2
The War That Will End War
H. G. WELLS, title of a book, 1914
In the summer of 1914, while all of Europe was on holiday, German troops flooded through Belgium, across the sand dunes and salt marshes of Flanders, and into northern France. Only a desperate counterattack by the French and British halted them at the river Marne, forty miles from Paris. France was saved by the city’s military governor, General Gallieni, who rushed reinforcements to the battle in a fleet of taxis.
Until the armistice of November 1918, the so-called western front, a double line of trenches separated by a no man’s land of barbed wire and mud, zigzagged from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The phrase im Westen nichts Neues—literally, “in the west, nothing new”—became so familiar to Germans that Erich Maria Remarque used it as the title of a best-selling novel, published in English as All Quiet on the Western Front.
The narrow gaze of the cinema has left us with an eye-level vision of this war: a few yards of muddy ground, pitted with shell craters, swept by machine gun fire. Asked to describe the sector where he won his Medal of Honor, Sergeant Alvin York said, “I occupied one space in a fifty-mile front. I saw so little it hardly seems worthwhile discussing it.”
Even strategists couldn’t grasp the totality of this troglodyte warren, almost five hundred miles long and often miles across. Jean Cocteau called it “an incredible labyrinth of corridors, roads and underground galleries.” Wilfred Owen arrived at the front for the first time after “a march of three miles over shelled road, then nearly three along a flooded trench”—flooded because large parts of the front were below the water table.
Douglas Haig’s description of preparations for his 1917 “big push” hints at the scale of the world’s first industrial war.
Vast stocks of ammunition and stores of all kinds had to be accumulated. Many miles of new railways—both standard and narrow gauge—and trench tramways were laid. All available roads were improved, many others made, and long causeways built over marshy valleys. Many additional dug-outs had to be provided as shelter for the troops, for use as dressing stations for the wounded, and as magazines for storing ammunition, food, water, and engineering material. Scores of miles of deep communication trenches had to be dug, as well as trenches for telephone wires, assembly and assault trenches, and numerous gun emplacements and observation posts. Many wells and borings were sunk, and over one hundred pumping plants installed. More than one hundred and twenty miles of water mains were laid.
With northern France cut off from its industries and farms, everything had to come from Britain, its dominions, and the Americas. Most of it poured through the port of Le Havre, at the mouth of the river Seine. In the area between the front and the English Channel, farms, villages, whole towns disappeared under an avalanche of goods, equipment, animals, people, and the materials to feed them. One supply center alone covered twelve square miles. A twenty-five-mile area from the front to Amiens became a military town, fed by new roads lined with shell dumps and encampments.
From the front, hundreds of supply lines snaked back to the Channel. Traffic in that direction was mainly the wounded and dead. Stretcher bearers carried casualties to dressing stations where doctors decided who justified treatment and who could not be saved. The fortunate won evacuation to the hospital port of Etaples, and thence to Britain for care and convalescence.
Sixty-five million men and women fought in what is variously called the First German War, la guerre de ’14, the Great War, the European War, and World War I. The French, the Americans, the British, and their allies from the dominions, Australia, India, and Canada, lost 9,407,136 soldiers and civilians; the Austro-German Central powers, 7,153,241: 5 percent of their combined populations. Just as many more were wounded.
Troops of the Allied armies, Paris, 4 July 1916
Some lived that war in blood and mud. Others ate ice cream.
The slaughters of the Somme, Belleau Wood, and Verdun can obscure the fact that, for each combatant who endured these horrors, just as many never fired a shot. They hauled freight, shuffled papers, nursed the wounded, buried the dead, wrote requisitions, drew maps, cooked meals, wrangled horses and mules, or, in the pungent phrase of General George Patton about a later war, “shoveled shit in Louisiana.”
My father’s father, Archie Baxter, belonged to this army of the unremarkable. He volunteered in Sydney in May 1916 to serve in the Australian Imperial Force and arrived in Le Havre at the end of that year. The war ended in November 1918 and he returned home early in 1919. He was never promoted above private, won no medals, earned no commendations.
What happened to him during those two years? Nobody in our family knew—except that the experience left him somehow harmed. Everyone agrees that for the rest of his life, he remained troubled and dissatisfied, haunted by memories of France.