SALE, cheap, Desirable Residence. Climate Warm: fine view. Splendid links close by, good shooting. Terms moderate. Owner going abroad. Apply Feddup, Gordon Farm, nr Wipers.23
There were older defences too. Coucy le Château, the finest medieval castle in France, lay on the British line of retreat in 1914. One of its lords had married Isabella, daughter of Edward II of England, and was created Earl of Bedford. His house already had the proud boast:
Roi ne suis, ne Prince, ne Duc, ne Comte aussi, Je suis le Sire de Coucy.24
The castle’s methodical destruction when the Germans withdrew from the area in 1917 offended the capable and soldierly Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the local army group commander, who protested to his own high command that it had no military value. Henry V’s men knew the castle at Peronne, and when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers moved down south in mid 1916, they
saw Corbie across the Somme. It cold-shouldered Henry V when he marched along its ridge, to turn at Agincourt on the host that beset him. But from what unknown church near-by did Bardolph take the golden pyx?25
Captain Reginald Tompson, a railway staff officer in 1914, was delighted to find himself in the village of Le Bourget, just outside Paris, the scene of a battle in the Franco-Prussian War. ‘This is the very place immortalised by de Neuville in his picture Le Bourget’, he exulted in his diary. ‘I must go and see the church. They tell me the scene is exactly as in ’70.’26
Landscape stirred more than history. Once, when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were on the march:
There were few men within range of seeing who did not look wistfully at a wayside house of red brick and tiles, built to an English design, and set in an English garden …27
Men easily found familiar comparisons. The old hospital in Corbie was ‘something on the lines of St Cross in Winchester’, the stream running through Lumbres would make ‘an ideal trout stream, if only it was properly cared for’. Scottish infantry sitting about their billets in St-Omer made it seem like a Lanarkshire town, and Aubers Ridge looked just like the Hog’s Back between Guildford and Farnham.28 The villages on the Somme were ‘each … as big as Cholsey, reckoning from the church to half way to the asylum’. Second Lieutenant H. M. Stanford, Royal Field Artillery, told his parents that the Flanders countryside ‘is very flat and full of dykes and canals but one can see fairly high hills out to the E. and N.E., otherwise it might be part of the marshes at home for the most part’. In the trenches, however, ‘the mud becomes worse than the Aldeburgh River, and that’s saying a great deal’.29 John Masefield, on the Somme as a correspondent in 1916, described the Ancre running down the western edge of the battlefield, ‘beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames runs at Goring and Pangbourne’.30
Most combatants wondered if the blighted landscape could ever be restored. ‘We used to say that it would never be reclaimed,’ wrote Henry Williamson,
that in fifty years it would still be the same dreadful morass … It was said that this land … would not be cleared up for 100 years. But after the armistice Russian labourers came over in thousands, also Italians. I saw them digging with long-handled shovels, first collecting great dumps of wire and yellow unexploded shells. Rifles stood on thinning bayonets in places all over the battlefield in 1924, marking where wounded men had fallen. Dugouts were beginning to cave in.31
In some places, like the zones rouges at Verdun, the land was simply cloaked in pine trees after the war and left to the patient hand of nature. Some villages were so comprehensively destroyed that they were no longer worth rebuilding in a post-war France whose manpower losses had reduced pressure on the land.
When President Poincaré gave Verdun its Cross of the Légion d’Honneur he prophesied that ‘this ravaged countryside will recover the laughing face that it wore in happy times’, but the years have proved him wrong.32 The villages of Douaumont, Fleury, Vaux, Bezonvaux, Louvemont, Ornes, Haumont, Beaumont and Cumèries were never rebuilt. Small wonder that the female figure in Rodin’s bronze La Défense, sited symbolically outside Verdun’s Porte St-Paul, is ‘screaming in grief and anger at the sky’.33 But elsewhere his optimism has been justified, as John Masefield prophesied while the war was still in progress.
When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places … will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps … In a few years time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.34
Major General Sir Ernest Swinton thought that Masefield was right. In Twenty Years After he wrote that:
Time has worked its changes. The battle-fields today are green and gold again. Young trees are everywhere and the desolate waste of shell-hole and mud has given way to pasture-land and waving corn. Proudly on the heights stand the memorials to the fallen, and in the valleys and on hillside peacefully lie the silent cities where they rest.35
The Western Front was created by the war’s opening campaign. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had been a humiliating defeat for the French, and at its end France’s two easternmost provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, were ceded to Germany. The burst of French patriotic revival which followed the defeat died away in the 1890s, its demise marked by the Dreyfus affair and the increasing use of troops against striking workers. But the French army had been modernised, with the 75-mm quick-firing field gun, the justly celebrated soixante-quinze, as its most visible symbol. Serious-minded officers studied march-tables at the new staff college, railway engineers threw a network of track across the countryside to make mobilisation and concentration easier, and military engineers scrawled their own geometry on the bare slopes of western Lorraine, glaring out to the new border.
But despite a properly thought-through system of conscription which filled new barracks with fresh-faced youths, France was destined to remain weaker than Germany: neither her demography nor her industry could keep pace. Part of the solution was to offset French weakness with foreign strength. In 1892 she concluded a military accord with the Russians, and the conditions of French loans to help Russian industry placed particular emphasis on the construction of railways which would help the Russian army, huge but still only part-reformed, move westwards more quickly. In 1901 the Russians agreed to launch their first attack on Germany eighteen days after the declaration of war, and to follow it with up to 800,000 men by the twenty-eighth day.
Colonial rivalry made an agreement with Britain more difficult. However, in January 1906 Colonel Victor Huguet, the French military attaché in London, called on the chief of the general staff to ask what Britain’s attitude would be if the Morocco crisis, then
