Back to the Front (28 page)

My host explains that although the lady owns the cafe she serves only locals. She never opens it to strangers because she
has no license. Who knows? I might be a spy for the inland revenue service.

"Besides, no one else around here would ever invite you inside. Not like where I come from. People in my country have
le sens de la fete.
They know how to have a good time."

I ask the inevitable question.

"Where do you come from?"

He takes a pull on his corn-paper cigarette. "Les Eparges."

I look at him in surprise. His "country" is a couple of hills away. I just walked through that village two hours ago.

There is no smile on his face. He obviously considers himself an expatriate.

A car door closes outside the kitchen window with a tinny slam. A look of alarm crosses the man's face. He puts the lid back
on the sugar bowl. His wife, a strong-looking woman in her mid-sixties, comes in carrying a clutch of plastic grocery bags.
She
sees
me, then looks at her husband in dismay. She must disapprove of his habit of inviting in strangers and telling them what deadbeats
her people are. The bags land on the linoleum with a thud. She stalks off to some other room of the house.

"See what I mean?" the old man says.

I
AM NOW
in a type of countryside that the French fondly call
la France
profonde, a
region far from the cities and towns that pay attention to their century. These are the sticks, where old people still think
that a change in contour means a change in culture and where superstitions about hexes and witchcraft have never died out.
It is a place marked by emptiness, as most of the young have left. The woman who served me breakfast in the market town of
Fresnes-en-Woevre shyly asked me if distant Paris was "as crowded as they say it is."

This part of la France profonde is crossed by the Front. As it leaves Verdun the Western Front goes east for a few miles before
turning sharply southwest and forming what was once known as the St. Mihiel Salient. The trenches traversed the plain of the
Woevre, a low flatland that is mercifully free of the nightmarish craters and hollows of Verdun. The scars from the war all
seem to be concentrated on a large hillock near Les Eparges, the fun-loving village from which marriage had plucked the homesick
old man who gave me a cup of coffee. The Eparges prominence, like Vauquois near the Argonne, was the scene of a grotesque
battle of mines and countermines during 1915. The French command sacrificed men in unimaginable quantity in trying to gain
a piece of the summit that they had not bothered defending in 1914. One local action, in the spring of 1915, killed 250 Frenchmen
to one German. It was repeated the next day.

The countryside becomes lovely as I head back into the highlands near the Meuse. This is what the region of Douaumont and
Vaux would have looked like if German and French artillery had not smashed it into its molecular components. Through the villages
of St. Remy-la-Calonne and Dommartin-la-Montagne, small fields alternate with stands of conifers, this time concealing nothing
more than the occasional bike path. The area makes up part of the Regional Natural Park of Lorraine, with expansive vistas
stretching out to the east. Shadows of clouds race across the deep green plain that stretches beyond the River Moselle and
leads to Alsace. In the summer of 1914 the French army tried to emulate those shadows. A wall of death awaited. Great masses
of young men loped across these fields, their bright red pants and dark blue coats the relic of an earlier age, in the hope
of winning glory for their regiments and redeeming the martial honor of France lost in 1870. The fiasco of infantrymen charging
machine guns was enacted time and time again until several hundred thousand lay inert in the farmland of Lorraine.

I think of the beginning of the war as I near the end of my walk, simply because this part of the Front saw the wholesale
destruction of a French idealism akin to the spirit animating the doomed Wandervogel youths of Germany. Near the hamlet of
Vaux-les-Palameix the writer Alain-Fournier vanished forever during a risky attack in the surrounding woods on September 22,
1914. A survivor of that fatal foray maintained that he saw the twenty-eight-year-old novelist fall to the ground after taking
a bullet wound to the head. The image—the brain of a young artist blown away by the war—would be revived regularly by mourners
of the generation of 1914. One postwar commentator wrote: " We are still suffering from that head wound . . . The brain of
the world [i.e., France] has undergone a kind of trepanning."
Le front,
in a nice lexical coincidence, means both the front and the forehead.

The notion of an irretrievably lost capital of creative talent took hold as the casualty lists from that horrendous first
year of senseless attaques a outrance grew longer. Alain-Fournier, whose real name was Henri Alban Fournier, had written his
masterpiece
Le Grand Meaulnes {The Wanderer)
about one young man's attempt to recover a lost world. News of his passing was treated as emblematic of this literary theme.
An imaginative world was indeed being lost. By the end of the first year of the war, 133 French writers had been killed in
the fighting. Ernest Psichari, the prewar darling of the zealous new generation of French nationalists enamored of exalted
Catholicism and mystical patriotism, was among those whose reputation ballooned into myth through death on the battlefield.
Psichari's posthumous influence, however, paled beside that of Charles Peguy, a forty-one-year-old polemicist, poet, and essayist
whose death on September 4, 1914, during the first day of the Battle of Marne, ensured him a place in the French pantheon
within shouting distance of Joan of Arc, one of his favorite subjects for epic treatment. Peguy achieved a sort of apotheosis
in death that made him an inspirational figure for combatants in both world wars.

As I set off through the sun-touched woods on the road to St. Mihiel, I feel that I am beginning to leave the war behind me.
There is something irresistibly valedictory about this moment spent near the unlocated grave of Alain-Fournier. His hero,
Meaulnes, is the type of fellow who would understand the sad beauty in the ruins of Soupir. Indeed, for much of the novel,
Meaulnes endeavors to reconstruct a world that he never experienced. His motivation is love, set in the late afternoon of
vanishing youth. I decide that somewhere in my ephemeral constitution of lapsed amnesiac, accidental historian, and incompetent
hiker, there is a touch of Alain-Fournier's Meaulnes. The past must not be relinquished without a small sense of moment.

O
N MAY 2,1991,
Alain-Fournier's body was at last found in the woods near Palameix. I learned of the discovery by pure chance.
At the time I was working on a fashion magazine whose offices floated high above Broadway and West 50th Street in New York
City. I was working late, on deadline, filling column inches with a couple of other staff writers. I went to the empty art
room to procrastinate. A French glossy had been left lying around, so I idly flipped through it for want of anything better
to do. The item about the discovery of Alain-Fournier was minute, but it didn't escape me. There was a blurred photograph
of the author taken in 1913.

I looked out the window at the lights of a Manhattan midnight. There was no one to tell how I felt, even if I had wanted to.
The sun and the sadness came rushing back. I saw Tommy Conlon's grave on the Somme, heard the strains of the
Merry Widow Waltz,
felt the hot breath of traffic on the Menin Road.

Perhaps this was memory, then.

When I returned to my desk, the others were waiting for me. We still had an hour or two of stylish, kicky copy to produce.
Unconsciously I began humming "Papa Don't Preach."

The fashion editor looked at me incredulously. " Stephen, do you mind?" she said. " Madonna's history."

Her assistant seconded her. "Yeah, get a life."

7.
Montsec

The grim little logging town of St. Mihiel hosts an impromptu Great War seminar, as a gay English couple and I speak in hushed
tones of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in the dining room of our hotel. They are en route to Luxembourg, but want to
spend all day tomorrow inspecting the battlefields of Verdun. They wonder if I know anywhere to stay outside the city, which
they heard was "dreadful." I ask them if they like pig's trotters.

The two are literary war buffs, the most distinguished branch of a family that includes souvenir hunters, gore aficionados,
munitions freaks, destruction junkies, army bores, inverted pacifists, medal collectors, mutilation perverts, macho memoirists,
armchair Napoleons, misogynist camp-followers, closet Attilas, frustrated murderers, and myself. My erudite dinner companions
think of the Great War exclusively as a literary event. One of them downs the last of his brandy and, to my astonishment,
proposes to recite from memory the entirety of Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." Owen, Britain's most beloved war poet, was killed
in action just one week before the Armistice of 1918.

The poem's title, I am told by way of a throat-clearing introduction, refers to a line from Horace, "How sweet and noble it
is to die for one's country," which every public schoolboy in 1914 Britain would have known in its Latin original. Owen sets
his famous parable on the Front as a group of soldiers leave the trenches for a rest in the rear. "Five-Nines" are shells:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting
flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone was still yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the
cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for
some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The waiter looks askance at us as we sit in silence, brooding in a bath of anachronism. I eventually ask the reciter where
he learned to declaim Great War poetry so movingly.

"I didn't iearn' it," comes the reply. "I wrote it. I
am
Wilfred Owen."

The laughter arrives a split second too late, and the would-have-been poet has a fixed look in his eye. I find an excuse to
leave shortly afterward. They're delighted when I turn and salute at the door.

T
HE LANDSCAPE EAST
of St. Mihiel looks as literary as last night's dinner companions. A green plain stretches out to the east,
its perspective pleasantly broken up by great stands of tall birches and swaying poplars. In the background, a sudden hill
stands alone, crowned with a classical peristyle. Large puffs of cloud float over it, weightless portents in a blue sky. Birds
wheel about. The view is Byronic, Romantic, as much an incitement to reverie as is the natural rhythm of walking. I half expect
the classical building to be an ivy-covered ruin, or to see a riderless white charger rearing on the summit. I feel the need
for a cloak, or a headful of Greek. The bucolic Olympus draws nearer.

The spell is broken as two fighter jets thunder in from the north to bank sharply over the monument. The apprentice top guns
of France obviously have a favorite flight path that takes them hedge-hopping at earsplitting speed over the Mort Homme, Les
Eparges, and then this hill, Montsec. The effect is unpleasant in the extreme. What was a peaceful setting becomes a disturbed
chop of raw sound. A third jet rends the air above the hill. For once the Western Front had disguised itself as something
other than a killing field, and these French flyboys have to go and ruin it. Petulant and proprietary, I begin the ascent
of the hill.

For all my Romantic maunderings, the circular colonnade atop Montsec is a war monument. It commemorates an American attack
of September 1918, just like the pillar at Montfaucon. The St. Mihiel offensive, as it came to be known, was the first U.S.-commanded
military action on European soil and preceded the Meuse-Argonne effort by a couple of weeks. It raised the curtain on a new
era of Old World acquiescence in leadership from abroad. The American army was a fledgling then, not the bloated beast of
today that eats away at Washington's financial health. Montsec, in a way, is the birthplace of the Pentagon.

Given that dubious distinction, the view from its summit might be expected to be overpriced, or at least classified. Neither
is the case. Montsec's vista stretches from the hills near the Meuse across a quilt of farmlands to the heights of the Moselle.
It was here on September 12, 1918, that Pershing's men closed the giant German salient of St. Mihiel, through a combination
of luck and overwhelming superiority in men and materiel. The luck came from the German decision to retreat just as the battle
was about to begin. In some places, the American infantry had to go chasing after their prey, looking for someone to fight.
In others, artillery obliterated the German lines. The battle, unlike Meuse-Argonne, was a swift American victory.

From Montsec the distant American and German cemeteries at Thiaucourt can be made out far to the east. Closer by is the village
of Essey, where the youthful Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were supposed to have engaged in an ostentatious game of
chicken by walking out in the open as German shells flew. My sole companion during my stay atop Montsec is a gray cat that
slinks around the monumental columns in a private slalom. When it suddenly stiffens, I guess the reason. An instant later,
yet another Mirage jet flashes in front of the sun, screaming its message about the tiresome grandeur of French firepower.