My Great War Tour

"We can truly say that the whole circuit of the Earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon Earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war."   

- King George V, Tyne Cot Cemetery Dedication, 1922

Sometime in the mid 1980s at UGA, in an undergraduate course I was taking called “The 20^thCentury American Novel”, professor James Kilgo referred to World War I as “a continental divide in world history.”   Of course I had heard of the Great War before then – I knew about Franz Ferdinand and Doughboys and the trenches and all that – but the extent of its significance had never occurred to me before.  Kilgo was undoubtedly speaking of it in the limited context of its influence on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other “Lost Generation” writers and artists, the crowd whose sense of living in a “botched civilization” catalyzed modernism in all the arts.   Kilgo’s metaphor, suggesting a “no looking back” level of change, lit a spark of fascination in me that has never gone out.   I have grown to love reading and teaching texts that spiraled directly out of the experience of that war, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, and of course Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  The work of the trench poets – Owen, Sassoon, and the rest – continues to astonish me.   And the films – classics such as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Weir's Gallipoli, plus more recent works such as the film versions of Pat Barker's Regeneration and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. For some reason I can’t get enough of this stuff, perhaps because I feel that it kind of explains the contemporary world to me.   As Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory, “There seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; it is essentially ironic; and it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.” 

We Americans discount the significance of World War I by thinking about it so little.   Each November Premier League fans can see English soccer teams wearing poppy emblems on their jerseys to mark Armistice Day, but here the war doesn’t register in that way.  Russell Baker, reflecting on how little imprint the Great War has on American consciousness compared to World War II, wrote that the war “feels as if it happened 300 years ago. I guess the Kaiser was rotten box-office.”   For me, a more likely explanation is that a combatant nation that lost just over 100,000 soldiers won't remember the war with the same intensity as nations that suffered eight, nine, ten times that many losses. 

This November 11 is an important Armistice Day, the 100^th anniversary of the end of the war.  Europe has been living through a four-year exercise in memory, each week or month bringing a new Great War centennial moment to reflect upon.  

Of all the commemoration events, perhaps the most visually striking was at the Tower of London:  890,000 ceramic poppies (one for each British fatality in the war) were placed in the moat area, creating a collective sense of a river of blood, graphically communicating the massive scale of the loss of life in that war.  

London’s Imperial War Museum marked the centenary by renovating its World War I exhibits.  I came across an advertisement (created by the team that gave us Wallace and Gromit) for the newly redesigned exhibition, and - cartoon devotee that I am - I was so moved by what I saw that my Great War fascination went from reading books and seeing films to a yearning for the first hand.  To paraphrase Liz Lemon, I wanted to go to there.

And so I did, thanks to the generosity of my school.   The first week of August I visited London the see the Imperial War Museum, Ypres to see war-related sites around that part of Belgium, and Albert, France to visit sites related to the Battle of the Somme.   

I’d love to tell you here about all my adventures on my Great War Tour, about seeing Mark Rylance in Othello at the Globe and actually ordering a Royale with Cheese in Albert and hearing a guy play “La Vie en Rose” on an accordion on the Paris Metro - a living, breathing French cliché.  But to tell the whole story I’d have to be like a rude host making you sit through six carousels full of slides from his vacation.  Instead I’m going to exercise some self-discipline here and restrict myself here to telling you about three or four experiences. 

Flanders was a contested area from the beginning to the end of World War I.   The area around Ypres was the scene of some of the war’s fiercest, deadliest fighting.   Today it features multiple memorials to the English fallen, but for some reason the site there that affected me most was the Langemarck German Cemetery, a few kilometers from Ypres.   

Because the Germans had been occupiers in Belgium, and had violated Belgium’s neutrality in their invasion of France, they met plenty of local resistance in the aftermath of the war when they tried to memorialize their fallen soldiers.   Langemarck is one place they succeeded.  Set in the middle of farmland (cows are visible in the background of many of my photos), it is beautifully shaded, beautifully laid out, and – unlike the British Commonwealth cemeteries – it is not shackled by a uniformity of style. Nevertheless, the different forms of gravesites within the large cemetery cohere somehow.  44,000 German soldiers are interred there, 25,000 of whom are unidentified.   Many of the dead there were student recruits, who died needlessly in futile frontal attacks early in the war.  

Langemarck made me think of the Franz Kemmerich, the young schoolmate of Paul Bäumer's who dies of his war wounds in the second chapter of All Quiet on the Western Front.   Sitting by Franz’s deathbed, Paul observes, “He only weeps, his head turned aside.   He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters.   He says nothing:  all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.  This is the most disturbing and hardest parting I have ever seen . . .”

In Ypres there is a massive commemorative arch called the Menin Gate.   It features carved names of over 50,000 British Commonwealth soldiers who died around Ypres during the war.   Every evening at the Menin Gate at 8:00 there is a memorial ceremony called Last Post.  It has been held there every evening since 1927.   I attended one while I was in  Ypres.  It was packed with English tourists (Ypres seems to do a booming business in Great War tourism).   It was a lovely summer evening.   A pastor delivered a pithy, moving sermon featuring the Prayer of St. Francis (“Where there is hatred, let me sow love . . .”).  Then a small choral group - from where I don't know -  gave a melancholy performance of "Oh Shenandoah."   They say visiting another country can stir up one’s patriotic feelings.   For me it is hard to feel unadulterated patriotism in these times, so hearing this folk song of ours rendered so beautifully in this meaningful setting touched my heart.   I felt a similar rush of patriotic feeling earlier in the day when I was having lunch in the nearby village of Zonnebeke:  James Brown’s “I Got You” came over the restaurant’s speakers.   James Brown feels good.  So did I.  Whatever else may be said of our country at the moment, we can always take pride in our music.

From Ypres I went 80 miles south to the Somme region. Even by the standards of World War I, the Somme stands out as a horrific battle.  A British offensive designed in part to divert the Germans from their own offensive at Verdun, the Battle of the Somme lasted over four months and was one of the bloodiest in human history.   A million casualties for an inconclusive result.  The Somme region is a rural area, and to this day it is a major site of pilgrimage for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the British soldiers who fought there: scores of tour buses traverse the narrow roads, going from one monument or cemetery to the next.   The massive Thiepval Monument is especially popular.   At the war museum in Peronne I saw one concrete example of how the war endures in this area:  a display of rusted and muddy implements of war that Somme farmers have unwittingly dug up in the decades since 1918.

Ever since I became fascinated with World War I, I have known the mind-boggling death toll, but nothing brought the scale of death home to me like driving aimlessly around Beaumont-Hamel and Fricourt and La Boiselle and noting how common it is for a rural vista there to feature a British war cemetery.  They are everywhere, all in the same style, in the middle of fields, by the sides of one-lane roads.   They are especially haunting when seen from a distance.  You know if you were within the low brick walls of yonder cemetery you would see that so, so many of the gravestones bear the unknown soldier inscription of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission:  “A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God.”  So many nameless dead, called "unbekannt" or "inconnu" in the German and French cemeteries.  They bring to mind Wilfred Owen’s bitter question:  “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”  

If I encountered a lot of cemeteries around Ypres and Albert, I also came across a lot of poppies, the emblematic flower of the Great War.  Not real ones but lots of tiny wooden facsimiles placed on graves and monuments, and poppy designs adorning literally everything in gift shops: coffee mugs, purses, refrigerator magnets, picture puzzles, umbrellas, and on and on.   I got so accustomed to seeing fake poppies that it kind of took my breath away when I came across a real one.  I was trying to back out of a heavily rutted one lane farm road near Fricourt when I saw one growing wild.   I picked it and immediately did what no Great War soldier could have done:  took a selfie.   Those fellows did something different with poppies.    Here’s my favorite Great War poem, by Isaac Rosenberg, one of the millions who didn’t make it out alive:

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.