end, on the hills of the Swiss frontier, in geography almost as unlike that of the Flanders coast as it is possible to imagine.
John Masefield thought that the front could best be understood as a river flowing across the landscape, straight here, meandering there, sometimes wide and sometime more narrow. In some areas normality came very close to its bank. Private Robert Case of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry told his parents in July 1915 that: ‘Back behind the lines there are, except for quantities of khaki, no indications of the biggest strafe the world has known. The land is tilled up to say 1½ miles of the firing line, and in many cases within 1,000 yards.’14 In others, like the Somme sector in 1916–18, repeated attack and counterattack widened the front to what was, literally and metaphorically, a broad marsh. ‘I cannot give you any conception of what the battlefield is like now,’ wrote Masefield to his wife in October 1916,
but if you will imagine any 13 miles x 9 miles known to you, say from Goring to Abingdon, raking in Dorchester, Wallingford, Nettlebed and the Chilterns above Goring, you will get a hint of its extent. Then imagine in all that expanse no single tree left, but either dismembered or cut off short, & burnt quite black. Then imagine that in all that expanse no single house is left, nor any large part of a house, except one iron gate & half a little red chapel, & that all the other building is literally blasted into little bits, so that no man can tell where the villages were, nor how they ran, nor what they were like.15
The Western Front was speckled with architecture which reflected its past. The great squares of Béthune and Arras, with their arcaded walks and florid house fronts – redbrick for Flanders, relieved by honey-coloured stone for Artois and Picardy – were reminiscent of the plaças in Spanish cities, for this was once the Spanish Netherlands. Officers and men with a literary or historical bent, and there were many, mused on architectural detail. As 4/Coldstream Guards slogged across Artois in late 1915 an officer observed ‘a comic incident’:
Sergeant Melton was marching next to me. Behind us were two educated men, Sergeant Oliver and Corporal Newton – who started a discussion about the relative merits of Hazlitt and Goldsmith. To this exchange, which we could not help overhearing, Melton reacted with ill-concealed disgust. When we passed a partly-restored church Oliver and Newton discussed its date. One of them suggested it might be six hundred years old. Melton, who had good eyesight, noticed that the restored front door had a date on it. He half turned round, and, with a rictus of sarcasm, addressed Sergeant Oliver as follows: ‘You great booby, how can it be that old when it has 1857 over the door?’16
Churches often had harsh and unpromising exteriors but were prettier inside. Captain James Dunn thought that Doullens church, though ‘nondescript and unattractive without, has fine early twelfth-century detail within’, as well as ‘finely-preserved mid-Gothic arching’.17 Private Frank Richards, of the same battalion, saw things with a slightly different eye. ‘Stevens and I visited the cathedral,’ he wrote of Rouen, ‘and we were very much taken with the beautiful oil paintings and other objects of art inside. One old soldier who paid it a visit said it would be a fine place to loot.’18 However, some private soldiers were more appreciative. Stapleton Tench Eachus, a Royal Engineers signaller, explained why he had mixed views about the church of St-Gilles at Epagnette in mid-1916.
The church is an old one and not by any means remarkable for its structural architecture, at least that was my impression. It had however been elaborately decorated and the walls and pillars painted in divers hues. The paintings, which were hung about the building, constituted in my view the most remarkable feature to be seen in this place of worship. Perhaps however my vision in such matters may be influenced in a prejudicial direction on account of the fact that having had the privilege of visiting that most wonderful sumptuous church, St John’s at Valetta, Malta, one is apt to judge readily and in so doing overlook the claims of those of less repute.19
Men were often struck by the way that the names of bars, hotels and restaurants reflected the area’s turbulent past. A tavern on the Brussels road outside Mons, at the scene of the first clash between British and German cavalry on 22 August 1914, was named La Reine d’Hongroie, after the Queen of Hungary: Maria Theresa, when Mons was in the Austrian Netherlands. Aux Armes de France with its Valois blue with golden lilies and L’Ecu de France with its crown had both survived three republics, and Le Bivouac de L’Fmpereur bore the distinctive silhouette of the little corporal. The peasantry slaked their thirst in a score of establishments named Les Cultivateurs, and there were horses, prancing or ploughing, black and white. There was the double-headed eagle for the Hapsburg Empire and his crowned cousin for the French, and even, as a sharp-eyed army doctor recorded, Au Grand Marlbrouck named after the first Duke of Marlborough and La Reine d’Angleterre after his queen.20
This was a land already marked by war. Many were struck by the bizarre connection of ancient and modern. When Charles Carrington returned to the battlefields in 1923 he found:
a trench still full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. I dug an old gun out of the mud and found to my surprise that it was not a modern rifle but a Brown Bess musket, dropped there by some British soldier during Wellington’s last action against a French rearguard in 1815.21
There was fighting there long before Wellington. In the sixteenth century the northern border of France followed the line of the Somme, as the fortifications at Montreuil, Doullens and Péronne, so familiar to British soldiers of the war, still demonstrate. Philip II of Spain built the great monastery-palace of El Escorial, just north of Madrid, to celebrate victory over the French at St-Quentin in 1557.
But the rising power of France was not to be denied, and the border moved inexorably northwards. Cyrano de Bergerac fought the Spaniards at Arras in fiction, and the future James II of England fought them in fact when Duke of York, and a lieutenant general in French service. ‘I joyn’d the Army by Peronne …’, he wrote.
About the 16th [July 1654] … wee began our march towards Arras, and camp’d at a village called Sains, near Sauchy-Cauchy which lys between Cambray and Arras … The next day we continued our march towards Mouchy-le-Preux … Monsieur de Turenne’s own quarter was at this place of Mouchy … Monsr. de la Ferté had his quarter at the right hand of our Line down by the side of the River Scarpe, at a Village called Peule.
Give or take the vagaries of spelling, James’s countrymen would have recognised Cambrai and Monchy, Arras and the Scarpe, though they might have reflected grimly that a battle then cost both sides ‘not … above four hundred … I remember but one Collonell, M. de Puymarais, Coll of horse, a brave young gentleman …’.22 There were to be rather more brave young gentlemen stretched out on the slopes between Monchy and Arras when the British 3rd Army assaulted the place in April 1917.
The French fortified the captured ground. Vauban’s pré carré was a double line of geometrical artillery fortresses, one running from Gravelines to Arras and on to Avesnes, the other from Dunkirk to Ypres, Menin and Valenciennes to Maubeuge. The bastions and ravelins of this fortification, built to resist the close-range pounding of heavy guns, proved surprisingly resistant to more modern artillery, and thousands of British soldiers were to retain grateful memories of casemates beneath the ramparts at Ypres, which accorded a measure of protection hard to find elsewhere in or around that blighted town. They also housed the ‘offices’ of one of the best-known trench newspapers, The Wipers Times, whose first edition had its own view on
