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He had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds.
STEPHEN CRANE, The Red Badge of Courage
In the bleak midwinter of 1916, General Douglas Haig, commander of the Allied armies in Europe, visited the Flanders front to unveil his plans for a spring offensive against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria.
He made his visit at a black time. In July of 1915, his attempt to break through the German lines had ended in slaughter. Believing that his men would take the enemy trenches without much trouble, he ordered them to advance standing upright, bayonets fixed. Within a few seconds, most were scythed down by fire from machine guns, a weapon Haig thought “much over-rated.”
The British and French, supported by Canadian, Indian, and Australian volunteers, suffered 420,000 casualties during this campaign, 60,000 on the first day. The French alone lost 200,000 men and the Germans nearly 500,000 before the fighting halted in November for the winter and the war froze into stalemate.
To outline his plans for 1917, Haig called a conference of commanders. Few large buildings survived in the forward areas, but his staff found an intact château near the Belgian town of Nieuwpoort.
They didn’t know it was already occupied.
During the first weeks of the war, Polish countess Misia Sert, one of the most fashionable hostesses in Paris, persuaded General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the military governor, to authorize a private ambulance service. She would fit out the delivery vans of couturiers Paul Poiret and Jean Patou, which were sitting unused since all their staff had been drafted to make uniforms.
Poiret, before he left to create a new greatcoat for the army, designed an outfit for Misia’s group: dark blue, gold buttons, collar flared, jacket theatrically skirted. His best illustrator, Paul Iribe, also joined Sert but preferred his own version of protective clothing: a deep-sea diver’s suit, complete with solid brass helmet.
Other recruits included the young poet Jean Cocteau, a regular at Sert’s salon in her Quai Voltaire apartment, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. Cocteau recognized their motivation as less compassion than curiosity. The curtain was about to go up on the greatest first night of the century, more sensational even than the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and they were determined to have front-row seats. “They were going behind the scenes of the drama,” he wrote of the group. “They were like music-lovers in the dress circle listening to Stravinsky, leaning over the dark stalls.”
For two years, Cocteau crisscrossed the war zone with Sert’s group, then joined another formed by Count Etienne de Beaumont, famous for the costume balls at which he often appeared in elaborate drag. They fluttered behind the lines like butterflies, distributing cigarettes, candy, and other treats to the troops, and occasionally, though they had no medical training, ferrying casualties back to dressing stations. The much they saw that was horrible made them more anxious than ever to think about something else.
Jean Cocteau in Paul Poiret uniform
In December 1916, they arrived in the area near Nieuwpoort, located a surviving château, and commandeered the best rooms. After a leisurely bath, the two men spent the afternoon trying on their most exquisite outfits, choosing finally two pairs of colorful silk pajamas. Scented, rouged, and powdered, with bracelets jingling at ankles and wrists, they descended to the salon, expecting to dine in solitary elegance—only to find General Haig and the entire high command huddled over maps spread out on the largest table.
For a frozen moment, rival visions of war stared at one another.
On one side, two exemplars of the Parisian way of life—theatrical, sophisticated, sensual. On the other, a humorless disciplinarian who embodied the puritan values of duty, country, service.
Cocteau and Beaumont excused themselves and crept back to their rooms to giggle at the looks on the staff officers’ faces, while the “real” soldiers, shaking their heads in disbelief, returned to the business of planning death.
How could two such radically opposed cultures fight on the same side? What was the nature of the civilization they were battling to preserve?
Count Etienne de Beaumont
And what was my paternal grandfather, William Archie Baxter, of Burrawang, New South Wales, doing in the middle of it?
Well, it was that kind of a war.