, looking up at the tendrils of the Milky Way. Tired
legs and the warm night air conspire to make further walking in the darkness seem pointless. My backpack is my pillow, the
constellations my canvas.

Fade to white. The scene is a British army camp in northern India at the turn of the century. The men and officers are in
drill formation on a parade ground in the blazing heat of the day. They are rehearsing for an official occasion. The regimental
band goes through its repertoire. The day grows hotter. A bead of sweat trickles beneath a stiff collar . . .

This memory is my grandfather's. As a youngster, Daniel O'Shea enlisted with the Duke of Wellington regiment of the British
army and was sent to what was called the Northwest Frontier. It was the heyday of the Raj, Britain's colonial empire on the
subcontinent. Just a few short years after that hot afternoon in India, the same regiment took him to the Western Front, where
he would lose an eye and receive a shrapnel wound in the leg.

My father, as a young man in the big city, used to go visit Daniel whenever the pain of his war wound landed him up at the
Leopardstown veterans' hospital in Dublin. The ex-soldier talked of everything and anything except the cause of his distress.
When
All Quiet on the Western
Front
came to Ireland and caused a sensation in the deeply Catholic countryside, he refused to see the film. He wanted nothing to
do with it. Perhaps he, like Marcel Ayme, thought that anti-war films encouraged war, or that talking about the war romanticized
it. He probably would have disapproved of this book. Whatever the reason, a veil was drawn over that part of his past.

Not that he was ashamed to have been in the army. When, in the early 1920s, the thugs of a Black and Tan death squad descended
on a neighbor's house to haul away a man suspected of IRA sympathies, Daniel raced next door and pulled rank on their British
army commander. He saved the man by using his sergeant-major bluster. He could become the old soldier whenever circumstances
called for it. Another family tale concerns two itinerant Indian cloth salesmen entering my grandfather's tailor shop in Tralee
in the 1930s. They stayed for a week. To everyone's astonishment, including theirs, this small-town, one-eyed Irish tailor
spoke their language fluently. They traded tales and shared drinks like old friends.

But these are all memories about him. They are not his, just as this Front I walk is not actually the Front, but a landscape
that remembers the Front. Daniel's memories are all gone now, except for one that has seeped through the cracks of time down
to me, ninety years later. Fortunately, this is a cinematic countryside and the lights have dimmed:

The regimental band strikes up a waltz. Its first notes drift over the treetops that sway beyond the compound fence. The tune
is familiar, Franz Lehár's " Merry Widow Waltz. "

A woman absently comes out onto the porch of the colonel's bungalow. It is his young wife, just arrived in India from England.
She toys with her parasol, then sets it down against the rail. The bandmaster glances over at her.

She emerges into the sunshine, her long pale dress just clearing the fine white dust of the yard. Her clear
eyes
survey the ranks, her head sways in time to the music. She makes her choice.

"Would you like to dance?"

The young Irishman stammers a reply. He steps forward, takes her in his arms, and they're off. They swirl through the whiteness,
followed everywhere by the music. Around the red and gold of the band, beyond the ranks of massed men, in front of the barracks,
behind the bungalow, alongside the compound wall, back though the stark light of the parade ground. His youthful legs are
strong and his eyes are dark. Her eyes are closed, her dress twirls in the dust. There is no one in the yard except them.
They dance together as if that's all they've ever done.