Blog Posts

Woodman, Spare That Tree

12/1/2016

I've never found it difficult to write. I could quote Oscar Wilde about "taking a comma out" but, well, a brief glance at the highlights on this page is sure to amuse you:

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/

I stayed up most of the night quite frequently for several decades, and I was busy writing, but that was as much coincidence as cause and effect. For a score or more of years, I only wrote when I couldn't stir up a card game or a board game.

Three or four descriptive paragraphs or a dialogue string seems to me to be a sitting’s worth of work. This gets you within sight of 365 pages a year if actually held to. And yet this is a trivial amount, the size of an email, just an effusion. Ten paragraphs a sitting can be heavy work, but the serious dilettante should reach that pace now and then. And that pace is enough. Writing the words down, or inscription itself, is not the most important part of the craft or practice of writing. If an expression or supposed expression resists itself or seems to need an application of force to put down, then the expression is being assembled wrong and the units need to be looked at again.

Design and material are inseparable. Material defines the range of possible designs, and the purpose of the design is to master and represent the material. If equipoise between material and design is achieved or approached, the execution cannot help being “good.” This is obvious enough in pottery or glassblowing or painting.

The weird, webby quality of language, grammar and words generally helps us forget that writing is also a tactile art. Drawing is a tactile art, and sketching, and calligraphy. Handwriting is not usually called an art but from its first stirrings clutching cigar-sized First Grade pencils, it’s self-evidently a tactile expression. Even when subordinated to the idea, and to the thralls of language and grammar, and in the modern era where the electronic keyboard is king, writing is still a tactile expression. It’s not just a form of reading, or the reverse of the reading process. Writing is an inscriptive act. Its link to ideation is not exact.

Sometime in the early 1960s my mother Hazel decided to go back to work, and invested in a Sears portable typewriter and a typing manual to brush up on her pre-marriage typing skills. My brother Alan and I were still in elementary school, I think. When Hazel went back to work I co-opted the Sears typewriter (but not the manual) and fooled around with it for the next few years typing various things. I didn’t use it for homework—I didn’t want to panic my teachers. I mainly enjoyed playing with this small, comprehensible machine, and working the machinery. Soon I began to get to a decent 5-finger typist stage. However, the 1960 Sears portable was a very basic machine with a beige-colored shield, stiff keys and a very flat click. It was a sad enough little device. The one in the picture here might as well be the same machine.

http://typewriterdatabase.com/

Something told me I could do better. In the summer before the tenth grade, I saw a lightly used Baby Hermes 3000 portable in the window of Charlottesville Business Machines on West Main Street, at that time the town’s main purveyor of typewriters. The color scheme was aquamarine with white keys. The baby Hermes is usually seafoam and mint. I’ve never seen another one in the blue-white variant. But that’s quite irrelevant. At the time, I neither knew nor cared about equipment brands. I believed without judgment that this was probably the finest piece of writing equipment for sale in Charlottesville at the moment, when I saw it in the window.

Unfortunately my paper route career had just ended and I momentarily had no source of money. But it turned out to be ridiculously easy to get a job at Standard Drug on Main Street as a floor mopper, though God knows I despised the very idea. I knew mopping the drug store would be bad, damn bad; mercifully I did not know how bad. My job was literally to wheel a bucket of gray water around and mop the floor, clean up spills, scrub the word “f*ck” off the walls next to the unguarded back entrance to Water Street, and even clean up the vomit in the event somebody’s diseased kid puked on the floor.

You would think that would never happen. Why would kids puke? But the truth, as the years have confirmed, is that kids puke more than you’d think. I found myself mopping up puke in Standard’s Drug. I’m still a little resentful about it fifty years later. But I had a motive.

So I grudgingly counted down from paycheck #1 to paycheck #5, at which point I quit on the spot, turned in my mop bucket, and bought the Hermes in the window on the way home. I carried it home on foot. We seldom felt like spending a nickel on a bus ride. Indeed we walked everywhere we went; if we were in a hurry or needed to get completely across town, we just walked down the railroad tracks instead of the sidewalks.

I had no idea the baby Hermes was a famous typewriter. I never considered trying it out in the store to make sure the keys worked. At home, I was surprised to discover the keyboard was in French. I’d love to have a Hermes 3000 baby portable now, as an artifact. The keys were soft and silky, and the strike had a lovely feminine alto sound very pleasant to the ear. This typewriter received heavy use for years and eventually needed new springs. It could have been reconditioned into a state of perfection but the electric era had arrived.

http://genevatypewriters.blogspot.com/2011/01/typewriter-ephemera-hermes-3000.html

The next machine I used was Karen’s Smith-Corona, which was a good machine.

http://typewriterdatabase.com/

After wearing that one out, I had a year-long run-in with a manual Underwood. I am not sure now what that looked like—it may well have been an Underwood Champion as old as I was. I just don’t remember. It came from a yard sale. People would say, “Man, you type on that?” and I would vainly answer, “Yep, they grow ‘em tough back where I crawled out of the weeds from.”

Obviously at this point I had plunged deeply into the world of second-hand objects. Thereafter, my grad school career was probably literally saved by the lucky discovery of a used IBM Selectric for next to nothing at another yard sale.

A Selectric (later known as the Selectric 1 after the Selectric 2 was released). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

Selectrics were workhorses and not very breakable or prone to wear. My first-model Selectric was my last typewriter and the one I used the longest. It was not lovely but I was grateful to this machine for ticking on and on without a hint of trouble. I used it until 1983, when I got a job with an office and an IBM Dedicated Word Processor, a station I could not have afforded at home.

IBM Dedicated Word Processor. Note “toaster” drive for big 5 ½ inch floppies.
“The Centre For Computing History” - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32890425

The early word processors were clearly not typewriters, and modern people may have trouble understanding how crisp the dividing line seemed to be. Word processors were much closer to computers, but we could not have known that, since the first Amiga and Commodore systems were still a year or two away. These IBM dedicated word processor systems cost over ten grand at the time, much of the expense being the monster printer (not pictured), which was the size of a washtub and probably gave off gamma rays, and had to have its type ball changed if you wanted to change the font.

Since then I have just typed on throw-away keyboards, which have much sameness. And yet even on keyboards and mice, inscription remains manual and is still a tactile act.

I feel I have a firm tactile grasp of what comes up from the keyboard when I practice writing, but little way of typing an explanation of it. It’s certainly not my intention to tell people things. I leave that to others. The bits of writtenness on my screen are artifacts of a given moment. The paragraphs or larger units are a sort of ornament. They are “a thing to look at.”

Such pieces of writing, or word accretions, are not viewed in a vacuum. They are viewed in the material world, possibly by people who are only reading something at that moment because they are sick in bed with the flu and feel terrible.

Or, for a happier image in the Christmas season, paragraphs are like the decorations one hangs on a tree or wreath of thought. The tree or wreath must be there and be fairly stable. Then the artiste can open his bins and baskets of ornaments and strands and work them all over the tree for the desired effect. The result is inevitably a Christmas tree, but hopefully readers trust that the undecorated space behind the words is not empty.

Niblets of typing actually do come from something; they are not ex nihilo. There is an old mnemonic I don’t literally believe in called the Memory Palace, a supposed system for retrieving memories by linking strings of associations together. The ability to regularize strings of associations for predictable results is, maybe, a short definition of what human language is. People, however, have mixed results with self-control, including the control of their memories. But the Memory Palace theory does have something to it; memory connects to the present mainly by strings of association. It is more tree-like than architectural, because it grows new linkages all the time. Ornaments made of words are an appeal to other peoples’ memories. Certainly an odd thing to appeal to, since I cannot see your memory.

My personal mnemonic is not a palace--not even a cottage; styling it a Memory Tree may even be too grandiose. I think I will call it a Memory Weed Lot, where opportunistic memories twine through each other toward the light, growing, dying and seeding season by season.

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
’T was my forefather’s hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not.

George Pope Morris (October 10, 1802 – July 6, 1864) was an American editor, poet, and songwriter. (Wikipedia)

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My Newest Novel - "Exemptions"

11/17/2016

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I'm happy to say my longest-running writing project is finally published. When I started writing Exemptions, I was newly married and still a student, in my first university tour and mainly interested in studying comparative religion. That seems like a different world now, because it was a different world.

The stereotype of the 1960s is a sort of Hippie carnival, as seen in Mad Magazine, but in reality the lost-in-time Hippie moment was surprisingly normal, replete with oxford shoes and button-down shirts and people making no particular effort to look freaky. There were exceptions. They were not the style leaders or thought leaders of the future; they were just exceptions.

Meanwhile, in the place and time Exemptions is set, the Civil Rights Movement was still controversial and endangered, and Women’s Lib, as it was then called, was still in a larval stage and not quite out yet. In terms of real life the hippie kids had beliefs and expectations similar to those of their parents in most ways.
And yet something was happening -- though we still don’t know what it was. Electric media were certainly involved.

The original title of the book, when I started it in 1972, was Fission. My drafts were labeled under that title throughout the 70s and into the 80s, when the manuscript was renamed Astral Bodies. The book has been as long as 350 pages and as short as 50; and the time I spent on it was just the luxury of selfishness and pleasure, and nothing to do with improvements or betterment.

Not a descriptive title, Astral Bodies had to be replaced. All three section titles, "Head Raid," "Werebabies of the Reich," and "Thermonuclear Xanadu," were considered as main titles. The family brain trust came up with the title Exemptions instead. This is partly a reference to the draft-exempted status of students, though the student draft deferment was soon to end.

Earlier versions of Exemptions were either more experimental or more overtly novelistic. Somewhere back in the lost drafts would be the first manuscript I ever submitted, and ten years later other versions were still being mailed away in manila envelopes, as the practice then was. In retrospect I was undeservedly fortunate to have these earlier versions politely ignored. They probably weren't really worse but I would have been deprived of the decades-long game of playing with this material. I hope readers will have fun with it too.

Exemptions

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Octoblog

10/23/2016

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Autumn in central Virginia; the first frost is probably a week or more off but the trees are already shedding their partly turned leaves. For many of the trees around here, leaves begin going limp in September and then drop off quietly and unostentatiously in October.

After several hot days, the wind turned Friday evening and cold air from West Virginia is flowing over us. A perfect day for working in the yard.

Side view of the main vegetable garden today, 65 degrees F

So that is what I did. I finished mowing the back yard and the garden, which is still supporting a lot of unfrozen hot peppers and a last few tomatoes.

Last year we ordered a packet containing 8 or 10 heirloom pepper seeds attributed to the Central African Republic. These produced two or three plants which eventually bore a total of a half-dozen one-inch peppers. I saved and dried the seeds from the half-dozen pepper fruits and planted them this spring. Almost every saved seed produced a plant this year, and these plants are producing far more African peppers than last year’s plants — industrial levels. They have been peppering since July. The picture below was taken in a chilly drizzle Friday.

I doubt the explanation for this year’s success was overnight natural selection. More likely, the key to success was more seeds, leading to a hundredfold improvement.

This African pepper is fairly hot but no more so than a cayenne. The yellow color is pleasant and artistic. A single pepper thinly sliced and de-seeded makes a good individual dose. There is a strong hard-to-name flavor other than heat, as found with habaneros, and all-in-all a great fresh hot pepper.

Central African heirloom hot pepper

We also planted two varieties of cayenne, one a fancy heirloom and one from the Milmont Garden Center in the Shenandoah Valley. Fresh cayenne is a gastronomical necessity and not a luxury.

Also essayed was a recherché New Mexico chili which has produced only a few fruits, but with intricate heat and flavor. This variety will have its seeds saved and next year we will see if more seeds are the answer to production again.

Two varieties of cayenne

As it happens, we've found this year that we have also raised a fine crop of snakes. The larger and more sporting varieties are correspondingly smarter and do not intend to be seen. Total copperhead sightings in the garden were one last year and none this year. The smaller house-and-garden snakes are regular discoveries and not really shy, and they seem to enjoy as many insects as they can lay their tongues on.
The snake in the photo, which short of better identification I have dubbed a hybrid tea snake, climbed a bean vine to get well up into gnat territory, for its favorite prey.

If your garden is not raising snakes, something is terribly wrong. Gardens attract the snake clan’s favorite food, bugs, in insane and incalculable non-Pythagorean numbers.

Unmortared or free-stone walls, good dirt, and no chemical pesticides are the first steps to cultivating snakes. Insect predation is certainly a literal purpose in the life of snakes, and snakes are worthy of their hire. If you don’t get snakes after a year or two, then it’s on the snakes to keep trying. Human existence is predicated on some other purpose anyway.

On a more authorial note, my novel in progress, formerly known as Astral Bodies, has, I think, reached its final title, which will be Exemptions. "Astral Bodies" was at least the third or fourth name of this novel, which I started in the 1970s, and never seemed quite satisfactory. Submitted to the Brains Trust for consideration, fresh potential titles included “Diffusion,” “Nuclear Diffusion,” “Thermonuclear Xanadu,” “Werebabies of the Reich,” “Head Raid,” “Misplaced Comas,” and “Student Exemption.” While not as obvious a title as "Thermonuclear Xanadu," which remains my personal favorite, Exemptions is appropriate enough and has a literary flavor. I think I'm going with it. Publication as an ebook on amazon.com is imminent.

Does everybody find titles this difficult? In my salvage bin there are pages from a manuscript I began in 1988 and worked on spasmodically for the next four years, which has never been called anything but “The Baltimore Dog Novel,” a frankly terrible title. TBDN (for short) once reached a length of 400+ pages, and I have yellowing typewritten pages to prove it. The total length of the surviving manuscript is closer to 100 pages, as scattered fragments.

Then there is my manuscript of "Geology Tours Unlimited," which is another appalling title. GTU was also once over 300 pages. The surviving elements are half that long. Hardly a tragedy. Shorter, less elegiac texts may well be preferred these days, and comparative brevity may be a wave of the future.

To my sensibility, such as it is, titles are more essential for short stories than for novels, often supplying the key to the lock. Novels may just require an identifier or mnemonic. Thomas Pynchon’s novels illustrate this perfectly. Gravity’s Rainbow is an ideal title for that book, an inspired title, but the book itself was unaffected by its name. Meanwhile V, Mason & Dixon, Vineland, and The Crying of Lot 49 are just good mnemonics. You have to call them something.

The real owner of the garden

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Long Time

8/29/2016

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It has been a long time since my last blog post.

I find that it takes a certain amount of interest in some given thing to write even one paragraph about it. Lapses in writing are not necessarily a sign of disinterest, however. Experience itself can take up all the time that might have been spent writing. But when you can garden, why use gardening time to write? The experience of heat and bugs, blood and sweat, the sight of the endless battles between various forms of life slugging it out in, on, and above the soil, the stupendous importance of vagrant thunderstorms, can easily overwhelm the urge to punctuate.

Natural Garden Still Life

At the end of my last blog post my son Alex and I were headed for the Belgian border and the Waterloo battlefield. I would have written, in a Waterloo post, how frighteningly small we found the Waterloo battlefield. The armies there were not small but the space they fought across was compact and petite, even by Virginia Civil War standards. Those huge armies must have carpeted the ground in such a confined space.

Waterloo Battlefield from the Lion’s Mound

The Lion’s Mound, Roughly the Same Size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, Now Covers the Exact Spot from which Wellington Watched the Battle of Waterloo

But that’s quite enough for now about the extinction of all of Napoleon’s hopes. A year has passed since we saw Waterloo.

This summer I visited family and friends in Honolulu, and spent a week in South Kona as well. There could be no better company on earth. We stayed in an airbnb house steeply pitched over a black pebble beach, looking west.

Black Pebble Beach

Life since I got back home to Central Virginia has mostly been about weeds, gardening, and light sculpture.

Light Sculpture with Rocks

Light Sculpture with Found Objects

In May, before I went to Hawaii, I finished a second edition of The Southern Skylark, first published in 2013. This month I swapped out the first edition on Kindle Publishing for my new second edition. (I'll be setting up a CreateSpace paper version on amazon.com soon.) The book is a couple of pages longer now. I don’t delude myself that anyone else could tell the difference between the two editions but there is one fairly fundamental point. There is a reason why Augustus Hingely believes his lecture on “The Lives of the Poets” is important enough to cross the Atlantic for—Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry.”

Sometimes we take things for granted—"A Defence of Poetry" is a fervid and rambling document, a stream of thought, which resembles in some ways a psychedelic re-rendering of the Declaration of Independence. In the course of his human events Shelley wanted to disband the European past as he understood it, and to this end he held a number of truths to be self-evident, which did not stop him from stating some of these truths specifically anyway.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Wikipedia)

Shelley was Jeffersonian to start with, but he took Jeffersoniansm much farther. For instance, Shelley’s essay states as a self-evident truth the complete equality of women and men. It’s a very early example of this idea, in British essays anyway. Actually I suppose this idea was always common among a certain class of women and even among some men, and may rate as one of the very oldest ideas in the history of the human mind. But socially, in Shelley’s time the self-evident truth of sexual equality was regarded as a peculiar secret. There even existed a vast shaggy edifice of religious, legal, societal and folkloric custom relegating women to second-class prerogatives in most spheres of life. How quaint everyone must have been in the old days.

Shelley proposed cultural revolution—including sexual revolution—and exalted liberty in the abstract as the highest motive imaginable. In some ways "A Defence of Poetry" is, or was meant to be, a watershed document not unlike the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming freedom of thought and expression, social liberty and equality, in almost hallucinogenic terms. It was radical then and it is really just as radical now.

A Head of His Time

Sadly, Shelley did not live to publish this essay. As with most of his writing, possession of the rights to publish reverted to Shelley’s father rather than Shelley’s wife. The elder Shelley felt deeply moved to suppress it, and "A Defence of Poetry" was not finally published until after he died.

Mary Shelley (Wikipedia)

Thus, at the time in which The Southern Skylark is set "A Defence of Poetry" was only known to a circle of Romantics in a growing aesthetic movement. Hingely has merely undertaken to lecture on this unpublished work and on the life of Shelley and others. It seemed to me this needed a cleaner exposition; hence my second edition.

The Southern Skylark

It’s strange to reflect that I started writing The Southern Skylark in 1976. It has gone through dozens of drafts. I wrote it for my own pleasure. Over the years I've rewritten and re-edited it times beyond recounting, before finally committing to publication. The book has a serious core, but its humor still tickles me.

I'm going to be completing another book in the category of “endless fun” soon. Its working title has been “Astral Bodies” since 1973 but I don’t think that will be its final title. It feels like I have rewritten "Astral Bodies" 24 or 30 times anyway, if not more, and it is still such a hoot to me that I have no actual motive to ever finish it. But I have been selfish enough, I guess. "Astral Bodies" is a memoir of 1969-1973, telling the tale of some freakish years. It is full of selfish people.

Of course not all selfishness is bad. Enlightened selfishness or self-centering is a worthy goal of consciousness. “Know thyself,” a maxim said to have been inscribed above the forecourt at the Temple of Delphi, has been attributed to at least 7 ancient Greek sages, according to Wikipedia. And it is likely a much older thought than that. Some have suspected that the more one knows about oneself, the less self remains—and that if we came to truly know ourselves, the process would turn us into someone other than we were—we would then be someone else. This has always sounded like tremendous fun to me, but it may be that some of us have less to lose than others by indulging in such exercises.

That is partly what the temporarily-named "Astral Bodies" appears to be to be about. In the original draft of 1973, I selected the 1969 to 1973 time frame because that was when the story was. Over the years since, the period from 1969-1971 has revealed itself to have been practically a generational spacetime discontinuity, almost a fairytale “before and after which” moment such as would not recur again in American culture until 2001, complete with terrible tragedies and senseless acts but also with considerably more hope and optimism than many folks like to allow themselves to feel in 2016.

The 20th century had to end before I finally realized that in "Astral Bodies" I was once again writing a historical novel—even if I had to wait for history to catch up. Remembering those lost times from an almost laughable distance, I find myself thinking it would not be a bad thing if the people of the present could flush away their fears and recover some of the old sang froid that characterized those years.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 8

4/10/2016

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This is Part 8 of my series of posts relating the visit my son Alex and I made this past summer to Belgium and Northern France. At the end of my last post we were heading back to le Village Gaulois for a good night's sleep after spending the day in the vicinity of Verdun.

Our plan for the next day was to explore the eastern end of the Argonne Forest battlefield. We would be following, by car, the route taken by Frank Wolinski, Karen’s maternal grandfather and Alex’s great-grandfather, who as a sergeant in Company C of the 47th Infantry Regiment went over the top in the first wave of the attack on the Argonne Forest on September 26, 1918.

Years ago, I wrote an essay on Frank Wolinski’s experiences in the Great War. Frank Wolinski participated in all three American campaigns, was decorated twice and promoted to platoon sergeant, and then took part in the occupation of Germany, returning home in the summer of 1919. My original essay was a response to a family request and too quick a job, but everyone was very kind and no one complained. The subject however is a good one, and since Alex and I were in France, here was a clear opportunity to visit some of the scenes and rewrite the essay.

For my newly published narrative on Frank Wolinski's experiences during the Great War, click here.

We did not visit the 47th Regiment’s training area near Calais, and we drove heedless past the scenes of the Aisne-Marne offensive. We did not investigate the area south of Verdun or the St. Mihiel Salient. We picked up Grandpa Wolinski’s tracks at the road junction between Marre and Esnes, a mile from Le Village de Gaulois, driving D38 to Esnes and turning north on D18 toward Malancourt, which quickly put us on Hill 304 where Frank Wolinski’s regiment spent the night of September 25, 1918, before the Argonne Forest attack.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

The Battle of the Argonne Forest lasted for over six weeks of continuous close combat on a 25-mile front, and ultimately involved close to a million U.S. soldiers, tens of thousands of French soldiers (mostly artillerists) and over half a million German soldiers. Tens of thousands of lives were lost and a couple of hundred thousand more lives ruined on the destroyed landscape of the Argonne, whose pre-war population had been completely displaced years before, and tens of thousands of German and French lives already lost in 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917.

British and European histories regard the Battle of the Argonne Forest as one of several huge offensives in late 1918 that liberated German-occupied France, collectively destroyed the ability of the German Heer to defend the borders of Germany, and led to the Armistice on November 11, 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles the following year. In an exchange of letters with General John Pershing after the war, Marshal Ferdinand Foch suggested that all the offensives composed one continuous battle, which he suggested could be called the Battle of France. By another reckoning, British historians tended to consider the Second Battle of Cambrai in early October 1918 and the dissolution of parts of the German defense lines in northern France as the death-knell of the German position on the Western Front. Objectively it is reasonable to say the whole front was collapsing from the English Channel to the Alps, at a terrible cost to all sides.

Americans tended, for a time, to view the Battle of the Argonne Forest as the unique killing stroke that ended the war. It had been the largest battle in American history by far, and like other Great War battles seemed calculated to boggle the imagination and defy description. The scale of American losses was likewise staggering. From the U.S. perspective, the Battle of the Argonne Forest seemed truly singular. President Wilson’s triumphant imperial reception in Europe after the Armistice, when the heads of the victorious nations met to redraw the map of the world, strengthened the sense that the Argonne Forest was the climax of the War to End all Wars and a decisive battle that changed world history forever.

American travelers returned to Europe in droves in 1919 and 1920, and for a time the Argonne Forest battlefield was high on the tourist agenda. It was a famous place, and the huge American military cemetery next to Montfaucon was a pilgrimage site for countless mourners. The tourists and the mourners brought back lots of fresh unrusted debris which can be found in many a Great War militaria collection today. A number of monuments were commissioned, including the magnificent Art Deco eagle gates at the main American cemetery, and the American Memorial Tower on Montfaucon, mate to the Verdun lighthouse just out of sight in the distance beyond Le Morte Homme.

But before these monuments could be finished, the nation lost interest in the war. By the time the last U.S. occupation troops returned from the Rhineland in 1923, Wilson was gone and the parades were over. The country had already shrugged off Wilson’s League of Nations, the Fourteen Points, and Wilson’s definition of progress. The war had become, not exactly an embarrassment, but something no longer convenient to examine closely. Veterans’ relief organizations and the divisional associations petered out of existence, or turned into reunion clubs, and the Great War passed from historical climax to old news while the commemorative marbles were still being carved.

Nothing has occurred since to reverse the early wave of disinterest that pigeonholed the American phase of the Great War as a historical curiosity. The facts of the war had been a nasty shock to American idealism. The Allied diplomats were the first to turn their backs on Wilson at Versailles, rejecting the President’s plea that peace without justice would be no peace at all. Instead the Versailles Treaty became a poisonous brew, about vengeance on Germany more than anything else, though also ignoring the interests of some of the Allied nations as well, notably Japan, while fractionalizing Central Europe and the former Ottoman Empire, acts whose repercussions are very much with us today, and ignoring the claims of colonized and enslaved peoples everywhere. Then, after the world rejected the Fourteen Points, Wilson returned home to find the United States rejecting the League of Nations. Americans generally speaking now wanted to put the whole episode behind them.

Wilson’s defeat was a world tragedy then and remains a tragedy now. Some might say it is not too late—would still be surprisingly timely—to dig out the Fourteen Points and try all fourteen of them. Over a hundred thousand Americans died for that and lie in France today, dream unfulfilled. More than two hundred thousand were injured.

Nonetheless, there was something to the original public sense that the climactic battle of General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force was historically singular and exceptional. A century later, the Argonne Forest is still the largest land battle in American history and may remain so forever. War itself is no longer done that way. The scale of its fury also remains unmatched; the Argonne Forest concentrated as many American casualties into six weeks as the Vietnam War did in ten years.

The road through Esnes is beautiful today, though deserted.

Leaving Esnes. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Esnes in 1918 (US Army Official Photograph, from Bach & Hall)

Hill 304 is still a mass of scars and trenches, though under pines now; heavy shelling in 1916 reduced its elevation by 10 meters. Not far from the French monument, Frank Wolinski would have watched the whirlwind bombardment before the September 26 attack.

Hill 304 Monument. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Old Trenches on the Summit of Hill 304 . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

It would be possible and in fact easy to walk the track of the 47th Regiment’s advance from Hill 304 to its terminus at Brieulles-sur-Meuse. A forest service jeep trail on Hill 304 connects with the secondary roads that meander toward Nantillois. We were driving, however, and D18 goes to Malancourt on the 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division’s line of advance.

The map link on the Brieulles website, expanded and converted to satellite view, shows the terrain.
Malancourt has a remarkable memorial recording that in 1918 an American division was destroyed on the exact same spot a French regiment was destroyed in 1916—the spot in question being Montfaucon.

German Bunker Converted to a War Memorial . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Memorial Plaque at Malancourt . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Before going to the American Memorial at Montfaucon, we wanted to retrace Grandpa Wolinski’s route. D168 took us east across the grain of the 47th Regiment’s advance, where a ruined roadside crucifix provides a bit of a landmark. The roadcut may or may not correspond roughly to the first line of German defenses.

Roadside crucifix. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Hill 304 from the Crucifix; First German Line Somewhere in the Foreground. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Here are two brief videos I shot, the first one north of Hill 304 #1, and the second from Montfaucon.

D168 goes to Béthincourt at the foot of Le Mort Homme, in the center of the 80th (Blue Ridge) Division’s line of advance. However, just before one reaches Bethincourt there is an unpaved road to Cuisy, angling across the 4th Division sector perfectly.

Road to Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Alex’s navigation skills put us across the main German forward defense line, the Volker Stellung, the focus of the American and French barrage on the night of September 25 and early hours of September 26. The dirt road is still cratered here and the chunks of old concrete give the location away.

Approaching Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Since the trench system has been filled in and plowed over for a century, there was nothing to see but us. And apparently we were very interesting; the farmer at the top of the hill came out of his barn to see who could possibly be driving across his wheat fields in the middle of the morning in this absolutely deserted corner of France. We waved as we rattled by in a cloud of dust, but by the expression on his face he was too astonished to react. As the farm road wound back toward Cuisy, the American memorial at Montfaucon became visible.

Montfaucon tower –looking NNW just SE of Cuisy . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Pavement resumes at Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Cuisy during the battle, with supply train to Nantillois in background. (Official US Army Photo, from Bach & Hall).

Not far to Montfaucon. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The American monument. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Monument stairs. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Click here for a brief video I shot from the top of the American monument.

View toward the Meuse. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In front of the memorial are the bunkers that destroyed the 79th Division.

Deadly bunkers. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Danger. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Behind the tower (see next three photos below) is a really fine ruined abbey, which had already been demolished repeatedly before the Jacobins finally finished it off at the end of the 18th century. Its bits and pieces go back to Charlemagne.

Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We of course were as happy as a pair of larks, since that is our natural state, but gloomier people might have found something to wonder about. The country south of Verdun seemed thinly populated to say the least, but from Le Morte Homme and Hill 304 across into the Argonne it was as if hardly anyone wanted to be there -- whether deserted or avoided or just out of the way. The little villages were populated but no one was stirring in them. There was no one at the monument. The roads were deserted. We had the terrain to ourselves. It was heavenly.

US Army topo, 1938.

We were navigating by an antique U.S. Army topo map, and I remember telling Alex we ought to expect Nantillois to have grown and ramified and to correspond poorly to our ancient map. Nantillois was spookily precise, however—rebuilt in situ where the original destroyed village had been, no larger and probably very little different.

Nantillois. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The road to Brieulles. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The road from Nantillois to Brieulles passes by the 4th Division commemorative obelisk. The division’s veterans’ association purchased a roadside plot for this memorial opposite the Bois de Brieulles.

4th Division Monument. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Bois de Ogons in the background. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Grandpa Wolinski's company, Company C, spent the better part of three weeks in the Bois de Brieulles, before ultimately capturing Brieulles itself, at which point the company and the 47th Regiment as a whole had taken so many casualties that the unit was pulled out of the line—the last regiment of the original first wave of the attack that was still in the field.

Brieulles. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Modern Brieulles is a dusty place probably twice the size of the severely damaged Brieulles of 1918. The Bois de Brieulles too is larger today than it appears to have been in 1918. The other dire names from the battle, the Bois de Ogons, the Foret de Fays and so on, are not found on today’s Google maps but these places are still there. We saw them dreaming in the sun. There are some unanswered questions that might take a few hours to settle—by all contemporary descriptions from 1918 the north edge of the Bois de Brieulles should have the town under observation, but the Army topo shows the end of a low ridge between the bulk of the wood and the town. The northern edge of the wood was certainly blasted away in the battle and the modern edge of the wood may not be in the same place.

We moderns civilians also tend to forget (if we ever knew) how infantry weapons and artillery actually work. There is a tendency to mentally condense the landscape to Hollywood proportions, but on the battlefield 500 yards is well within lethal range, and anything you can actually see is inherently far too close.

Town center. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

A critic might describe Brieulles as sleepy, but like everywhere else we went in France and Belgium the people we met were wonderful. We were at first assumed to be German (we were driving a Volkswagen) and were politely directed toward the German military cemetery, but when we explained that we were Yanks, we awakened the memory of Yanks having been there before, and we were redirected in the opposite direction toward the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. The surprise inspired by the discovery that we were American reminded us once more, as if we needed reminding, that while our fellow Americans may flock to places of cultural significance such as Paris, the French back country has no such cachet and the Great War has too slight a grip on the national consciousness to generate tourism.

Nowhere was this more painfully obvious than the American Cemetery. As at Ieper, as at the Somme and Verdun, here too the dead have been aesthetically collected from all over the neighborhood, rearranged, covered with fine white marble and rationalized back into some semblance of military order.

Monumental gates on D123. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Eagle. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

The gardeners mowing the verge of the road stared at our vehicle as if we were apparitions driving through on a phantom coach. One gathers that visitors are rare enough.

It was a long way to Waterloo, so we drove on.

The Old Roman Road to Somewhere. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 7

1/1/2016

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This is part 7 of my series of posts relating the visit my son Alex and I made this past summer to Belgium and Northern France. At the end of my last post we were leaving Châlons and heading toward the village of Marre, 12 km from Verdun.

The sun went down as our GPS sought the location of Marre.

Moonrise Along the Road to Marre. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Marre is a cluster of 4 or 5 farmhouses. We had reservations at Le Village Gaulois, a strange idiosyncratic hotel somehow re-imagined from the Gallic dark ages. We were too late for dinner but we were welcomed as if we lived there. Le Village Gaulois radiated a rare sense of psychic self-sufficiency. We settled down on the terrace, procured ice, a corkscrew and eau gazeuse, blew out the candle, and reveled in the quiet starlight and the thunderous baying of a pair of 120-lb farm werewolves in the adjacent yard, who could plainly smell foreigners and wanted it known.

Le Village Gaulois: Five Stars in our book. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The Restaurant. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Since it still exists, Marre is not technically one of the many villages detruits, villages that were totally destroyed in the battles for Verdun and never rebuilt. The rebuilt Marre is roughly equidistant from the shattered ruins of the Fort de Marre to the southeast and Le Mort Homme to the northwest, the low hill that saw some of the bitterest fighting of the Great War. Marre is in the middle of the western end of the Verdun battlefield. Today it is a lovely and thinly-populated farm landscape. In September 1916 it was a landscape of ruins from which French artillery managed to defend the line of the Meuse River just to the north.

There had never been anything quite like the battle of Verdun. The ancient fortress of Verdun had been modernized over the last quarter of the 19th century to include a vast ring of underground concrete forts, marked on the map below as red pentagons. This massive feat of defensive engineering was designed to make Verdun unassailable. The fortifications, however, did not deter attack. The core battlefield at Verdun, an area of approximately 100 square miles, was quickly reduced to a landscape of overlapping shell craters. The overall battle area totals about 300 square miles, and includes many areas still infested today with unexploded shells and other ammunition, including poison gas shells. Verdun was its own planet. Western history might even be divisible into before Verdun and after, the way Americans see the Civil War. The scale of the disaster at Verdun was quickly obvious to the world at large and came to define the national nightmare of both France and Germany.

Verdun Map. (Wikipedia).

Our first stop on leaving Le Village Gaulois was the town of Verdun, with its medieval cathedral, which dominates the heights of the area and thus attracted a surfeit of shellfire in the Great War.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

The rebuilt cathedral still bears the marks of artillery strikes inside and out.

Direct Hit inside the Cloister. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We roamed the hill on foot, particularly enjoying the Tolkienesque victory monument.

Verdun Memorial Stairs. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

First we saw Fort Vaux. The Verdun forts seem large on top but they are vastly larger underground, like cement icebergs showing only a fraction of their bulk. The builders of the Verdun forts sank vast chthonic edifices many stories deep, from which underground tunnels radiated into the surrounding landscape to create an octopus-like array of turreted gun positions. It is more than slightly creepy, as if the builders already knew life in the open was going to be impossible in the coming war.

Above: Exterior of Fort Vaux Pretty Much Beat to Rubble. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Aerial view of Fort Vaux in November 1916 (Wikimedia).

Les Combattants Anciens and Their Environment - Then (Wikipedia).

Outside Fort Vaux in 1917 (Wikipedia).

Interior of Fort Vaux Today. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Vaux -- Exterior Observation Turret. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Vaux -- Machine Gun Position. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Bits Hither and Yon. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Tree and Bunker. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We also visited Fort Douamont, the key position in Verdun’s ring of forts.

The Entrance to Fort Douamont. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Fort Douamont Before and After (Wikipedia).

Fort Douamont Under Attack (Wikipedia).

Subterranean Douamont is an eerie labyrinth of tunnels, machinery, and inexplicable pits several stories deep. It was in many respects an underground city, meant to be self-sufficient for months at a time in the event it was attacked.

Down another level. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Dropoff to Who Knows Where, Already Three Stories Underground. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Machinery for Driving the Giant 155 mm Gun Turret. Photo by Gary Mawyer

Streets of the Underground City. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Douamont Exterior. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

On top of the fort. Video by Gary Mawyer.

Sign Explaining Where Not to Walk. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Gun Turret Atop Douamont—One of the Many. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

This housing is scored with direct hits and even contains embedded shell fuses.

The Verdun park has lots of walking trails and back roads and on one of these we found the rear entrance to Fort Souville. After the fall of Forts Vaux and Douamont, Fort Souville and the Fleury ridgeline were for a time the center of the battle, the last obstacle for the German attack.

Rear Entrance to Fort Souville. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Today this leafy enclave is naturally air conditioned by the steady rush of cold air pouring out of the entrance tunnels.

The whole ridge is a tumbled mass of shell holes, trenches and ruins, among which we cautiously ambled for hundreds of yards.

Trench near Fort Souville. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The attack on Fort Souville included shelling by a 15-inch naval gun mounted on a railway carriage. The pits blasted by this gun are still distinguishable from the smaller shell holes by their depth and size. Souville was brought under direct infantry attack but did not fall.

Landscape view drawn in 1916, not to scale, to show the Verdun area in relief. (Wikipedia.)

We also visited the Verdun Ossuary, a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture.

Interior of Ossuary. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

An ossuary is a place to store bones. This one has the bones of about a quarter of a million soldiers who died at Verdun, and is adjacent to a vast military cemetery for some tens of thousands of the identified French dead. There are plenty of other cemeteries, some vast, others small, at Verdun, but the ossuary is the gathering spot for the skeletons of the anonymous--be they German, French, Austrian, Moroccan, Senegalese, and others as well. The ossuary is lit with an uncanny red-orange light.

A Glimpse of the French Military Cemetery from the Ossuary Lighthouse. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Beneath the side corridors of the ossuary are bays in which the bones gathered from the battlefield over the years are heaped. The remains can be viewed through heavy glass windows at ground level. Kneeling and peering in, one sees cairns of bones through each of the many windows. At the ends farthest from the lighthouse the bins are less full, awaiting further finds. There are still tens of thousands of soldiers missing.

The Verdun Ossuary is a natural continuum of the medieval cathedral. While medieval cathedrals display the relics of saints, at Verdun sainthood has been democratized to include everyone. Though mostly French and German, the ossuary draws on all of Europe and the European world empire. Verdun was arguably a violent denial of liberty and fraternity, but equality was finally achieved. There is no central altar, no priestly elite, no liturgy; all were crucified, each in his own way.

At night the Ossuary Lighthouse sweeps the battlefield with its crimson beams as if to summon the angry dead. We did not stay for dark. We returned to Le Village Gaulois for an absolutely astonishing meal.

The Dining Terrace. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

It was an opportunity to let our hair stop standing on end, and contemplate life.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Having dined and wined very satisfactorily, we headed off to the villages detruits of Cumières, in the lee of Le Mort Homme, and Forges, at the western hinge of the 1915 front. At Forges there is signage to help indicate where things were, but there's nothing there now except trees and undergrowth slowly breaking down the shell craters. We found a dirt forest service road up onto the Mort Homme ridge that gave us a sense of the area. This fairly straight road cut through miles of superimposed trench lines from different weeks or months of the battle, riven masses of old trench snaking off in all directions through the pine plantations. As recently as the 1960s nothing but the hardiest weeds could grow on this poisoned ridge, repeatedly saturated with every form of toxic gas and chemical explosive known to either side. The pines were the first successful plantings. Late in the day we reached Le Mort Homme.

"They did not pass." Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In countless assaults, the German army finally seized this ridge, from Forges to Le Mort Homme and Hill 304. In countless counterattacks the French seized it back, at which point the hill may very well have become the most bitterly contested piece of real estate in all of human history. The monument atop it is appropriately nightmarish. The hill itself is a maze of decaying trenches, roots and vines, undergrowth and shell holes, a landscape rearranged by man into an obstacle course, around which we stumbled cautiously until darkness approached.

Road from Le Mort Homme to Esnes. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

But it is hard to stay somber for too long in the supernatural beauty of rural France. It’s a lovely country, and we had an appointment with an ice bucket full of champagne and the hilarious farm werewolves back at Le Village Gaulois, who would once again render the night melodious while we quietly discussed deep matters in the starry darkness.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 6

11/15/2015

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This is part 6 of my series of posts relating the visit my son Alex and I made this past summer to Belgium and Northern France. As I write this, France is much in the minds and hearts of many of us, and my thoughts and prayers are with the French people.

At the end of my previous post we were leaving Reims. Meandering down side roads through forets full of renards, we headed toward Epernay.

Un renard dans le foret. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

The region was replete with wineries and tour routes, and it would have been next to impossible to drive in the wrong direction.

The map. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

The green on the above map represents the principal terroirs of arguably the most famous grapes in the world.

Hautvillers would be a great place to stay for a few days. Among its treasures is the Abbey of Saint Sindulph, before whose altar is the grave of Dom Pierre Perignon (1638-1715).

Saint Sindulphe’s, also known as the Abbey of Hautvillers. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Grave of Dom Perignon. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Wikipedia has a balanced view of this legendary character popularly credited with inventing champagne.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_P%C3%A9rignon_%28monk%29

As Tacitus once noted, success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan. Bubbly wine is prehistoric, but technology was needed for bubbly wine to become champagne, including the invention of thicker bottles to reduce the risk of explosion, a development that came after Perignon’s time. Perignon’s contributions seem to have been taste, method and planning; in effect, the ability to control the fermentation reactions, the ancestral Méthode Champenoise itself. As a refiner of existing techniques, Dom Perignon should be the patron saint of editors. The official patron saint of editors, Saint Bosco, is weirdly shared as the patron saint of chocolate syrup. To the Pope I say, “Please let us have Dom Perignon instead.” Perignon’s miracles have always been obvious, even to nonbelievers.

The Abbey of Hautvillers is modest, charming, and musty.

Abbey of Hautvillers. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Founded more than a century before the birth of Charlemagne, the Abbey of Hautvillers has been burned and sacked or at least vandalized over and over again. It spent 200 years as a mere tumbled ruin among the roadside weeds. But for some reason this abbey has always been rebuilt whenever circumstances allowed. Several stone blocks belonging to the original 7th Century foundations can still be seen today.

Where Charlemagne may very well have tethered his horse. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

One of its treasures is a piece of Saint Helena.

Fragmentary remains of Saint Helena. Photo by Gary Mawyer

This seems almost staggeringly appropriate, since Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, may have started and certainly promoted the whole industry of gathering relics. Her expeditions to the Holy Land were conducted at a time when the Gospels were only a couple of centuries old. The pickings she came across were amazing.

Relic veneration was no transient mania. Hundreds of years after Helena, historians recorded the return of the survivors of the First Crusade to their native cities in Northern France and Flanders — bands of sunburnt and bearded warriors garbed in oriental robes, carrying in their luggage an incalculable wealth of mummified heads, petrified hearts and other organs, femurs, teeth, finger bones, toe bones, the original spear stuck into Jesus on the cross, and anything else of the kind they had uncovered. But the real tsunami of holy relics came after the fall and sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, on April 12, 1204 CE, a date that will live in infamy. Before then, Crusaders had to be content with things St. Helena did not find first. But in 1204 her whole vast collection, which included most of the True Cross, all the Holy Family’s next-of-kin, and several entire disciples, was carried off to Western Europe — and her own sacred remains too, looted along with the rest. Such a supernaturally exquisite irony deserves more than one toast in the best possible champagne. Sometimes history actually makes perfect sense.

On to Epernay.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Here and above, Avenue de Champagne, lined with the mansions and cellars of the great champagne barons. Photos by Alex Mawyer.

The explosion in Epernay’s wealth dates from the popularization of champagne in the 19th Century. Aggrandizement continues. We reached Epernay in the afternoon, and found it calm, sleepy, somewhat deserted. Despite the wealth on display, Epernay is a rural place. There are plenty of organized cellar tours, but we had just missed the last tour of the day. Epernay has any number of walk-in tasting rooms. You can wander at random and see what happens, and no harm done. We repaired to a wine store and found the shelves filled with legends and myths and holy relics, all for sale at local prices.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

We did well. There was also a friendly and relaxing café with exquisite local macaroons close by, where we could catch our breath and calm down.

I remember Epernay as quite lively – that is, everyone we met was vivacious — but objectively Epernay was not at all crowded.

Quiet Epernay street. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

We left town in late afternoon, idly fossicking toward Châlons-en-Champagne, sort of, by way of yet more champagne bushes on the hillsides of the Côte des Blancs.

Church rising from the grapes. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Romanesque church door. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The late afternoon sunlight brought out the saturated colors and hidden shadows in the terrain. Without the signposts, we might have wondered where exactly we were.

One wonders where one is. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

One wonders where anyone is. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

View toward View toward Châlons-en-Champagne. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

The land glided along silkily, its meanings concealed. Nothing has really been really forgotten. But the sense of superposition, of a layered past, is inherently the outsider’s sense. To the native initiated in this soil and air, it is all one thing.

Châlons, down the traditional invasion route from Epernay, shares in common with a lot of Northern French towns what a science fiction writer might call “The Armentieres Paradox.” No doubt there is a modern Châlons with 3 or 4 Starbucks locations and a row of fine restaurants near the university, a couple of multiplex theaters and several streets for boutique shopping, three or four well-heeled suburbs, and an outer ring of malls and car dealerships. But we never saw this side of France, not in Armentieres and not in Châlons. Instead we invariably drove to some dominant gothic spire and parked.

Châlons has two of these stupendous monuments. The first we encountered was Notre-Dame-en-Vaux, stuffed into a modern vehicular intersection like the stake in a vampire’s heart. We were late in the day and the basilica was closed, and we were very, very sorry, because this was no medieval afterthought. It was a ship-of-the-line among basilicas, its construction having begun in 1157 and finished in 1217.

Basilica of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux at Châlons-en-Champagne. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Plainly the original Châlons road hub is now more a traffic obstacle than a traffic facilitator. No matter where you are going, you have to circle the basilica first.

We walked toward the Grand Place and the cathedral. Châlons was successfully old. It desperately calls for a closer look.

Streets of Châlons. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The streets lead to the Hotel de Ville and the Grand Place and then on to the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Châlons, consecrated in 1187 by Pope Eugene III. The cathedral begins as a Romanesque edifice and continues as a Gothic one until the far portico is reached, which was built in the Baroque style. Said to have an unprecedented amount of original medieval glass still in its windows, the Cathedral of Saint Étienne begged a few hours’ study but, alas, was also closed and our regret was keen. Châlons is still calling me to come back.

Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Châlons at the end of the day. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Architecture as a kind of madness. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Glass of all eras. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Anciens combattants. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Next to the cathedral, atop an elaborate Great War memorial, old soldiers were marching toward their croix de bois in nearby Verdun, where we were headed next.

Châlons, or at least this part of it, closed before sunset, except for the astonishing revels of a squad of French Marines, their girlfriends and some hangers-on at the only café that was still open in the Grand Place. Whatever we had to drink was unmemorable and too warm, and we quickly realized the kitchen staff was consumed by the Rabelaisian task of keeping the Marines supplied; it would take hours for us to be served. We left.

We had reservations in the basically nonexistent village of Marre, 12 km from Verdun. That was why we had come to France in the first place. It was time to go there.

Sunset on the road from Châlons to Verdun. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 5

10/14/2015

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This post is part five of a series describing a recent visit my son Alex and I made to Belgium and France. In my first four posts I described our several days in Brussels, Ypres, the Somme, and Amiens. In this post I discuss our visit to Reims (also known as Rheims.)

After several days basking in the silky, languorous gold and green landscape of Ypres, the Somme and Amiens, a landscape painted again and again by artists of every stripe, our drive to Reims proved a bit disorienting. It almost felt as if the crayonists forgot what they came for and neglected to sketch that part, a tour through "Unpainted France: The Neglected Corners."

That being said, many interesting sights and gustatory delights awaited. First stop, for lunch at Saint Quentin, did not disappoint.

Hunting for lunch. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Four noble cheeses in a case at a Carrefour. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

But before lunch, we visited the medieval Basilica of Saint Quentin. Saint Quentin sits squarely atop a high point, predictably obscuring the original Neolithic fort and Roman castrum. As the first photo above shows, we parked blocks short of the Grand Place and then found ourselves wandering uphill.

There is an interesting explanation for the location of the Basilica of Saint Quentin on the exact summit of town: presumably the oxen carrying the corpse of the saint, who had been murdered on the way to Reims, from village to village stopped on that exact spot. This would have been late in the third century.

Basilica of Saint Quentin. Facade under repair. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The basilica has a great selection of bones to look at, a fine maze, a lot of early painting, and in retrospect may be my favorite of the cathedrals and basilicas we saw on this trip — although this is a humble claim because ours was a fast tour — we either did not find or were unable to explore quite a large number of cathedrals and basilicas, each with its own treasures and magic.

Part of an earnest selection of the mortal remains of Saint Quentin. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Saint Quentin, the maze. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Saint Quentin: Pieces of basilica everywhere Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Pierre D’Estourmel and his daughter Adrienne. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

I contemplate moving into the basilica. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Alex contemplates moving into the Hotel de Ville. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We knew nothing of the history of Saint Quentin when we were there. Perhaps one might recommend that tourists not necessarily pay too much attention to the histories of all the places they visit. Straining the experience of a place through the mesh of past events is not the same as being there. Like Shanghai Lil, Saint Quentin has quite a past. But facts and histories are not really knowledge if one has no context for it.

Saint Quentin the town struck us as a great place to live, big enough but not too big, with neighborhood features of real interest. There was no evidence anyone in this town had deliberately set out to work themselves to death but all the shops were open. One can get a really good coffee within a block of the basilica. The post office is conveniently located. The local macaroons are quite special. No one appeared to care if everything I said came out in a hopeless mash of asyntactic French, Spanish, hoots and muttering mixed with American. Aside from the flower beds, much of the Grand Place had been converted into a tropical desert-themed playground, half Tahiti and half North Africa, complete with little sand dunes. As Alex said, the people of Saint Quentin obviously care a lot about children.

And so on to Reims, an important administrative center for Roman Gaul and then for Christian Gaul, and subsequently the ritual coronation venue for the kings of France. To call Reims the heart of the ancien regime would be no exaggeration. Getting the dauphin crowned here was the aim of Jeanne D’Arc’s quest, and no causes live longer or more vividly in point of imagination than lost causes.

Cathedral of Reims, Having a Makeover. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

The cathedral towers at Reims lack spires because the spires the cathedral builders designed were beyond their ability to erect. This outcome is not unique. There are a number of similar examples. I find them most evocative. In an earlier post I referred to Gothic architecture as crazed with ambition and I think that is a fair characterization. Cathedral builders erected structures at the outer limits of what they could imaginably achieve, and sometimes a bit beyond. Their motives were many, conscious and unconscious. Monumentalism is a species-wide impulse with examples from the Pyramids of Egypt to Angkor Wat by way of Tikal, New York, and Washington D.C. The gothic cathedrals are among the few that incorporate a sense of esthetic delicacy as part of their design, suggesting the arboreal weightlessness of the primordial forest. But this is an inside effect. It works inside the space. From outside, the great cathedrals cannot disguise their sheer mass. To drive this mass upward by arch and spire and reticulated finial after finial is less an attempt to fool the viewer’s eye than to gratify the builders’ passion for weightlessness. One wonders if beneath their vaulted and motionless heaven, their fixed sky, they dreamt of hanging their cathedrals like pendants by strands of finest gray-white limestone, as heavenly stalactites.

Reims Cathedral, lost in space. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Light from darkness Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Treasures of the past. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Amazing beasts. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Broken demons. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Awaiting restoration. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Hammered columns of spalled granite. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Reims Cathedral exhibits many galleries full of priceless debris, and apparently lies under perpetual reconstruction. We were amused to see several Volkswagen-sized sculptural elements made of fiberglass, light enough for three or four workmen to lift, being trundled to the façade as part of the restoration. This cathedral has been destroyed many times and for as many reasons as the builders had for putting it there. In olden days destruction was largely limited to what could be done by beating on it or setting fire to it and collapsing the roof. In modern times artillery proved more effective. A few old photos from the 1920 Michelin Guide make this shockingly clear.

The last photo is most telling. After changing hands a couple of times, Reims was in No Man’s Land for much of the Great War. Pushing the Germans out of artillery range of Reims was a prime objective of the French army. The battles for Reims did not subside until the success of the Aisne-Marne Offensive in 1918, which included large numbers of American troops fighting under French generals. Few if any of the U.S. troops fighting in the Aisne-Marne Offensive would have had any idea of the prehistory of that battle or its connection to the history of the cathedral.

Reims is also a hot spot for wine tours, particularly champagne tours. We seriously considered enlisting in one of these tours but a little research revealed that the tours are mainly headed off to Epernay, the veritable Mecca of champagne. The tours sounded great. For a not unreasonable sum one can be chauffeured by knowledgeable guides from estate cellar to estate cellar. But Epernay itself is replete with open tasting rooms, so a tour is not vital. All one really needs is a thirst. We set off for Epernay with thirsts whetted to a razor-keen edge, and that will be the subject of my next blog post.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France - Part 4

9/9/2015

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This blog post is part four of a series describing a recent visit my son Alex and I made to Belgium and France. In my first three posts I described our several days in Brussels, Ypres, and the Somme. This post describes our visit to Amiens.

Amiens, a middle-sized city that has spilled out onto the surrounding landscape in the last half-century, is the capital of Picardy. Jules Verne lived here. The two world wars of the 20th century brought Amiens its share of Jules-Verne-like adventures, with futuristic airships dropping bombs and modernistic armies creating havoc and extensive redevelopment opportunities. Some 1500 years earlier Attila the Hun ravaged the area, and a millennium or so after that the Spanish occupied it during the Wars of Religion. In short, Amiens has a long history.

As it happens, we didn't wind up seeing much of modern Amiens. Our GPS veered us off the highway, through a neighborhood where the old city walls must have stood, and into the center of ancient Amiens, a rocky bluff above the Somme River with the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the summit.

Amiens Cathedral of Notre Dame, West Façade. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Amiens Cathedral, begun in 1220 and completed in 1288, is larger than it looks. It is the largest cathedral in France in both height and internal volume. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris would fit inside it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral

Our hotel was almost adjacent to the cathedral. Alex asked at the hotel desk what else there was to do in Amiens and we were advised not to miss the nightly fete in the cathedral square, which included a light show. We assumed “fete” meant jongleurs, rat catchers and Morris dancers prancing about to sackbut and flugelhorn, while buxom soutanes and flirty chasubles kept the famished mob happy with stoneware tankards of malted beverage. We resolved not to miss the medieval cosplay by any means. Having sampled some quite decent beer at the café across the street, we headed out to walk around the cathedral and down into the formerly medieval town. Circling the cathedral on foot, one soon gets an idea how this structure just goes on and on.

A convex area. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

A concave area. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

A straight stretch. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The remains of the old town below the bluff include ruins, fragments from many centuries that have been repaired and re-repaired over and over again, obviously to no avail. And yet they still stand and someone is even mowing the grass in anticipation of the next tenant.

Ruins of Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The youths of the ville were fraternizing.

Youth is wasted on the young. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Down the side street shown above, we found the canals of the Little Venice of the North. The Somme is navigable below Amiens.

Canal-side living, Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

There were hints of antiquity.

Not a cathedral. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

A street like this goes somewhere. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The discovery of restaurants. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Colors of Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We found a restaurant we liked the looks of and dined on rustic French cooking like grandma used to make. Above us was the cathedral again. We had come in yet another circle. While we ate, we could not help reflecting that the day had begun at Mud Post and Plugstreet Wood, and that we had been down the Hawthorn Mine Crater and across Delville Wood, with almost nothing to eat but a lot of stupendously good cheeses, very nice slices of cold sausage and some remarkable local wine, along with the best efforts of various bakeries and coffee shops and such adventitious beer and macaroons as we had been fortunate enough to find in the wilderness. Now, climactically, we saw next to our canal-side table the Cat of Amiens, a not very famous animal that haunts the canals of the Venice of the North.

The cat of Amiens. Video by Gary Mawyer.

It was a rare vorpal cat with transdimensional skills, as the photo below shows.

Vorpal cat heading for other realities. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The cathedral above us. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

This was the second cathedral we had seen on top of a bluff and would not be the last. Eventually we came to think these high seats are planted thusly for a reason. What, we speculated, is under these cathedrals? Something is—and by the law of superposition, it has to be something a lot older than cathedrals.

The waitress asked us where we were from, and seemed slightly taken aback that we were Americans. Alex’s French is natural enough to get him pegged vaguely as a regional citoyen of some sort but beyond that, apparently not many Americans slog through Amiens. “How did you like Paris?” the waitress said.

“We didn’t go to Paris,” Alex said.

“You came to Amiens instead of Paris?” she said. She seemed truly floored.

This was my opportunity to unleash the only complete French sentence I know: “Je ne regrette rien.” Otherwise it would be une faute objective.

It was now time to head off through the dusk to the cathedral fete. Imagine our surprise to find no jongleurs, no soutanes or even demi-soutanes. Instead, a projector array had been set up around the square to recreate the original polychrome in which the medieval cathedral had been painted when it was new. A long melodious narration accompanied the play of lights, with atmospheric Debussy and plainsong accompaniment. The show was divided into chapters, between which the projectors recreated cloudy moonlight blowing across the façade of the cathedral, representing the passage of time. The colors faded. They were lost. Then they were back, garish and somehow deeply moving, the veritable colors of the past, the face of the church as the 13th century knew it. Only 30 or 40 people at most had come out to see the cathedral fete. This seemed a shame—the effect was utterly strange. The music was trance-like, the narration liquid and at least to me unintelligible, and the flow of light and shade magical, cloud and color on the stony heaven and the carved arrays of the holy, the cloud of witnesses as it was imagined in sandstone in Picardy before Constantinople fell. A stranger thing than this would be strange indeed.

The next morning the cathedral opened with the sun and we were able to go inside.

Cathedral aisle. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The columns in the cathedral have taken a frightful beating over the centuries and it is a good thing the original masons designed them to survive the abuse. It was as if they knew somehow that time would be unkind.

Original stonework. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Effigies abound. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Bands of the saved, gathered above tablets commemorating the successful payment of indulgences. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Headlessness proved to be a recurring motif here, outside the building and inside.

Saints at the gate, everybody bring your head. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Judith and Holofernes, 18th Century style. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The reason for the emphasis on heads is the presence in the building of the veridical head of St. John the Baptist, collected from Jerusalem by Saint Helen and then looted from Byzantium by Picard Crusaders and brought back to Amiens in triumph as a most telling souvenir, to become the chief treasure of the cathedral.

John the Baptist as he is today. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We were coming to realize that bodies and bones are fundamental properties of cathedrals and part of what they have always been for. It does make one a little jealous. Bands of armed Crusaders are most unlikely to go scrabbling after my fossilized teeth and tidbits in centuries to come, much less hire artisans to embed the fragments in gold and declare them to be enshrined treasures. I went wrong somewhere. I don’t know where.

Golden shrines don’t seem to counteract the weird humility all bones have, and if that was not really John the Baptist it was surely somebody, somebody whose destiny was more than a trifle odd either way.

When hedgehogs went to church too. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Cathedrals are designed to channel light, and the columns in this one seem to resemble great groves of primordial trees; the naturalism is intense and includes plants and animals, as well as people, devils and angels; indeed in the original conception the idea seems to have been to conflate the Bible and the church establishment along with the local notables, the general population, and the beasts of the fields and fowls of the air, not to mention the crops and the weeds of the roadside and also every invisible or nonexistent thing the builders believed in as well. The cathedral is then an encyclopedia, mainly visual rather than textual, and in some ways a replica of the world, or an insistent reconfiguring of it. I particularly liked the hedgehog pictured above, but one does not want the intensity of the details to obscure the effect of the whole.

Architectural confidence. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Stunning windows. Practically no original glass remains. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

As Alex remarked, the 13th century builders of this cathedral had the same intellectual capacity we have. We may look at our science and literature, not to mention our entertainments and technological tools and toys, and the vast data stream of modern life, and wonder what these old-timers filled their empty heads with. But that would be a mistake. Their heads were as full as ours, and if we want to know what they thought about, they built it for us to see — the stupendous font of imagery in the Cathedral of Amiens, the geometry and the masonry, the arts and crafts on display, as well as the bones and the layered memorials of thirty generations.

But the day was young and the weather was perfect and it was time to be off to Reims, as will be described in my next post in this series.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France - Part 3

8/22/2015

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This blog post is part three of a series describing a recent visit my son Alex and I made to Belgium and France. In my first two posts I described our several days in Brussels and in Ypres, also known as Ieper.

Leaving Ieper on the road to Armentières, we soon noticed more French and less Flemish in the roadside signage until the Flemish language disappeared altogether and we were in France. We intended to drive more slowly through Armentières and get a passing look at the place, and thus wandered off the high road. The somewhat quiet neighborhood in which we soon found ourselves had plainly been designed by one of the less flamboyant surrealists. Though pleasant enough in its own way, one could not help wondering where everybody had gone. Had we found the Twilight Zone? Could this be Armentières?

Photo by Gary Mawyer

No, not quite. However, it was not far to Armentières itself.

Armentières: A famous crossroads. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Armentières is a bustling town of modest size through which armies have been retreating or advancing briskly since Julius Caesar divided all Gaul into three parts. Originally part of Flanders, Armentières and surrounding French-speaking territory became part of France as late as the 17th century, as the Wars of Religion finally burned themselves out.

Armentières: the Grand Place. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We headed for the open countryside of northern France, famous for its slag heaps—once a bitter terrain in 1915, where battles at Loos and Arras and Neuve Chapelle and Vimy Ridge set the tone of stalemate in the Great War.

1915 New York Times map (Wikipedia).

This section of the Western Front in 1915 was the testing ground for the Anglo-French theory that sufficiently heavy attacks could, by sheer brute force, drive an opposing army of approximately equal strength out of heavily fortified trench works. This is, of course, a military truth. Ultimately nothing can be successfully defended if an attacking force is willing to pay the price, as history has ever shown. For Americans the best clue to the battle mentality of 1915 may be the island battles of the Pacific War - Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa - where the entire surface was fortified, there were no flanks, and all attacks were frontal.

The 1915 battles, though largely unsuccessful for either side, seemed promising and led directly to what we call the Battle of the Somme. Participants referred to it as the Big Push, a term borrowed from the Battle of Loos, which had been the previous Big Push. The Big Push along the Somme began on July 1, 1916, and was officially declared over on November 18, 1916. Its goals, the recapture of the towns of Péronne and Bapaume, were not achieved, but the front was pushed six miles eastward, and the British and French generals and politicians regarded the Big Push as a victory. The British press and public also regarded it as a victory, although an increasingly terrifying one as the true casualty figures slowly trickled out. July 1, 1916, is often called the worst day in the history of the British army, with 60,000 troops killed, wounded or missing. The war would end before the story of that day became common knowledge.

Despite the usage of the iconic date of July 1, there was in fact no one “Battle of the Somme”. On the southern end of the Somme front, British and French troops, supported by technically superb French artillery, inflicted tremendous losses on the German army at little cost to themselves, and advanced through the first, second and third defensive lines to reach open country, where they could see German reservists in the distance desperately trying to dig a new trench line. On the northern end of the Somme front, the Big Push resulted in the slaughter of the attacking battalions and no gains at all. How the participants experienced it depended on where they were. Fresh attacks to lop off sections of German line were planned at once and the Big Push went grinding on for months, thirty yards here and a hundred yards there, almost all of it uphill, until winter and manpower exhaustion brought the thing to an end.

Classic Somme scenery: Hawthorn Ridge looking toward Beaumont Hamel. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

As it was in 1916. (Imperial War Museum)

We came in through Bapaume and thus reached the site of the last stages of the battle first. On the whole, now that the trenches have mostly been filled in and the fortifications plowed over, we could see no special visual logic to the Somme battlefield. It’s a 15-by-8-mile oblong of chalk downs studded with woods, farms and creek bottoms associated with the Ancre and Somme rivers. The ground rises from west to east. The piecemeal capture of this terrain took months and over a million and a half casualties on both sides. Some of its landmarks are vantage points on higher ground, or sites of climactic events, while other landmarks are the scenes of particular disasters or happenstances, or became famous by anecdote or association. As a tourist, it would take at least three full days to work one’s way across the entire battlefield and have a look at all the famous locations.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme

We turned off the Bapaume-Albert road, basically the axis of the British attack, to see High Wood and Delville Wood. These two woods were fought over for many weeks at the height of the battle and are legendary elements of the story. High Wood is fenced off and private but Delville Wood is a park, the land given in perpetuity by France to South Africa to recognize the South African soldiers who helped recapture it.

Delville Wood Memorial. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In the battle, Delville and High Wood were so devastated by bombardment that few trees survived. However, Delville Wood does contain one tree that was not destroyed in 1916, called the Last Tree.

The Last Tree. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The ground in Delville Wood is deeply rutted with old shell holes and former trenches.

Uneven surface of Delville Wood. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

It’s a lovely quiet spot. The other visitors were a party of three South Africans and a young British couple. A French family was also enjoying the shade at a picnic table in the parking area beyond the wood. We had plans to spend the night in Amiens and thus only a day, so we opted to head next to Thiepval Ridge and the Memorial to the Missing. If one considers the Albert-Bapaume Road the principal axis of the Big Push, Thiepval Ridge to the north was one of the principal obstacles and was quite slow to fall.

We mentioned to the South Africans that we were headed for Thiepval Ridge - a conversation inspired by the fact that one of them was my age and, like me, not willing to scramble over the park wall and thus obliged to go out the gate.

Rightly or wrongly, we were using the GPS in our rented Volkswagen. The South Africans in their rented Land Rover obviously decided to follow us, perhaps in the touching belief that as Americans we must already know everything. The GPS soon turned us off the main highway and onto a dirt farm lane in the vicinity of Mouquet Farm, partially blocked by farm equipment and by some French farmers vainly trying to wave us back.

I waved back too as Alex accelerated in a cloud of Somme chalk dust, the South African Land Rover right behind us. “This area is famous for the hundreds of tons of unexploded ordinance on it,” I said.

“There’s one now,” Alex said, pointing at a protective tractor tire surrounding a monstrously large artillery projectile. No doubt that was what the French farmers were on about, and the South Africans, we noticed, pulled over and stopped.

“I bet they’re trying to buy it,” I said.

I would have photographed it but Alex, with the survival instincts of a Great War ambulance driver, had the Volkswagen bounding across the ruts in a spray of gravel towards the GPS’s promise of a paved road. Perhaps the best thing.

The Thiepval memorial was roped off from visitors, shielded in scaffolding and undergoing a good cleanup in anticipation of next year’s Somme centennial. A groundskeeper on a lawn tractor was methodically towing a ground-penetrating radar set back and forth across the parking lot, searching for any leftover unexploded shells that might still be buried there. His face was serious and he was paying the most studious attention to his equipment, which made me wonder if someone with a magnetometer had perhaps come through and gotten a nasty shock.

Like the Menin Gate, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing is a cyclopean brick-and-marble portal to the next world, bearing the names of 72,195 missing British and Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave, sometimes referred to as “the Missing of the Somme.”

See http://www.amazon.com/The-Missing-Somme-Geoff-Dyer/dp/0307742970

Thiepval Memorial (Wikipedia)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiepval_Memorial

From there we pushed on north along the Thiepval Ridge to Thiepval Wood. One of our main interests in going to the Somme was to visit the section of the battlefield where J.R.R. Tolkien served as battalion signals officer of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Tolkien, age 24, arrived at the Somme on July 14, 1916, two weeks after the Big Push began, and stayed until the end of October, two weeks before the battle ended. His battalion was first thrown into the fight at Ovillers, near the Albert Road, with astonishing casualties, and then sent into Thiepval Wood opposite the formidable Schwaben Redoubt. The Schwaben Redoubt had been one of the first day objectives on July 1, and the first attack scarcely got out of the edge of Thiepval Wood before it was massacred. The dead from that attack and several attacks since then were still littering No Man’s Land uphill from the British trenches when Tolkien arrived.

In front of Thiepval Wood. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The wood itself was also gone by then. Thiepval Wood was scoured earth torn by ditches and bunkers housing thousands of British troops, from which at irregular intervals new waves of attacks were sent forth to leave new scatterings of casualties and corpses across the foreground. The top of the ridge in the photo above was unreachable when Tolkien was there. Weeks turned to months. When the Schawben Redoubt finally fell, there was little left of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.

At the end of October, Ronald Tolkien contracted potentially lethal trench fever and was evacuated to England. He spent months in hospital and most of the rest of the war recuperating. In 1917 he wrote the first of his great literary passages, The Fall of Gondolin. By then his old company had achieved annihilation, its last handful of soldiers joining the rest of the missing.

See http://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Great-War-Threshold-Middle-earth/dp/0618574816/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1440014543&sr=1-1&keywords=tolkien+and+the+great+war

The influence of the Great War on The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion can hardly be missed. The area in front of Thiepval Wood was the original Mordor, close to the German word for murder, “mord.”

And yet everything passes, and this is the face of the original Mordor today:

Poppies on Thiepval Ridge. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Today it is easy to walk to the top of the ridge and see what must have been a machine-gunner’s dream, looking back toward the edge of Thiepval Wood.

Alex on a walk into Mordor. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Of course the Germans were being murdered on just as liberal a scale. The embarrassment of their situation, as an uninvited foreign army in somebody else’s country, sometimes obscures the reality that the Allemande had a cause too—the German imperial cause. Of course the German soldiers of the Great War were as patriotic as the other soldiers, but there was more to their desperate plight than patriotism. Barely half a century earlier, within living human memory, Germany had been a region of small, poor, politically weak principalities rather than a modern state. Since then Germany had unified and rapidly developed into an industrial giant, a nation of great wealth and power, opened up a world trade, embarked upon the adventure of overseas colonization, and declared itself an empire and the foremost military power on the European continent.

Die Proklamation des Deutschen Kaiserreiches by Anton von Werner (1877). (Wikipedia)

All those things had been gambled away in the 1914 invasion of Belgium and France and concomitant war with Russia. By 1916 Germany’s colonies were gone. German world trade was gone. Access to raw materials for industry was gone. The emperor, the army and the government rightly feared that if Germany sued for peace, the German people would rise up in disgust and throw the monarchy and all those who depended on it out of power. Before the war, the largest political party in Germany, the Social Democratic Party, was anti-monarchical, parliamentarian, and inclined to Marxism. Only war fever stood between the Kaiser’s government and collapse, and the last card in the Kaiser’s hand was the possession of most of Belgium and a large part of northern France, hostages for some yet-unimagined potential outcome that would not spell the end of the Imperial Reich.

German War Bond poster (Wikipedia).

In common with other Lost Causes buried in the ruins of history, it can be hard to imagine what the principle of Empire meant at the beginning of the last century. One way to reconceptualize the Imperial concept is to consider the nature of the armies that faced each other at the Somme. The British army, supported by tens of thousands of Chinese organized into labor battalions for engineering purposes, drew its manpower from the farthest reaches of the world: Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, shock troops of the Empire; insanely valorous soldiers from India like the famous Deccan Horse who charged High Wood with pennons fluttering, to be cut to pieces by machine gun fire; Gurkhas famous for their trench raiding skills; Fijians and Maoris, men of legendary strength, manning the big guns; alongside the French, the Algerians, the Senegalese, the Annamese… this is what “empire” meant, a world in arms. This kind of world domination, which seemed to have come so naturally to Great Britain, had long been the well-stated goal of the Kaiser’s Reich, and the Somme was now part of the price for not having succeeded.

The Hawthorn Ridge mine crater was one example of the horrors the Germans faced. British engineers set off 8 large and 11 small mines under sections of the German line on the first day of the Somme. The Hawthorn Ridge explosion remains to this day one of the largest conventional explosions ever managed. Those on top of it never knew, but those around it were alerted at once that the impending attack would be on a huge scale.

The explosion of the mine under Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt I, 1 July 1916.
(Photo by Ernest Brooks) Imperial War Museum.

A century later, the crater remains - still huge, and requiring a scramble to get into.

Steps to Hawthorn Ridge. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Crater at top of rise, shrouded in trees. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Into the crater. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The July 1 attack on the newly blown Hawthorn Ridge crater was a failure. The goal was to swarm past the crater into Beaumont-Hamel. Few of the British and Commonwealth soldiers even reached the German wire. One of the most poignant monuments on the Somme is the Newfoundland Memorial, with its bronze caribou. The original trenches and shellholes have been left to nature in this park. The Newfoundland Regiment, part of the second wave, got about halfway across No Man’s Land, suffering 90% casualties. Months would pass before Beaumont Hamel was finally captured. By then it was just a smear of brick dust, part of the landscape of Mordor.

Newfoundland Memorial. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Our plans were to spend the night in Amiens, so we put the Somme behind us and drove on through Albert. The enormous battlefields of Picardy behind us seemed as peaceful and charmingly pretty as a landscape could possibly be. Is it really only our imagination that furnishes the farmland of the Somme with ghosts?

In the next blog post we will turn our attention from the Great War to the great cathedrals, and from battlefields to champagne fields, before circling back to sites of conflict.

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Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.

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