Introduction

My dinner companion frowned slightly. He’d asked the simple, classic question — what did you do last summer? — and the answer he received was a puzzle. Now he’d have to play along.

“What front?” he said at last.

“The Western Front.”

He nodded, relieved to have heard something vaguely familiar. “Is that like the Maginot Line?”

“Close,” I said helpfully. “But you’ve got the wrong war.”

We ate in silence for a few instants. I could almost hear the wheels spin: Western Front, Western Front…

“D-Day?”

“Nope.”

His sunny California countenance creased in embarrassment. Here he was, a fellow freelancer in Paris, and some major European conflict had escaped his notice. What if he could interview me, get an assignment out of it? What if he could write off our meal as a research expense?

I relented. “The Western Front… All Quiet…The trenches…World War I…”

He almost spat a mouthful of couscous at me. “World War I,” he said witheringly. “That’s history!”

Ah yes, the ultimate put-down. A Baby Boomer lowering the boom. If a thing is history, it is a loser. Been there, done that, let’s move on.

I felt bad for spoiling a pleasant conversation, because I knew mentioning history in some company betrays a serious character flaw, like torturing canaries in your spare time. I understood his contempt: I too had started life with the view that history was something that began as a test pattern on a TV screen. Nothing much of importance had occurred before then. Moses, Christ, Columbus, The Wizard of Oz maybe, but nothing that could possibly rival the broadcast here and now.

In that we were not entirely unusual. Every generation is said to dismiss the experience of its predecessors as a sort of tedious overture humanity had to endure before the real divas stepped onstage. Ignoring, even forgetting, the past is much better than the alternative: being trapped by it, condemned to viewing current events as recurrent events and wasting time in learning how and whom to hate. “History,” James Joyce had Stephen Dedalus say in Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” In my childhood years, my peers and I were all fully awake; history wasn’t even the ghost of a dream.

I grew up in North America, physically far from the quaint, the old and the musty, where a sense of a past had almost been obliterated in the cause of the new. I write “almost,” because vestiges of an earlier time had managd to survive. If I do a bit of personal archaeology, I can still hear a playground chant from the very cusp of memory, sung by my older brothers and me on dusty summer days in 1960:

Whistle while you work,
Hitler is a jerk,
Mussolini has no weenie,
Eisenhower has no power,
Diefenbaker is a faker,
Khruschev is a mischief maker.

How this geopolitical version of a Disney ditty got to preschoolers in southern Ontario is not important here. The Diefenbaker line showed we were Canadians; the Mussolini one, that we were little boys with the usual anxieties. That we judged this doggerel worthy of our repertoire meant that we had some idea of the enormities that had recently occurred in the adult past. We were letting intruders into our world away from time.

There were our parents, too. They could always be trusted to inject some cryptic reference into the normal day’s round of weightless novelty. I once reached across the dinner table for an extra helping, was checked by a gentle paternal remark: “Austria was Hungary, so it took a piece of Turkey.” I now know that line, as playfully political as our rhyme on Khruschev, refers to the era around the Great War, the incomprehensible adult enormity preceding my father’s childhood. At the time, however, the comment seemed just to be another example of the uncrackable code in which my parents chose to communicate. Like many children baffled by their elders, I put down such incidents to their not being me.

And they most definitely weren’t. They had emigrated from Ireland in 1949, and were thus bearers of a sensibility at oddds with the budding Boomers in their home. They, or at least their origins, represented History. Of the two main families of Irish immigrants to America, the clannish keepers of the rebel flame and the clear-eyed seekers of assimilation, my parents belonged to the latter. Yet the mere fact of their “Irishness” contradicted the don’t-look-back ethos reigning in North America at mid-century. They subverte the here and now simply by being themselves. Through them the reality of another place, Ireland, with connections, complications and, however retrogade it seemed, a past that mattered to the present, could not be denied. No many how many times we changed the channel, the shadow of something permanent always flickered on the screen.

We O’Sheas were a textbook example of an uprooted nuclear family. A large, extended cladn lived inaccessibly across an ocean, and the whim of my father’s employers sent us bopping from city to town to city every two or three years. Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, and a string of smaller towns in southern Ontario — Oshawa, Kingston, St. Thomas, Cornwall — formed the itinerary of our nomadism. Since there was never a hometown to which we could attach some fleeting identity or loyalty, we developed a virtual sense of place. It worked well with our approximate sense of time. I never dreamed that the two would come apart when I glimpsed the Western Front of the First World War. After that moment, the worm of context got into my ahistorical apple.

But not without difficulty, and not as successfully as the worm can penetrate, for better or worse, the overripe fruit of a European sensibility. Of the First World War I knew, vaguely, that my two Irish grandfathers had gone to France to fight the Germans for the British. This knowledge only confirmed my customary personal calculus: Europe = Confusing = Irrelevant. Others conspired to strengthen the notion of an indecipherable world. In late 1963, my second-grade music teacher in Calgary had the charges at St. Pius X elementary school stomp around the classroom and sing, “We Are Marching to Pretoria.” Just why we little western Canadians were supposed to be enthused about going off to war — in this instance the Boer War of 1899 — is as confusing to me now as it was then.

Adults were always springing surprises, some of which came from as far out of left fields as my father’s remark about Turkey. A week or so before having to feign martial ardor about those impudent South Africans, we were solemnly sent home from school in the middle of the day because the slain young president of the United States had been a Catholic. We didn’t understand, but we didn’t complain either. A week or so before that, we were instructed to bring big bars of Ivory soap to class. These we carved into crosses, not out of parochial school piety but out of a yearly duty to to change the art table in the back of the room into a soapy graveyard. The full implications of this grotesque exercise didn’t occur to us, just as the macabre meaning of Halloween may never really dawn on most of us until the very end of life. In fact, November 11 seemed to be a sequel to Halloween, only far less fun and far more puzzling. There usually was some sort of poetry reading over the PA system in the morning, often John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” followed by an extended art period, then a recess during which we got to compare who was wearing the best paper poppy. By eleven o’clock, the kid who had carved the most symmetrical soap headstone would get to arrange the cemetery in the back of the class. At lunch, all was mercifully forgotten, and this inexplicable intrusion — what could a “Flanders” possibly be? — into our cocoon would be, in the new sense of the word, history.

Things might have remained at that stage for me, at least with regard to the First World War, had I not been drawn back across the ocean that my parents had crossed at mid-century. In 1981, I moved to Paris and eked out a picturesque existence teaching English, subtitling French movies and writing articles on trends, imaginary and real, for magazines and newspapers. The Boomer millennium had come and gone in the intervening two decades, and history, despite our reflexive indifference, had not stopped or ceased to count. From Washington in the mid-1980s came news of a theory grandly known as The End of History, but that turned out to be nothing more than an ideological chortle over the mounting problems of Communist regimes. The past, with its nightmare of nationalisms and ethnic hatred, had stubbornly refused to give up its ghosts.

It was about this time that a friend and I took a winter weekend away from Paris to visit the barren fields of the Somme. He had let the worm gnaw all the way to the core of his apple: an Ohio Boomer, he had somehow landed up on the Left Bank as a graduate student of French history. I, fresh from reading an account of the battles of 1916, was the dilettante, out for a field trip away from the city. Although I had lived for about three years amid the old stones and streets of Paris, I still thought of history, whenever I did think of it, as something that happened in books or, at best, on plaques affixed to buildings. My undergraduate education, the liberal arts mix of literature and history, had led me to believe that the past existed in the stacks of the university library. My graduate student friend thought otherwise — for him, it seemed to exist on maps. On the train ride north from Paris to Amiens, and thence to Albert, he unfolded for me a masterwork of anally fixated exactitude on which he had carefully shaded the position occupied by the English, German and French armies on different days in July of 1916. If we didn’t see anything of interest, at least we’d know precisely where we were.

*

The fields east of the town of Albert were newly plowed. It was a cold December day, clear and crisp, and no snow lay on the deep brown earth. We stood on the crest of a long ridge that sloped eastward, down to the village of La Boisselle about half a mile distant. On each side of La Boisselle there were slight depressions — from the map we knew these sunken fields formed what the attacking British troops had called Sausage and Mash valleys. From our vantage point atop the ridge, the gently rolling countryside between the Somme and Ancre Rivers stretched like a dark rumpled blanket. There was a jagged pattern on it.

In some fields the soil gave way to skittish traces of white, slashes of brilliance against the dun landscape of Picardy in the winter; in others, the chalk had completely taken over, changing what should have been a long swatch of moist dark earth to a blinding rectangle of whiteness. We looked at the fields stretching to the horizon in front of us, then back at the map. Then back at the fields. There was an uncanny similarity between the shading on the one and the splotches on the other. Wherever the fighting had been heaviest, the shelling hardest — wherever the murderous standoff of trench warfare had taken place — the ground was bleached with tiny chalk pebbles plowed up from its shattered subsoil.

The earth had not yet recovered from the Great War. This angry band of white, though irregular and intermittent in places, snaked across the land as far as we could see, as if someone had taken a styptic pencil to an immense wound. We were looking at the Western Front.

I was stunned. This slice of history was not the safe, irrelevant stuff that gathers dust in some archive. This was staring me right in the face. We walked down the hill to La Boisselle, across the ground, I would later read, where the soldiers of the Tyneside Irish marched on the morning of July 1, 1916. Of the 3,000 who left the trenches that day, struggling under the seventy-five pounds of equipment with which the British army saw fit to saddle each attacking soldier, only about 200 survived unscathed. By the time we reached the village of La Boisselle the litter of war had become apparent everywhere. On a hedge sat two tattered gas masks that looked as if they had been recently disentangled from some piece of farm machinery. In muddy trails scored with twin tire ruts of heavy tractors lays a cache of rusting bullets and barbed wire embedded in the earth. Beside a fence post at the corner of a field, a small group of unexploded shells stood to attention, still laden with menace after a lifetime spent underground. Farmer had left them there, as part of the so-called Iron Harvest that every season’s plowing yields. A government explosives unit eventually carts all the shells away — several hundred tons a year — and detonates them in quarries.

The village itself was a familiar succession of tan-colored bungalows of recent construction — French real estate developers grandly call them pavillons — that marked La Boisselle as a newly resettled hamlet. Only here the bland predictability of European exurbia suddenly took a turn for the ominous. In the midst of the bungalows with their backyard swings stood a vacant lot that could not be anesthetized into the present. It was an expanse of tall tortured mounds rising in unlikely and unnatural ways from a heaving plane of pockmarks and craters. The pale green fuzz of grass and weeds that covered each contour did not hide the violence that had once been done there. It looked as if a raging sea had been frozen, then made land. In between the Danger and Keep Out signs I spotted a small mountain bike, lying there as if some heedless boy had just popped a wheelie and then been dragged home for a spanking. The rear wheel turned slowly in the slight wind, its spokes glinting in the cold December sunshine. Somehow it comforted me.

That weekend on the Somme — we trudged all over the map — gave me a strange sort of thrill that I didn’t fully welcome. I feared I’d fallen victim to the exuberant nihilism of the battlefield enthusiast, and that soon I would be whooping with joy coming across a trench in the forest, or a skeleton behind a barn. There is a sort of macho romance to the futility of war, an attraction to seeing things fall apart, born of the same impulse that makes setting fires or watching the wrecker’s ball such a fun pastime for so many men. Visiting sites of significant bloodshed — braking to gawk at humanity’s biggest smash-ups — seemed a habit better left to groupies of the military. And I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that infatuation with uniforms and battles was entirely foreign to me, given a family animus that verged on the fanatical. A reflexive hatred of the army formed the sole, unarticulated legacy of my grandfathers’ Great War experience. In our home, career soldiers were routing referred to as “professional assassins,” and in the Vietnam War years of the 1960s and early 1970s, our mother, her three sons in their teens, daily congratulated herself for not having chosen to immigrate to the land of the domino theory and the draft. Even the Boy Scouts had been suspect, their badges and uniforms seen as the thin edge of the warrior wedge.

But what if learning about history led me, against all odds, to a love of war lore? To a geek passion for guts and guns, to fetishism about medals and stripes, to furtive erection at the sight of fighter aircraft, to anachronistic anger over enemies never met, to hand-over-the-heart hypocrisy at monuments to massacres, to voyeurism disguised as compassion, to the fetid bath of patriotic cliché — what if it led, in short, to wooden-headed fellowship of war buffs? If that’s where it was leading, then there was no point in being a lapsed amnesiac. My dinner companion may have been right to despise me, after all. History is for the dead, or for rednecks. Perhaps I would become the expatriate equivalent of a Civil War re-enactor who spends his Sundays playing Johnny Reb and pining for slavery. Perhaps not. I felt that there had been something else out there, at the Somme, something other than a temptation to yield to a boyish love of destruction. I had seen it. The scar of the Front pointed to a curiosity that I did not know I had. In the months following that visit, reading brought home to me some of the connections between a generation long dead and my own, between those who witnessed the start of a century and those who would see it out. (Not that they are all gone: in March of 1995 the literary supplements of newspapers celebrated the hundredth birthaday of Ernst Jünger, fourteen times wounded in the Great War and author of the classic German war novel In Stahlgewittern, or Storm of Steel.) If initially the code of the past seemed as hard to crack as the strange turns of phrase that had stumped me as a child, it eventually revealed itself to be a compelling language of irony, bitterness and great beauty. I could scarcely believe that these loud, vital, angry voices, the voices of my grandparents’ generation, could have been so easily forgotten, that their experience could have left its imprint on the earth itself but no trace in our minds. Or almost none. Familiar expressions coined at the time pop out at me — “over the top,” “nothing to write home about” — and half-remembered, perhaps half-suspected, snatches of poetry rose up from the pages of anthologies. The sensibility seemed excruciatingly immediate, as mordant and disillusioned and undated as the latest world-weary wise-crack currently exchanged online by pony-tail capitalists and their slacker offspring. The famous opening to Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem L’Adieu du Cavalier (“The Horseman’s Farewell”) speaks for a generation made sardonic by its experience in hell:

Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie
Avec ses chants, ses longs loisirs

(Oh God! what a lovely war
With its songs, its long idle hours)

The sarcasm sounds newly minted. Less well known, but just as sadly universal, are the great poet’s entreaties as he lay on his deathbed, fatally weakened by war wounds, in 1918: “Save me, doctor! I want to live! I still have so much to say!” Apollinaire, to choose but him as an example, had stepped out of the cobwebs of a forgotten college curriculum and become an immediate presence for me. In glimpsing the Front, even more than a lifetime after the war had taken place, I opened the door to a haunted house full of invisible acquaintances.

Then there was, as I learned from perusing some of the excellent World War One histories published in the past twenty years or so, what can be called the Importance of the War. Had I read them before going on that winter weekend hike, I might not have tread so lightly around the Somme, content just to marvel like some idiot surveyor at the physical traces the conflict had left. The Great War is a great divide, as well defined a boundary as the Western Front was on my friend’s shaded map. First, but not foremost, were the political changes it helped engender. Even an incomplete list of them goes on and on: the fall of the Romanovs, the fall of the Ottomans, the fall of the Hohenzollerns, the fall of the Hapsburgs, the rise of Soviet Communism, the dress rehearsal of American hegemony, the dismemberment of Austro-Hungary, the creation of Poland, the creation of Yugoslavia, the creation of Czechoslovakia, the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the birth of nationalism in Australia, the birth of nationalism in New Zealand, the birth of nationalism in Canada, the revolt, the independence and partition of Ireland, the guarantee of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, the creation of Turkey, the birth of Arab nationalism, the fall of the monarchical principle, the extension of voting rights to women, the introduction of the income tax, the introduction of Prohibition, the acceptance of total war, the rise of Fascism, the rise of mass pacifism.

However earth-shaking that list might once have been, many of its items seem unimportant now because another world war followed &emdash; and because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1918. Boundaries have been drawn and redrawn, and almost all norms of decency broken. There is, however, another list to compile on the Importance of the War, which I’ve made from other encounters during my post-Somme war book binge. This time the great divide of the Great War is in the mind and some of the items may sound embarrassingly familiar to any of my peers who believe his/her worldview to have sprung spontaneously to mind, ex nihilo, during a station break. It is generally accepted that the Great War and its fifty-two months of senseless slaughter encouraged, or amplified, among other things: the loss of a belief in progress, a mistrust of technology, the loss of religious faith, the loss of a belief in Western cultural superiority, the rejection of class distinctions, the rejection of traditional sexual roles, the birth of the Modern, the rejection of the past, the elevation of irony to a standard mode of apprehending the world, the unbuttoning of moral codes and the conscious embrace of the irrational. Admittedly, the emphasis is once again on destruction, on disintegration, but not of the exploding car-crash variety deplored earlier. It is far more serious — more punk — than that, and to be fascinated by it may betray an inner malevolence greater than the one tapped into by the guys watching a demolition derby on cable. On this second list, with few exceptions, absence wins. Liberating, insecure, ironic absence.

I closed the books. The Western Front was out there, ready for my pilgrimage, my own private hajj. There was a lot to think about, a lot to look for. This book follows that journey, or rather those journeys, along the Front. In concrete, historical terms, the Western Front stretched from the North Sea on the Belgian coast to the border of France and Switzerland, some 450 miles, between the autumns of 1914 and 1918. I walked the length of it in the summer of 1986, precisely seventy years after the war’s worst period of murderous immobility. It was the Front as it stood in mid-1916 that I then attempted to trace, the time of stupendous, static carnage that is meant whenever the phrase “Western Front” crops up in conversation. Whenever my path kept to what had been no-man’s-land, the treacherous moonscape lying between the German and Allied trenches, where the scar of barbed wire and shell holes disfigured the face of Europe. My first hike, from mid-July to late September, was succeeded in subsequent years by quick forays to the Front whenever I got the chance. I went back to the Front, again and again.

What follows, then, is a record of frequent visits to a vanishing metaphor, a scrapbook of journeys made between 1985 and 1995. I did not go to the Front to lay wreaths, or to say again what has been so well said by writers closer to the conflict in both time and temperament than I could ever hope or want to be. Stirring words are for speeches, not for travelers with sore feet, or eyes that seldom see beyond the present. At time I went to the Front as an amateur historian, at other times as a map reader, a literary tourist, a picnicker, a boyfriend, a trend hound on holiday, a curiosity seeker, a (I’ll admit it) weekend war buff, a family researcher, a Canadian, a hiker, a married man, but always as a Boomer, trying to figure out why I was reaching for something beyond the horizon of living memory. Perhaps I did it out of an impulse to “mark the spot” as described in Michael Ignatieff’s splendid family history, The Russian Album:

“I still cannot shake off the superstition that the only past that is real, that exists at all, is the one contained within the memories of living people. When they die, the past they hold within them simply vanishes, and those of us who come after cannot inherit their experience, only preserve the myth of its existence. We can mark the spot where the cliff was washed away by the sea, but we cannot repair the wound the sea has made.”