Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
stumps Inverness Copse or Stirling Wood,’ he wrote. ‘And who ordained that these treacherous heaps of filth should be known as Stirling Castle or Northampton Farm?’7
Further south came the Lens coalfield with its winding gear, slag heaps and miners’ cottages, and then the escarpment of Vimy Ridge north of Arras. There the front line climbed onto the great chalk expanse of Artois and Picardy – open, confident countryside which lifted the spirits of soldiers marching down from the mud of the Ypres salient, partly because it looked like the last bit of England that most of them had seen, for it was ‘effectively an extension of the Weald anticline in southern England’.8 Lieutenant G. F. Ellenberger of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry described his arrival on the uplands above the Somme in the spring of 1916:
The poplar-lined pavés straight-stretching across the continuous plains of the North were a thing of the past; the road on which we were wound up and down following the valley on our left, on the other side of which the country rose in delightful hills; in the bottom of the valley flowed the Somme; the land we were traversing recalled the downs of Hampshire, its chalky slopes undulating and covered with coarse grass, and here and there dotted with dark copses and small woods. It was a sumptuous new world in the morning mist, seeming almost as it were home to which we had come from the flat mud of Flanders.9
Charles Carrington of the Royal Warwickshires thought that ‘it might be Kent if it wasn’t Picardy’. And Captain Rowland Feilding, fresh to the Somme from Flanders, told his wife how
The ground is becoming strewn with a great variety of wild flowers. Few and far between are the wild lilies of the valley in bloom, which are much sought after by officers and men, and are therefore very difficult to find.
Another common flower is a white one to which I cannot give a name. It grows from a bulb and has leaves like a daffodil, but much narrower and with a white stripe. If only you were in the country I would send you some bulbs.10
This charming landscape was destined to be destroyed as comprehensively as the Ypres salient had been. Second Lieutenant Bernard Martin, of the North Staffordshires, wrote of his own fifteen months on the front that:
The most dreadful picture in my Somme gallery is a landscape – a wide upland slope, uniformly drab, dirty white, chalk mixed with decaying vegetation, nor a tree stump or bush left, just desolation, with a track named Crucifix Alley for men to walk round or through shell holes to the larger desolation of Delville Wood. The whole blasted slope clotted to the very edges with dead bodies, too many to bury, and too costly, the area being under constant fire from artillery. This awful display of dead men looked like a set piece, as though some celestial undertaker had spaced the corpses evenly for interment and then been interrupted. Several times I picked my way through this cemetery of the unburied. A landscape picture my memory turns up in horror.11
Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, infantry officer and cartoonist, noted the lethal connection between surviving landmarks and enemy fire. ‘A farm was a place where you expected a shell to come through the wall at any minute’, he warned; ‘a tree was the sort of thing gunners took range on; a sunset indicated a quality of light in which it was unsafe to walk round’.12
The front line crossed the meandering Somme, still running more or less due south, before swinging eastwards to follow the high ground above the River Aisne. From there it followed the Chemin des Dames, the Ladies’ Way, once a carriage road built so that the daughters of Louis XV could drive from Compiègne to the Château de la Bove, seat of the Duchesse de Nemours. Although the British passed this way in 1914 and again in 1918, from the Chemin des Dames eastwards the front was French-held. Yet the process of converting landscape to desolation was just the same, and was all the more resented because the men who fought on this blighted landscape had often lived there too. Almost three-quarters of French soldiers were peasants, and the ravaging of their land and the destruction of little villages that had stood on it for a thousand years went to their hearts. In March 1917 a French trench newspaper told how:
The ruins of the village, entirely smashed up by bombardments, scarcely made up, here and there, a few sections of wall with a sinister whiteness, from which emerged, like a sad wreck, the skeleton of a church, horribly bony, torn, murdered, mangled; a fountain and a cross remained intact, side by side, in the middle of the dead hamlet. All around, desperately white stones strewed the ground, smashed up higgledy-piggledy, piled up in heaps, amongst shell holes, plaster, burnt woodwork, with only a few briar hedges to throw their black shadows onto this livid landscape. Anyone who has not seen this little place with the straight road passing its collapsed homes, cannot understand what intense emotion, what dark and chilling sadness, what unspeakable agony is revealed by this vision of desolation.13
Next, the front ran across the dry, chalky plateau of Champagne – like Artois but on an even greater scale – to disappear into the mighty forest of the Argonne. It emerged on the Meuse at the little fortress town of Verdun, its bare uplands ravaged in the fighting of 1916 and, even to my English mind, still quite the most evocative spot in the whole of this belt of murdered nature. The line then followed the right bank of the Meuse past St-Mihiel, and then climbed up into the Vosges, to end, on the hills of the Swiss frontier, in geography almost as unlike that of the Flanders coast as it is possible to imagine.
John Masefield thought that the front could best be understood as a river flowing across the landscape, straight here, meandering there, sometimes wide and sometime more narrow. In some areas normality came very close to its bank. Private Robert Case of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry told his parents in July 1915 that: ‘Back behind the lines there are, except for quantities of khaki, no indications of the biggest strafe the world has known. The land is tilled up to say 1½ miles of the firing line, and in many cases within 1,000 yards.’14 In others, like the Somme sector in 1916–18, repeated attack and counterattack widened the front to what was, literally and metaphorically, a broad marsh. ‘I cannot give you any conception of what the battlefield is like now,’ wrote Masefield to his wife in October 1916,
but if you will imagine any 13 miles x 9 miles known to you, say from Goring to Abingdon, raking in Dorchester, Wallingford, Nettlebed and the Chilterns above Goring, you will get a hint of its extent. Then imagine in all that expanse no single tree left, but either dismembered or cut off short, & burnt quite black. Then imagine that in all that expanse no single house is left, nor any large part of a house, except one iron gate & half a little red chapel, & that all the other building is literally blasted into little bits, so that no man can tell where the villages were, nor how they ran, nor what they were like.15
The Western Front was speckled with architecture which reflected its past. The great squares of Béthune and Arras, with their arcaded walks and florid house fronts – redbrick for Flanders, relieved by honey-coloured stone for Artois and Picardy – were reminiscent of the plaças in Spanish cities, for this was once the Spanish Netherlands. Officers and men with a literary or historical bent, and there were many, mused on architectural detail. As 4/Coldstream Guards slogged across Artois in late 1915 an officer observed ‘a comic incident’:
Sergeant Melton was marching next to me. Behind us were two educated men, Sergeant Oliver and Corporal Newton – who started a discussion about the relative merits of Hazlitt and Goldsmith. To this exchange, which we could not help overhearing, Melton reacted with ill-concealed disgust. When we passed a partly-restored church Oliver and Newton discussed its date. One of them suggested it might be six hundred years old. Melton, who had good eyesight, noticed that the restored front door had a date on it. He half turned round, and, with a rictus of sarcasm, addressed Sergeant Oliver as follows: ‘You great booby, how can it be that old when it has 1857 over the door?’16