Back to the Front (25 page)

Back and forth, zigzagging across the land, the trenches lead on like a terrier straining at the leash. I stay above the ditches
this time, for water has collected in their hollows and the poilus' duckboards have rotted into the earth generations ago.
There is no panic now, just an odd sense of a journey shared. Whatever else the trenches represented—the futility of war,
the failure of a civilization, the birth of the modern—for me they have become a companion, often glimpsed on this long hike
from the shores of the North Sea. This realization embarrasses as much as enlightens, because the trenches should be more
a mark of shame than a sign of fellowship. The silent ghosts I carry with me should suffice for company.

The afternoon wears on in idle daydream until finally a landmark is reached. At a place where the trenches cross a dirt road
an elderly man in a white golf shirt and shorts appears from behind a bush, like Death on holiday. When I hail him to ask
for directions, he skulks away behind a blind of greenery and soon I hear some muttering in a language I cannot identify.
Expecting to come across some tabloid horror, I advance cautiously around the bush and catch one last glimpse of him vanishing
into a bunker with what looks like his twin brother. My appearance must have frightened them. I look at my map and realize
that I have reached another
Abri du Kronprinz
(Crown Prince's Dugout), the name given on my map to a fortified complex near the edge of the forest. Having no wish to play
hide-and-seek with the timorous old fellows, I backtrack onto the dirt road and walk the last few hundred yards out onto a
highway. A sign greets me—"Mushroom Collecting Strictly Regulated"—showing that rule-crazy, Jacobin French civilization cannot
be far away.

The road describes a gentle arc and soon I am out of the woods and into the copper light of early evening. A wheatfield lies
in the foreground, the pimples of Vauquois and Montfaucon stand on the horizon. In the middle distance is the town of Varennes-en-Argonne,
my destination for the evening. I quicken my pace, passing the large monument south of town that commemorates the doughboys
of Pennsylvania who fought near here. A glimpse at my notebook tells me that George Patton and Harry Truman also saw action
around this lovely little town on the River Aire. Varennes's biggest claim to fame, however, lies not in the Great War but
in the French Revolution. A plaque on its eighteenth-century clock tower tells the story, for it was at this building, on
June 22, 1791, that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children were arrested as they tried to flee France. The king had
been on his way to rally monarchical Europe to crush the fledgling revolution. When news of this treachery got back to Paris,
support for the deposed Bourbons evaporated. It was a courageous republican innkeeper in Ste. Menehould who had recognized
the family and outdistanced the king's carriage through the Argonne to organize the fateful arrest in Varennes. This small
act in a far-flung provincial village, the tourist brochure in my hotel room tells me, changed the course of History.

I sink down at the writing table and look out the window. Young boys are fishing with long poles outstretched over the Aire,
a needlelike steeple rises from a mansarded church, the aperitif hour has commingled
boule
players and pastis drinkers on the village square. This is France as it should be, a postcard of present-day peace and turmoil
past. I have stumbled across a Frenchman's dream for his own country, the one exploited by salesmen and politicians, the picture
of a
douce France
made up of simple village life on a gentle summer night. The nightmare, Verdun, lies a dozen miles to the east.

2.
Montfaucon

Basket case: an armless and legless casualty

Cat stabber: a bayonet

Cognac-eyed: drunk

Dishy billy:
déshabillé
(undressed)

Frog's paradise: Paris

Jenny's pa:
je ne sais pas
(I don't know)

Pants rabbits: lice

Sandbag Mary Ann:
ca ne fait rien
(it doesn't matter)

Soldier's supper: anything nonexistent

Suicide ditch: front-line trench

Toot and scramble:
tout ensemble
(all together)

Zeppelins in a cloud: sausage in mashed potatoes

The inventiveness of the doughboys' slang can still tickle the cornball in me. Their fractured French lived on in grade-school
humor, especially in English-Canadian classrooms where the study of French became the temporary anchor for a drifting sense
of national identity. When we apprentice wags at recess exchanged "mercy bucket," "silver plate," and the like, we did so
in ignorance of the long pedigree of putting the French language through the wringer, a tradition that the Great War amplified
and brought momentarily to Middle America. Similarly, when we used such words as "scrounge," "wangle," "lousy," and "chat"
(to chat meant to delouse), we would never have guessed their origin in a distant war. At age eleven, I was told by a doctor
that I had contracted "trench mouth." My mother, mortified, ordered me to tell no one of my affliction. The link between the
blisters in the lining of my cheeks and the infantryman of the Great War would have hardly occurred to me.

T
ODAY I'VE TAKEN
it easy and made a small detour northward from Varennes to pay a visit to the American hill of the Argonne.
Here at Montfaucon a pseudoclassical American memorial overlooks the battlefield of the 1918 offensive and, in the distance
to the southeast, that of the 1916 Franco-German slaughter at Verdun. The memorial column, a 180foot-tall Goliath of stern
republican virtue, shows by its very size that the war loomed large on the American horizon. The Doric column, made of Italian
granite, is the largest U.S. war memorial in Europe.

As I sit on the lawn munching a sandwich and staring up at the memorial, it occurs to me that Montfaucon may also stand as
a testament to a change in mentality. Two and a half million Americans came to France in 1917 and 1918, and some of them liked
what they saw—at least those who ventured away from the Front. "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm," went the song, "after
they've seen Paree?" In some ways the Great War was the Grand Tour gone haywire, the harbinger of American Express and backpackers
like myself. In 1918, while those on the home front in America were girding their souls for Prohibition and the struggle against
sin, the people in the lands near the Western Front were getting ready to celebrate the passing of the plague of war. Without
the Great War, it is doubtful whether Jazz Age Paris would have attracted the heavenly homeless, those artists and writers
whose cafe antics in the 1920s have kept generations of tourists glued to overpriced seats in Mont-parnasse ever since. Without
the war, the French capital might not have attracted young and talented Americans long after it had been eclipsed by other
places as a center of creativity. Without the war, France might not have existed as a place, much less a destination, in the
world-view of ordinary Americans. The erotic charge of France, the notion of it as the homeland of transgression, the sheer
irresponsibility
it implied — all were received ideas reinforced and disseminated by the passage of millions of young men who happened to get
in on the tail end of a war.

What was true for all American soldiers was especially so for African-American men in uniform. The discriminatory practices
of the U.S. army during the war scandalized many Europeans. According to white army orthodoxy, the black doughboy divisions,
200,000 soldiers in all, were thought suitable only for menial jobs behind the Front. Even an American daredevil black ace
flying with the French was grounded for the duration of the war when, in 1917, his squadron of volunteer airmen was switched
from French to American command. In the Breton city of St. Malo, an American army general lodged an official complaint with
French authorities when he had to deal with a local administrator who was a black man from the West Indies. These and other
similar incidents of individual and institutional racism multiplied as formerly segregated Americans rubbed elbows in France.

It was mainly through the intervention of the French that African-Americans saw combat. Black units were transferred to French
command, thereby sparing white American units from having to go to war alongside them. The Germans, true to the itinerary
that would make them within a generation the most noxiously racist nation to have ever lived, protested over having to fight
black American troops on the Front. The Kaiser's propagandists accused the French of sinking to new depths of uncivilized
behavior—a rather breathtaking claim to make after three and a half years of abominably uncivilized warfare. The color distinction
did not bother the French, or the African-Americans for that matter. Thanks to the Great War, an unlikely alliance was struck
up between black America and France that continued for generations. Memoirs speak of black doughboys' delight in being treated
as equals in the streets of Paris, of French villagers in the Vosges "walking the dog" when the all-black army band of Jimmy
Europe played its jazzy, syncopated repertoire, and of a whole spate of incidents in which French restaurant owners sided
with black American patrons when white American customers insisted that their countrymen leave or go eat in the kitchen.

The Montfaucon memorial speaks of this unofficial, unexpected offshoot of the Great War, this link between the Harlem Renaissance
and the Western Front, even if it speaks very softly now, and fewer and fewer people sit at its base to listen. Although the
American forces were most conspicuously not "toot and scramble"
{tout ensemble)
on the Western Front, this old, unvisited column on a French hill can make one think otherwise. I decide that I'm becoming
sentimental, so I head back to Varennes and the Front of 1916.

3.
Varennes-en-Argonne to Verdun

At eight in the morning I have the town to myself. My route leads along the riverbank, then up a long and gradual slope to
the east. The walk is enlivened by a few inevitable dogs, a foggy dew, and a head emptied of all thought. At the crest of
the rise I turn around and see a little postcard of Varennes below me, wrapped in the wreaths of morning mist and backed by
the black hills of the Argonne. I bid good-bye to pigs' feet and antiroyalist snitches, then resume my walk eastward into
the enveloping greenness of the Meuse highlands.

Green everywhere. Lime green on the grassy swards, gunmetal green in the dark woods, pale green in the pastures. Hills and
buttes stick up at random, small ravines and ridges succeed each other as if in a hurry. Each field is a microcosm, a miniature
of the larger landscape. Warped by war, the parcels of fenced-off farmland present humps and hollows, creases and folds to
bewilder the eye accustomed to the ordered, tailored fields to be found elsewhere in France. Land such as this should be photographed,
written about, but not guarded against trespassers.

A farmer by the roadside turns into a generous giver of directions, his French sounding as if he has a beach ball permanently
lodged in his mouth. If you think this land is bad, he tells me without uttering a consonant, wait till you get to Vauquois.
There, things really begin to look strange. He's right—for once, a local oddity lives up to its billing. The wooded hill of
Vauquois was the westernmost point of the vast Verdun battlefield, and from a distance it does look the part of guardhouse.
At the foot of the prominence, I peer up under the foliage like a mischievous little boy craning to get a view up a skirt.
I see Paris, I see France, I see Vauquois's underpants. It is not an edifying sight. The hillside resembles a slice of Gruyere
cheese or a pox-ridden thigh, with gaping holes gouged out of its slopes, the ugly work of mines set off during a vicious
fight for the summit in 1914 and 1915.

I pass Avocourt, a huddle of barnlike houses standing in a muddy hollow. A field near the middle of town seems to sprout old
concrete pillboxes more successfully than it does rows of corn. The deafening drone of military helicopters overhead renders
the next stretch of road, which leads to the Front-line village of Esnes, even more unpleasant than it need be. Aerial maneuvers
must be occurring in this proving ground of French military honor. The roadway skirts a slope that leads upward to the summit
of Côte 304 (Hill 304), a famous site of the 1916 battle. I head cross-country in the hope of getting away from the copters
and back into the woods.

My path turns into a snarl of brush and weeds after scarcely two hundred yards. On either side of it stand multistranded barbed-wire
fences. There is no way else to advance but to squirm belly-first under the lowest rung of rusted wire. Once past the barrier
I continue up a sloping pasture, which in turn ends abruptly in another nasty fence. Beyond it, beckoning the hiker, is a
wide-waled path leading through a field of weeds to the woods farther uphill. To get there I have to crawl once again under
the barbed wire and encounter for the first time the problem of a strategically placed meadow muffin. The cows of Lorraine,
I soon learn with dismay, have conspired with the farmers to thwart the harmless pastime of long-distance hiking. Any stretch
of fence admitting of easy access is rendered impassable by bovine carpet bombing. Only those parts of a fence sporting a
prickly wreath of thornbushes are left free for the traveler; the rest is a festival of dung. Naming a cheese "The Laughing
Cow" no longer seems so far-fetched. I head for a thorn bush and start weeding.

T
HE TRAIL BEYOND
the fence leads directly into an enormous pine grove. I am now in what remains of the
Zone Rouge,
the swath of devastation that the French government designated as being dangerous for resettlement after the war. The physical
destruction of the
guerre de quatorze
in France was appalling: 319,269 houses obliterated; 313,675 houses seriously damaged; 1,699 villages annihilated; 707 villages
three-quarters destroyed; 1,656 villages half-destroyed; 20,603 factories leveled; 31,650 miles of road wrecked; 4,875 bridges
blown; 4,297,800 acres of farmland and 2,060,000 acres of uncultivated land poisoned, dug up, shelled, mined, befouled, littered,
and stained with a toxic, soupy mix of decaying corpses and rotting horse flesh. It was said that a cut in the Zone Rouge
would fester faster than elsewhere in France, that children should always be kept away from the place, that crops would never
grow there again.