Melancholy corners of a foreign field
December 22 2000
Dawn on the road to Folkestone with my daughter. We're driving via the Channel tunnel towards Bauvais, south of
Amiens, about 50km to the north of Paris, to a house that we have rented with three other families. The radio is
percolating away with the Today programme, which is shorn of politics because it's Christmas, and because "politics" in
Britain is apparently synonymous with parliamentary sessions and the availability and willingness of politicians to submit
to interviews. So a zoologist is talking about his study of the way penguins conserve their energy when they walk.
It's
possible, he says, that penguins will be able to give advice to pregnant women. Or is it the other way round? Male
penguins sit on their eggs for months, without moving or eating, while their partners roam freely. "It'll never catch on
with humans," says my daughter.
I grew up in a house with few books; one of them (or to be more precise two of them) was The Times History of the
Great War. Appropriately enough, the volumes were as large as tombstones and at least as melancholy. The books
strove for a diffident and unemotional style but the story that the maps, photographs and statistics told to a curious
10-year-old was a terrible litany of misery. They didn't show the victims of gas attacks or of shell-shock - those mad
eyes, robbed of their souls came to haunt me later - but fuzzy photographs of lozenge-shaped tanks lurching over
muddy crests, battalions marching to and from the front, groups of soldiers relaxing ("Indian soldiers enjoy a
cigarette") and line after regimented line of corpses marked by crosses were enough to fill my imagination.
December 23
It's a sharp, clear day as we drive through the small villages and towns whose names conjure my childhood memories of
houses and churches crumble like pie-crust by the war: Armentiers, Bapaume, Bethune, Douai, Cambrai, Arras, Vimy -
where there's a memorial to 60,000 Canadian soldiers who died defending a small lip of land that projects above a plain
that used to be dotted with coal mines. The memorial consists of two tall rectangular columns of Portland stone, with
the names of the dead soldiers inscribed around the base while a hooded weeping woman gazes out from the ridge.
It's
very simple and expressive and extraordinarily moving but less so than the trenches that have been preserved nearby.
The Canadian and German lines that faced each other are perhaps only 30m apart at their closest. Between the
opposing trenches, massive craters have been left by constant bombardment as if gouged out by giant hands, while the
land all around them is pitted and puckered. It's all grassed over now like a thin membrane over a virulent pox. On this
beautiful, cold, sunny day my daughter and I are able to see each other all too clearly across the trenches: close enough
to see a smile or a tear.
December 24
There's a thick, almost impenetrable fog and as we enter the Somme region, small handwritten signs announce perhaps
the most memorable characteristic of the region (at least for the soldiers): boue - mud. Every minor road is smeared
with thick clay, which sticks to our shoes as we step towards a monument near a small village called Azincourt. Henry
V's battlefield is marked with a menhir and a plan showing the disposition of the troops. The nimble English archers
hiding in the woods achieved victory over the French knights, who were obliged to fight on foot because of the
waterlogged fields and were bogged down in the mud in their heavy armour.
We think of the 20th century as the era that invented mass barbarity and suffering, in which whole societies were
culled by war, but 10,000 Frenchmen died at the battle of Agincourt.
The battlefield is known as La Carogne - the
Carrion, a name which might justly apply to the whole of this region in which war cemeteries are as common as orchards
in the Vale of Evesham. The stoical jocularity of the "tommy" is achingly immortalised in a British cemetery called
Blighty Valley, but alongside almost every small road there seems to be a corner of a foreign field that is forever
England, or Scotland, or Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, India, Africa, Morocco, even Germany, whose cemeteries
announce themselves more discreetly and whose dead are marked by plain black crosses.
Through a veil of mist and thin rain we spot the British memorial to the Unknown Soldiers. It's an appropriately
monumental monument designed by Lutyens in the imperial manner that he developed for the government buildings in
New Delhi. A vast brick-built four-sided triumphal arch towers over a stone catafalque bearing the names of 73,000
men who went missing in action.
Crowned With the Sunshine of Immortal Youth, says the inscription with appalling irony.
Lines of tombstones, the dead on parade, mark the presence of what was left of bodies that could only be identified by
the regimental flashes on their uniforms: "Soldier of the Great War/Known Unto God". On the monument are the names
of missing members of the bicycle battalion. In this cold, this fog, this wet - even today we slip and sludge through the
perfectly manicured lawns - this seems to sum up the entire lunacy; in lanes impassable to lorries, tanks, armoured
cars and even horses, a bicycle seems as much use as a teacup in a forest fire.
They say there is no condition one adapts to so quickly as war, a lesson that's been learned the hard way by the nearby
village of Thiepval, which was destroyed twice in the first war and fought over in the second. But like all the other
villages and towns we have passed through, its face is resolutely cheery - Christmas decorations in the streets, Santas
scaling the walls of the low houses.
I'm an unembarrassed Francophile of the sort brilliantly documented by Posy Simmonds: I like the language (though I
don't speak it well), the oysters in the market, the expert butchers, the choice of cheeses, the sense of place and civic
pride, boules in the town squares under the plane trees, poplars by the roadsides, the architecture (up to about 1910),
much of the landscape and many of the people.
I like too the fact that most small towns have Maisons de la Culture, and
that in a smallish town like Amiens the alternative to The Grinch and The Muppet Christmas Movie is a choice of 12
Chinese films. If there is evidence of a permanent conquest in this much fought-over part of France, it is in the
McDonald's signs which are displayed on the outskirts of every town, the huge carpet, furniture, DIY and wine
warehouses, and the nightmarishly gigantic hypermarkets. As my daughter would say, they'll never catch on with
humans.
