In Europe (16 page)

Were there actually switchmen of fate, working behind the scenes? There certainly were. First of all, one had the French brandy merchant Jean Monnet, whom we met earlier in the City of London. As soon as he heard that war had broken out, he asked for a meeting with the prime minister, René Viviani, a friend of a friend. Monnet, twenty-six at the time, raised a matter with Viviani which, as he wrote later, he would probably not have mentioned had he been older and wiser. It was a new kind of problem, a twentieth-century problem. For this mass war, Monnet reasoned, all of the warring nations’ resources had to be brought to bear, and that required new forms of organisation and cooperation.

War was no longer simply a matter for the battlefield. Winning a
modern war involved less heroic things as well, such as supply chains and shipping capacity. Germany, with its massive industrial base, seemed significantly better prepared for such warfare than either Great Britain or France. It was vitally important, therefore, that the two countries combine their economies, ‘as though forming a single nation’. Following on the heels of decades of overblown nationalism, this was an outright revolutionary idea.

The French prime minister agreed with him. Monnet succeeded in convincing the British as well – he had vast connections due to his business – and there arose an Allied Transport Pool and a Wheat Executive. These bodies focused, for the first time in European history, on common interests rather than on national ones.

Without the Wheat Executive, France would almost certainly have starved. Without the Allied Transport Pool, the German submarines would have been able to cut off all supply lines to the continent, as they almost succeeded in doing in the spring of 1917. When faced with the same problems in 1940, Great Britain and France established similar cooperative ties, but then in the service of a more ambitious ideal: their possible continuation in times of peace as well. In a certain sense, the Wheat Executive and the Allied Transport Pool were the kernel of what would later develop into the European Union.

There were other switchmen of fate: Karel Cogge, a Belgian lock-keeper, for example, along with a constantly inebriated ship's mate Hendrik Geeraerd and a local historian, Emeric Feys. It was Feys who found, in his archives, old plans for the inundation of the local marshlands. And it was on his instructions, in late October 1914, that Cogge opened the sluices at Veurne-Sas. When the water did not rise quickly enough, it was Geeraerd who, under cover of night, succeeded in prying open the abandoned and overgrown sluice doors in the Noordvaart canal. In this way they were able, at the very last moment, to flood the plain around the Yser. To this trio belongs the credit for halting the German advance at Nieuwpoort.

There are still two Cogges in the Nieuwpoort phone book: Kurt and Georges. I call Georges. ‘Yes, he was my great-uncle, my grandmother told me about it once. No, no one knows any more about it, they're all dead. Kurt? He's my son! And I have a grandson, too!’

And so the Cogges of Nieuwpoort live on, completely undaunted by history.

During the Great War, the town of Poperinge was the first relatively quiet spot behind the lines. Believe it or not, a sign still hangs in the square which reads
SAFE
or
UNSAFE
– depending on where the wind was coming from during a gas attack – but that didn't stop the fun. This was where one found the first glass, and the much-sung last woman:

The stately Talbot House stood outside that whirl of activity. It was an Everyman's club, where soldiers from any rank and class could find rest for a while. That egalitarian atmosphere still prevails, around the staircases, the furniture, the candelabras, the books, the paintings, the water jugs, the piano the men sang at. Until the late 1980s, veterans still came to stay here. Even the tranquil garden has remained unchanged, including the sign inviting one to ‘Come into the garden and forget about the war.’

I drink tea at the kitchen table, talk a little with a young Scotsman, look at all the empty chairs around us, muse over the boys from back then. In London I had met Lyn MacDonald, an expert on the First World War, a writer who traced and interviewed hundreds of veterans before it was too late, the mother confessor of the last survivors.

She told me how she had become intrigued by all those little clubs of old men who got together regularly in the 1960s and 1970s to raise a glass and sing a song. ‘The mere fact that they were together, that was enough. No one who hadn't been through the war could really understand what that meant.’

MacDonald always spoke of them as ‘the boys’. ‘When I interviewed them, I quickly found myself talking, not to extremely old men, but to very young men from 1914. To them, that war was often more real than the rest of their lives. As one of them put it: “I lived my entire life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the rest was only the credits.”’

During our conversation, she warned me against judging too hastily: ‘That generation wasn't mad, they were fantastic people. But they had very different ideals: patriotism, a sense of duty, service, self-sacrifice. They were typical Victorians, and after the war they came back to a world where they felt less and less at home.’

But still, what drove them? What drove all those men to take part in collective suicide? Lyn MacDonald told me about a man who was wounded, fell, and all he could think was:‘What a waste! All those months of expensive training, and I haven't even fired a shot!’ Everything in him wanted to fight, to prove himself.

‘Going over the top’, the leap from the trenches, was the definitive experience of the First World War, and at the same time the most terrifying: endless waiting, the passing round of rum, vomiting from nerves, the count, the whistles, out of the trenches, towards the enemy, through the barbed wire, running for your life in an unimaginable pandemonium of bullets, mines and mortars, and then shooting, burning, stabbing, killing. ‘Over the top, boys, come on, over the top.’ And they went.

Friends, neighbours, fellow villagers all volunteered together, were trained together and went over the top together. ‘You went, right, it was your duty, you'd signed up for it,’ said Arthur Wagstaff (b.1898) in the BBC documentary mentioned earlier. Tommy Gay: ‘Me and my mate were always together, the first time we went over the top we went together, but I never saw him after that. There was nothing but bullets. But not one of them had my name on it!’ Robbie Burns (b.1897): ‘Before every major attack you had the feeling this could be the very last time. You didn't let it show, you didn't talk about it, you kept it to yourself.’

At the start of the Battle of the Somme, even the most hardened soldiers fouled themselves when they realised that their commander had made a fatal mistake: ten minutes before the attack, he had stopped the shelling of the German positions. That gave the Germans, as they well knew, enough time to run from their bunkers, man their machine guns and slaughter the attackers. And that is exactly what happened. But they still went when the whistle blew.

All manner of explanations can of course be given for this phenomenon, varying from the patriotism on the home front to the strong sense
of camaraderie and the tight discipline within the British and German armies. Barthas describes the start of an absurd attack in Northern France, in the early hours of 17 December, 1914, straight into the German machine guns with no cover. A major had given the order. At first the captain refused to pass it along, the two men fought, then the captain climbed out of the trench and was shot down after taking a few steps. Barthas: ‘In the trenches the men were moaning and begging “But I have three children.” Or they screamed “Mama, Mama.” Another soldier begged for mercy. But the major, revolver in hand and beside himself with rage, threatened to shoot anyone who hesitated.’ Finally, they went, just a little more afraid of their major than they were of the enemy.

There is also another side to the story. The soldiers had not, after all, gone to war to ‘die for their fatherland’, but to kill, to wound, to mutilate. In most of the letters and diaries from the front, however, this subject is carefully avoided. Emphasis is always placed on the suffering and the dying, but one reads little about the actual experience of killing.

What was the motive? After a year of war, Barthas said he never wanted to hear the word ‘patriotic’ again: ‘It was very simple: we were forced to do it as victims of an unrelenting fate … We had lost our sense of values and our humanity. We were degraded to the status of pack animals: indifferent, unfeeling and deadened.’ Barthas was a committed socialist and humanist, and found his own solution to the problem: he fired only in self-defence, never for any other reason.

The attitude adopted by the poet Robert Graves was the polar opposite of this, perhaps in part because Graves was an officer and wished to do all he could to renounce his German origins. He had no qualms about treating an unsuspecting German, whom he had heard humming a tune from
Die lustige Witwe
during a reconnaissance mission, to a mortar attack fifteen minutes later. He killed with calm pragmatism. He had come up with a sort of formula for taking risks: ‘We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk.’

This same pragmatism also extended to the killing of prisoners. Although it was in violation of every military convention and code of honour, Barthas, Graves and other diarists mention it frequently. Prisoners on the
way to the rear lines would have a live grenade stuffed into their pockets, or were simply shot down. When a German patrol found a wounded man in no-man's-land, there was every chance they would slit his throat. Graves: ‘We ourselves preferred the mace.’

The most important thing in actual combat was the group, the soldiers with whom one interacted on a daily basis. ‘Regimental pride’, Graves called it. ‘No one wanted to be a bigger coward than his neighbour,’ Barthas observed. ‘Besides that, the men, stubborn as they were, believed in their own good luck.’ This same sense of solidarity was sometimes a powerful motive for killing: protecting the group, avenging a fallen comrade. Ernst Jünger describes how one of his men, the father of four children, was killed by a British sniper: ‘His comrades hung around the foxholes for a long time, hoping to avenge him. They wept with rage. They seemed to consider the Englishman who had fired the deadly shot to be their personal enemy.’ After the death of one of his best friends, the English poet Siegfried Sassoon volunteered for patrol duty every night ‘looking for Germans to kill’.

‘I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war,’ wrote Winston Churchill to Violet Asquith, the prime minister's daughter, in early 1915. ‘I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can't help it – I enjoy every second of it.’

Still, in most of the accounts of the Great War, one finds little or nothing of the individual passion for killing. On the contrary. Barthas relates how his men, while pursuing the enemy, were suddenly handed butchers’ knives. Clearly, these were to be used to kill the German wounded or prisoners. Most of the soldiers threw them aside: ‘These are weapons for murderers, not for soldiers.’ During the Battle of the Somme, German machine-gunners – shocked by the slaughter – regularly stopped firing long enough to allow British soldiers to crawl back to their trenches. Some British officers even felt that the soldiers’ greatest reservations about going over the top had to do not with their fear of dying, but their fear of killing.

The British machine-gunner Albert Depew was one of the few who wrote openly about how, in 1918, he had jumped a German in a trench and run his bayonet right through the man. ‘He was as delicate as a
pencil. When I returned to our trenches after my first charge, I could not sleep for a long time afterwards for remembering what that fellow looked like and how my bayonet slipped into him and how he screamed when he fell. He had his leg and his neck twisted under him after he got it. I thought about it a lot, and it grew to be almost a habit that whenever I was going to sleep I would think about him, and then all hope of sleeping was gone.’

YPRES LIVES OFF THE PAST, OFF ITS STEP GABLES, ITS NEWLY
constructed Middle Ages, off the graves and the dead. Ever since 1927, two buglers from the local volunteer fire department meet each evening at eight to sound the last post. Riek van den Kerkhove has been doing it for nineteen years now, Antoon Verschoot for almost forty-six. They pull up on their bicycles, snap to attention, wait until two policemen have stopped traffic, then let the notes echo from the walls of the enormous Menenpoort with its plaques holding the names of 54,896 dead soldiers. A dozen or so people stand around, looking on. Within a matter of moments it is over, they shake hands with the policemen, the traffic races on across the cobblestones again.

Antoon's broad face shines with amiability. He's retired now, but he continues to do this. ‘It's hard sometimes, in the winter, when you've been sitting nice and warm in front of the TV.’ Riek says: ‘It's an obligation of honour.’ He missed the call only once, when he was busy pulling someone out of the water. But otherwise the last post is always sounded, even when a house is burning down at the same time. ‘It goes before all the rest, you know,’ Antoon says.

When will the emotion of the Great War fade? When will it finally become history? When will the Battle of the Somme become something like the Battle of Waterloo? Allow me to hazard a guess: within the next ten years. Somewhere between the third and fourth generation, somewhere between the grandchildren – who can scarcely remember anyone who was involved – and the great-grandchildren the feeling will change. In the great charnel house at Verdun, the daily Mass recently became monthly. To the south
of the Somme a huge airport is planned, to be built across two war cemeteries. See here the writing on the wall. The spectacle, not the memory, gradually becomes the crux of the matter.