Back to the Front (29 page)

Back on the plain, after an hour or two of walking, I come across a more prosaic reminder of that firepower. A suspicious-looking
copse turns out to be the ruins of Remenauville, a village destroyed in the Great War.
Its flattened neighbors were rebuilt, but no one returned here, at least to live. A large sign in Remenauville's rubble warns
the visitor:

Ne Ramassez Aucun Objet Metallique

Evitez Nos Eorets en Periode de Chasse

(Do Not Pick up Metal Objects

Stay away from Our Woods in Hunting Season)

The shooting never stops around here.

8. Pont-H-Mousson to Badonviller to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

The long days of summer are drawing to a close. At sunset now, the slanting light in the sky betrays that Pont-a-Mousson lies
closer to the pole than to the equator. Its latitude is the same as that of the uppermost tip of Lake Superior. The town sits
on the left bank of the Moselle, midway between the two major urban centers of Lorraine. Upstream is Nancy, the baise-beige
gem of eastern France; downstream, Metz, the region's battered industrial and religious center. Pont-a-Mousson, although small,
is famous throughout the country. On any given day thousands of people in French cities look down to see whether their shoes
are still clean and glimpse the words "Pont-a-Mousson" stamped on manholes and sewer covers. It may not spell glory, but it
is recognition.

On crossing the Moselle, the warrior Western Front is almost over; indeed, many histories do not consider the Franco-German
face-off that took place from this point to the border of Switzerland as trench warfare in the traditional murderous sense.
Their maps of the Front stop at St. Mihiel. Yet there were trenches in most places, even if the warfare was limited. After
the lemming-like attacks of Plan XVII in the summer and fall of 1914, the remaining Lorraine segment of the Front became a
fairly somnolent sector, loosely held and leisurely in its rhythms. The vagaries of terrain and inadequate transport links
ruled out offensives of the gruesome magnitude of the Somme or Verdun. One story of these lackadaisical trenches tells of
a French reserve unit in the front line firing off its ammunition harmlessly in the air at the same hour and day every week.
The German troops opposite would then do likewise, after which everyone went back to playing cards and skittles with their
friends. In rugged Alsace, a few savage battles took place in 1914 and 1915 until the generals who ordered them realized,
presumably, that they were looking at large-scale maps of remote mountaintops lost in a sea of conifers. All was then quiet
in most of Alsace and Lorraine, an ironical wartime fate for the regions that had been peacetime bones of contention.

Thus the last part of the journey must hasten over a Western Front that is little more than a dotted line. Hunting season
approaches, and as I struggle up the slopes of Vosges I do not want some schnapps-sipping rifleman to mistake me for an oddly
foulmouthed deer. Dispatches will suffice as I race not to the sea but to Switzerland. The Front is ending, as are the summer
and the warm weather. So too is the war. Nineteen-eighteen is upon us.

T
HE MOMENTOUS EVENTS
of 1917 spelled both trouble and triumph for the Allies. The Americans had finally plumped for war, but
they were not about to let their ever-increasing contingent of men in France be placed under the authority of the likes of
Haig and Nivelle. The sorry slaughters of the Chemin des Dames and Passchendaele had given proof of command incompetence,
and army morale now rarely rose above the parapet of the muddy trenches. Unlike the volunteers in the first half of the war,
most new conscripts at the Front in 1918 knew that they were cannon fodder in a questionable cause.

The Western Front was one of the few fronts that remained a stalemate in the world at war of 1918. In the Ottoman lands of
the Middle East, the work of British armies and agents had done what the ineffective landing at Gallipoli had failed to do
three years earlier. The Ottoman Empire teetered on the brink of collapse. Arab nationalists, aided by T. E. Lawrence, one
of the few dashing figures of the entire conflict, had cast their lot in with the Allies and fought effectively against the
Turks. In its desire to lay its hands on Ottoman possessions, London spoke of nationhood to all who could help in the struggle.
Not only were Arabs promised autonomy, but so were European Zionists. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 recognized the principle
of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. When the British army took Jerusalem just before Christmas, 1917, much was made
in the press about this being the first time since the Crusader era that Westerners had controlled the sacred city. Less was
made of the British determination to keep the place. To the embarrassment of British and French governments paying lip service
to Woodrow Wilson's idealism, the newly empowered Bolsheviks of Russia published the secret treaties that had been signed
among Allies with an aim to divvying up the Ottoman Empire. The British and French now looked as rapacious as their worst
caricatures of the Germans.

Embarrassment, however, was the least of the worries to emerge from Russia. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks had yanked
Russia out of the war—or rather they had recognized that in the long-suffering Russian army there was no real will to fight
any longer. Combat stopped on November 29, 1917. As good revolutionaries, the Bolshevik delegation to the peace talks at the
Polish town of Brest-Litovsk refused at first to negotiate with the German representatives. How could heralds of a new world
order deal with the lackeys of an imperial power? In response, the German armies advanced farther and farther into Russia
until Petrograd itself was menaced. Trotsky changed his mind and on March 3, 1918, signed a peace treaty. The gigantic Eastern
Front ceased to exist. The Germans could do what they hadn't done since the summer of 1914: concentrate all their strength
in the West. The Americans hadn't yet arrived, and the British and French had exhausted themselves the year before. For a
warlord like Erich Ludendorff, who along with Hindenburg now commanded the war effort, the moment was propitious to renew
the attack. Visions of winning the war once again swam in front of Prussian monocles.

T
HE ROUTE FROM
Pont-a-Mousson to the next Front town of Nomeny may be the Platonic Form of a French roadway. Magnificent poplars
line both shoulders, giving a rustling, silken shade to the walker as he looks out at the golden fields rolling to the horizon.
The three
b's
of Fran-cophilia—beret, baguette, and bicycle—would not look out of place here, especially if the first were worn by a wrinkled
peasant taking the second home from town on the third. Some say that the French originally started planting these roadside
trees so that their armies could march in the shade. Others maintain that it's done to halt erosion and provide windbreaks.
Still others claim that they are placed there because they look good. Whatever the case, it is a pleasant way to start my
several days of forced march southeast toward the Vosges.

The Front turns at Nomeny to head south along the valley formed by the River Seille. After a few hours' walking through its
villages, I am convinced that it should be renamed the River Dog. Woofers bound out of yards, from behind fences, seemingly
out of trees. A particularly friendly one slobbers on an unproffered trouser leg. I press on, past the vale of Champenoux,
an important site of the battle for Nancy in 1914, and a lonely French military cemetery on a rise outside of town. There
is not one signature in the visitors' register. Long days go by serenely as the Front snakes through windswept farmland east
to Arracourt, then southeast past the villages of Xures, Xousse, and finally to Badonviller, at the edge of the forests of
the Vosges. The landscape thus far has been untortured, but unlovely too, the village churches always a variation of reinforced
concrete and stern slate roofs. Mud from tractors scores the roadways and leaves telltale marks in front of the large slatted
doors that serve as entrances to the farmhouses. People in Lorraine used to sleep with their livestock; now it appears they
cohabit with their farm machinery.

Badonviller is a town that once was to pottery what the nearby city of Baccarat is to crystal. The works have all closed,
and the place is a somber snapshot of rural France, the crows in its main square sharing a bench with an aging cure in a black
soutane. Beyond is the leading edge of pine trees and an abrupt ridge that I cross at a gap called Chapelotte. Bunkers and
pillboxes can be seen sticking out of the forest floor, and a hiking trail has been laid out to titillate the war buff. I
follow it over well-marked trenches and a carpet of needles to end up in a small outdoorsy tourist outpost named Pierre Percee.
The ruin of a pink sandstone castle overlooks a placid lake mottled with wind-surfers. This is too beautiful to be the Front.
A man in a wet suit gives me a ride in his four-wheel drive through the forests to the town of Senones. He never realized
that the guerre de quatorze came anywhere near his sylvan paradise.

I
N ITS CLOSING
stages, it didn't. By the spring of 1918, Ludendorff was ready to launch his final offensives all the way back
up in Flanders and Picardy. Unlike their French and British counterparts, the planners on the German general staff had learned
from years of static warfare. They might have been undemocratic, class-conscious, heinous Junker autocrats, but they were
open to new ideas. These were supplied by a certain Captain Geyer, one of the shrewdest tacticians of the war. He saw that
the Allies' adoption of the German defense-in-depth system—whereby the first trench was lightly manned and the main fighting
force kept in different positions well away from no-man's-land—spelled failure for the offensive tactic that had been adopted
by both sides since the time of Verdun. The defenders could always counterattack.

It is important to linger for a moment here on tactics, because Geyer had found the way to end trench warfare. He eliminated
the static Front. Henceforth, the war would be one of movement, the type of moving mayhem that generals had been seeking since
the failure of the Schlieffen Plan. Geyer's tactics called for an intelligent use of surprise, precision artillery, and specially
trained
Sturmtruppen,
or storm troopers.

Sturmtruppen were the key. These elite troops probed the lines right behind the creeping barrage of artillery until they found
a gap in the defenses. They then ran through, rifles slung over their shoulders, throwing grenades and reaching the enemy's
second or third lines. They performed fish-hook maneuvers, whereby they raced beyond defensive positions then turned around,
set up machine guns, and fired into the startled defenders' backs. Once they had established isolated strongholds the bulk
of the infantry came on, accompanied by dive-bombing airplanes and mobile artillery. The goal was to create confusion, exploit
it, and unnerve defenders who would no longer know where the Front was. To do this the stormtroopers needed suicidal bravery,
great latitude in taking the initiative, and lots of luck.

On March 21, 1918, everything fell into place. Ludendorff decided to attack over the old Somme battlefield. In the week that
followed, it looked as if Germany might win the war.

S
ENONES IS A
logging town and former monastic center that used to be
the capital of an independent principality known as Salm-Salm. It was a forested Ruritania that lay sandwiched between Alsace
and Lorraine and lived peacefully under its German princes until a stirred-up local populace voted to become a part of France
during the revolution. Nowadays, given the banners and pennants festooning its old square, the town seems to regret its vote.
As I walk through the wet streets of this lumberjack Versailles, the Front seems farther away than ever. Yet in the wooded
ridge to the northwest of town, elaborate concrete bunkers mark the trace of the Great War stalemate.

I set off southward, climbing a gradual slope to a plateau that was once the hinterland of the princes of Salm-Salm. As if
to continue a tradition of strange toponymy—Senones is the Front's second palindrome—the Salm-Salm countryside is now known
as Ban-de-Sapt. I spend a quiet moment in the French military cemetery of Fontenelle, its Art Deco sandstone statues a marked
change from the crumbling concrete memorials evident elsewhere in Lorraine. All around the graveyard is a dense forest, the
familiar thicket of rusted picket stakes and barbed wire barring any exploration. By this stage of my journey, seeing a trench
does not immediately impress. It is the cumulative effect of having seen so many tortured forest floors that stays in memory.
The Front
is
a scar, even in this Lorraine fastness.

Underneath evergreen boughs expectantly outstretched for the snow soon to come, a road marker points out the boundaries of
the ephemeral principality of Salm-Salm. Nearby, a worn sandstone marker shows the limits of the German advance in the First
World War. A helmet rests on laurel leaves; on the base are inscribed the words:
Ici Fut Repousse
L'Envahisseur
(The Invader Was Halted Here). In the 1920s, veterans' associations and motoring clubs paid for these demarcation stones to
be placed along the line of the farthest German advance. Another marker appears just a few miles on, outside the village of
Frapelle. Its little valley, through which the River Fave runs, seems to be sadder and more scarred by time than wooded Salm-Salm.
Rusting wrought-iron calvaries stand near crumbling bunkers, the door of a wayside chapel creaks in the freshening breeze,
great black birds swoop through the rotting rail fences. The rain clouds are closing in once again and the sky darkens. A
local delivery van gives me a ride through a three-mile-long tunnel to the town of Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. I'm at the gates
of Alsace in the pouring rain. Before I pass them, we must first return to Picardy.