Saturday, June 9, 2012
Picardy, France

Bonjour!

On the battlefields of the Somme, the poppies still bloom in profuse clumps as if streaking the verdant green with bloody slashes. Across the miles once ploughed by the regimental boots of millions, we walked in reverential silence to graves where lie the remains of what were once optimistic young men with hearts full of love and heads full of dreams.

But I should begin at the beginning.

A Visit to Picardy:
Picardy, that region of France best-known for its ancient cathedrals and the tragic massacres of World War I, is visited today mainly to pay homage to the youthful dead who went as teenagers mainly, gung-ho into battle, never knowing what the horrors of trench warfare would hold in store for them. As delineated so painfully by the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Seigfried Sasson and Rupert Brooks, they were eager to participate in what they mistakenly believed would be an easy victory over the Germans. War propaganda instigated an enthusiastic response to enlist (some fudged their ages to become eligible) and in posters of the period, their women are seen waving them bravely away. Little did the ‘Tommies’ know that they were marching off with wide grins right into the killing fields of the Somme.

The Western Front and The Battle of the Somme:
In a nutshell, the Battles of the Somme were fought to keep the Germans from advancing further west into France having already reached as far as Verdun. The British joined the French in this effort and fanned out all over the valley of the River Somme in Picardy, France, in 1914. If an artificial line were to be drawn to illustrate the wall of Allied troops that combined to combat the German offensive, it would stretch all the way from Belgium to the Swiss border. This came to be known as the Western Front.

The Creation of Trench Warfare:
It soon became clear to the Allied troops that the Germans were far better equipped than they were. When they became sitting targets for German machine-gun fire, they ducked into any ditch they could find to take cover. It soon made sense for them to actually dig trenches–long tunnels in the earth that could afford them cover, provide shelter and allow for strategizing attack.

After Verdun fell, the French and British believed that the way to keep the Germans from advancing was to make an all-out attack in great numbers. They did this on July 1, 1916, a day that will live in infamy, when thousands of soldiers rushed towards enemy lines straight into the jaws of death and knowing full well that they would be massacred. It has come to be considered one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. This was the Battle of the Somme. By the end of that day, the casualty list was so high that there were not even enough soldiers left to carry away and bury the ones that had died.

In 1917, only after German U-Boats began to torpedo American merchant ships, the US entered the war. With their arrival, strategy changed and by 1918, the Germans surrendered. Lonely Planet states that it is believed that one of the young soldiers fighting on the German side was one Adolf Hitler. The war came to an end on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, a day that continues to be remembered in the Western World–as Remembrance Day in the UK and as Veterans Day in the US. Finally, all was quiet on the Western Front.

At the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne:
At Chateau Peronne, about 50 miles east of the cathedral city of Amiens, is the Historial de la Grande Guerre (the Museum of the Great War). Of the original chateau, only the facade remains (that too almost razed to the ground by German bombardment). On the footprint of the castle, the Historial was built, twenty years ago, to remember French, British and German soldiers who laid down their lives for their countries.

The Wodehouse-Jeeves Connection:
On a gorgeous day, with the sun high in a blue, unclouded sky, we entered the Historial only to confront a special exhibit entitled ‘The Missing of the Somme’. It was a stark exhibition that provided pictures of the British soldiers whose whereabouts have remained unknown. Although tears sprang immediately to my eyes on reading diverse details about their economic backgrounds (so many were educated at public schools and were products of Oxford and Cambridge while others had trained as plumbers, carpenters and masons), the chap who sticks in my memory is one Percy Jeeves who, before the Great War, played cricket at Cheltenham. His name remains immortal because a certain P.G. Wodehouse happened to be at a cricket match in which Jeeves was batting. Three years later, when Wodehouse was looking to name the butler of his character Bertie Wooster, he recalled Percy’s name; and thus was created the irrepressible Jeeves. Of course, young Percy Jeeves himself did not live long enough to see his name made famous in literary history. His remains continue to be a mystery. I like to think they are in some happy Heaven where Percy is chuckling over the adventures of his namesake in Wodehouse’s hilarious novels.

The Museum’s Pits:
In the main hall of the Museum, pits have been created to contain the belongings of the soldiers who brought notoriety to the Somme. In ingeniously conceived ‘craters’, their uniforms, gear, weaponry and personal effects have been carefully arranged to give the viewer a sense of their meagre possessions. The peculiar-looking clubs with rounded maces attached to them were used to kill rats–a perpetual nuisance in the trenches. And the fact that every soldier, irrespective of nationality, carried his tin of foot powder, made it clear that they all suffered painful foot infections from standing for hours in soggy ground. The trials of trench warfare are well illustrated by large numbers of photographs that portray their torment not only during the incessant shelling but also in times of rest when the horrific mud of the winter turned the trenches into swamps.

Along the walls, in glass vitrines, war-time memorabilia from three countries is beautifully assembled and labeled together with pen and ink drawing by Otto Dix and others.

The Poppy Trail and the Poem:
And then there were the poppies: everywhere I looked, the flower bloomed. Not just in the fields and the ditches and the edge of the road, but in every showcase. Taking its motif from the poem by John McCrea, visitors are invited on The Poppy Trail. For us, it began in Peronne, a historic town that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the War. It was as good a place as any to achieve a short background on the fierce and catastrophic battles that brought such an expensive loss of life–a total of three million young men died–French, German, British and from countries that comprised the French and British empires: this includes Egypt, India, Cameroon, Barbados, Burma, Singapore, etc.

So here is the poem reproduced for those who have never heard of it:

        
Remembering my Mother:
In the gift shop, poppies are everywhere–on diaries, file folders, umbrellas, pens, key rings, magnets. There is poppy jewelry and poppy tea paraphernalia–teabag holders and stirrers, even cups and saucers.

It was inevitable that I would remember my late Mum Edith, now exactly three months gone, who had told me that as a child in school in Bombay, in British India, she had made red crepe paper poppies to support the survivors of World War I. Again, tears sprang in my eyes and this time they flowed down for the memory of her loss is still too recent and happy thoughts of her still make me weep. How proud she would have been to know that I had trodden the grounds on which the soldiers had trod whose’ families she had supported by her small craft effort. Yes, the empire and my Mum’s generation remembered the war dead and understood the poignancy of the soldiers’ sacrifice far better than my generation does or the one after me ever will. Although the descendants of the war dead still come on pilgrimage to the Somme today to pay homage to a fallen grandfather or a missing great-uncle, a time will come when these fields will be reduced only to tourist monuments. For me, student and eternal lover of history, the poignancy of the visit derived not just from the very recent memory of my own Mother’s  loss but from the fact that I was able to walk in the footsteps of the fallen and in the trenches dug out by those who were never given the funeral they deserved.

The Town of Peronne:
I had lunch–a Croque Monsieur, which is a French composition of a slice of bread, a slice of ham, bechamel sauce and sprinkled Gruyere–and a salad, in the museum cafe before I wandered about in the Town of Peronne to take in its ancient Church–completely rebuilt after the war–and its Town Hall (likewise). Looking around these villages in the valley of the Somme, it is hard to believe that every single one of them was reduced to rubble between 1914 and 1918 when blood mingled with the placid waters of the river.

After lunch, we got back into the coach and started our tour of the battlefields and memorial monuments of the Somme.

The Battlefields of the Somme: 
Our tour wound its way by coach from Peronne along The Poppy Trail via narrow country roads into the heart of fields that were abundant with waving green stalks of what will be wheat sheaves, come autumn. Occasionally we passed by a field full of oats bordered by the ubiquitous poppy.There are countless gravestones everywhere and any number of cemeteries that one can visit. We chose to see the following:

Rancourt:
Our first stop was Rancourt, where there is a large French cemetery containing row upon row of white crosses. bordered by a private chapel converted into a small museum. Just a few meters away, across the road, is the British Cemetery distinctive for the uniform light gray gravestones each carved with the emblem of the regiment to which the soldier belonged. Just a few hundred meters from that is the German cemetery distinguished by the dark gray broader German crosses and the large brick-colored monument at the very end.

Delville Woods:
Our next stop was Delville Woods where we found a cemetery and a memorial dedicated to the South African soldiers who fought on the side of the British and were massacred in large numbers.

Beaumont-Hamel:
At Beaumont-Hamel, a regiment from Newfoundland in Canada suffered one of the worst catastrophes of the war when the entire troop, hiding in the trenches they had dug, was killed in one fell swoop by German dynamite.

Their memorial is a caribou, a large deer native to Canada, that is placed on a high ridge overlooking the battlefield upon which the Canadians breathed their last. All around them are trenches. The Canadians seem to be the only ones who have retained the grounds exactly as they were (most of the French farmers, in an attempt to forget that the war ever happened, filled the trenches, farmed over them and returned the fields to their former shape). If you climb to the heights of the Caribou Monument, you can see the shape of the trenches and the way they zigzag deep into the earth. If you get down again, you can actually walk in them so that you get a very graphic sense of what it might have been to have actually fought a war from that perspective. The experience was sobering and bone-chilling.

After walking through the trenches, I ventured far into the battlefield to the spot marked by a dead tree which suggests how far the Newfoundland regiment got before they were mowed down so mercilessly. In the distance, is a small cemetery where the remains of those whose corpses were retrieved have been given an honorable farewell.

Ulster Tower:
Further on the Poppy Trail, the route curved along to a tower that is a replica of one to be found in Ireland. It was a memorial to the foreign regiment of Ulster and is, therefore, known as the Ulster Tower.

Thiepval and Sir Edwind Lutyens:
The last stop on our tour was Thiepval where the British have honored the soldiers of their Empire and of the French by building an astonishing monument in memoriam. The designer of this monument is none other than Sir Edwin Lutyens with whose work I am well familiar as he is the architect of the city of New Delhi. As the leading architect of the Edwardian Age, Lutyens was called upon to design a number of memorial monuments after the war and he did so across the length and breath of what was then the British Empire. It thrilled me to learn that the War Memorial that I could see from the window of my flat when I was living in London at Holborn was also designed by him in the aftermath of the war.

As in the case of all the buildings he designed, Lutyens took his inspiration from the local archictectural idiom and used indigenous material to best advantage. It was easily evident to me in the buildings we saw in Peronne and later in another large town called Albert that red brick and cream sandstone had combined everywhere to create dual toned structures. Lutyens borrowed the same concepts. He incorporated the colors of the Picardy landscape as well as the clean straight lines of the buildings (as was seen in the design of the local village churches). However, what he brought to his design is an awesome impressiveness, achieved by the towering height of the monument and the neo-Classical elements he included–such as the laurel wreaths inside each of which is engraved the name of a major battlefield of the Somme and the iconography of Empire as in the British crown and the engravings of the names of all the dead on the wall behind the monument. Another Lutyens creation (seen at every British cemetery) is the stone tablet placed on steps–a sort of plain pedestal to the memory of the dead. On the Thiepval monument, he places the tablet in the very center, immediately below the main arch–a secular altar, as it were, and a nod to the varied religious backgrounds of those who died.

For me, the monument at Thiepval brought the tour full circle–because we had started out by seeing the special exhibition at Peronne entitled “The Missing of the Somme’–and it was when I finally reached Thiepval, at the end of our tour, that I realized that the title of the exhibition was derived from the words engraved by Lutyens at the very top of the monument–The Missing of the Somme. And indeed as one walked down the monument and on to the green grass-carpeted cemetery on the other side, made more sanctified by the presence of a cross upon which was engraved the Sword designed by Lutyens’ contemporary Sir Herbert Baker, we saw gravestone after gravestone with the word ‘Inconnu’ (French for Unknown) or “A Soldier Lies Here” engraved in English upon countless gravestones. Most of the soldiers buried on this ground remain nameless (either because only parts of their bodies were recovered or because they were never found; a French cross or British gravestone merely denotes their former presence upon our earth).

Visiting Thiepval was a hugely sobering experience and, in many ways, the highlight–although each successive battlefield experience only intensified emotionally the feelings that had been stirred by our remembrance of the war and its gruesome outcome. It was at the gift store at Thiepval that I bought a pair of poppy ear-rings–a feminine form of the paper poppy that the British still stick in their lapels every year for a month before they commemorate Armistice Day–November 11. I never did understand the deep significance of that gesture–and now I do! And I feel deeply humbled for it.

By the time we got back on the bus for the long bus ride to Paris, it was 6 pm. Someone brought out a bottle of wine and glasses and we had a small apero to mark the end of our long and thought-provoking day. We stopped en route at an auto stop for dinner (cafeteria fare, but certainly tasty for that) and by 10 am, we were dropped at our destination–the CISP. I had my colleague Jen for company on the walk back to the  Bel Air metro station and in half an hour, I was home.

I am still processing the impact of the day and trying to separate my emotional response from my academic and intellectual reaction to the historical elements of the visit. This I do know. I was enlightened in a way I could never have imagined by this visit and my sensitivity to the need to commemorate the ultimate sacrifice made by those who died has been tremendously heightened. Three years ago, Llew and I had visited the coastal sites in Normandy associated with the sacrifices of World War II and the brave actions of the D-Day Landings. I am so glad that by visiting the Somme, my sense of the history of those two wars has coerced brilliantly to provide me with a much more profound understanding and appreciation of the bloody warfare of the first half of the twentieth century that characterized Western Europe.

I was dead tired when I reached my apartment and it was all I could do to brush and floss my teeth and crawl straight into bed–it had been a long day in more ways than one.

A demain!