Over the Top: The Stories Left Behind

I'm told by my most faithful followers that I missed several crucial elements in this summer's travel journal.  Clearly I have to refine my note-taking and editing processes.

In any case, here goes.

The Story of Driving in Rural France
As is always the case when in a country where a stick-shift car is vastly cheaper to rent (or really, on pretty much any vacation) Bill did all our driving, channeling his inner Mario Battali and shifting up and down and around curves and generally enjoying himself hugely.  (Yes, we know - Battali is the chef.  But Izzy heard us refer to Mario Andretti and thought, once, that they were the same person.)  And as you may know if you have enjoyed this kind of travel, when you are barreling along country roads you can pick up speed.  But if you enter a wee village at top speed, a sign posted by the side of the road will record your speed and give you a frowny face if you are going too fast.  Bill worked hard at managing this, and by the end of our week of driving was quite adept at slowing just enough to get a smiley face.  Of course, the signs that admonish PRUDENCE! help to remind you to be careful.  And if you aren't paying attention and blow by a sign that looks like it is telling you there is a mustache in the road ahead, you might fly over a raised crosswalk or a bump.  Needless to say, Private H-P is entranced by the signs announcing mustaches all over the place.

The Story of the Cheapskate
I will say here that Bill Laskin is no cheapskate.  Here we are enjoying a splendid European vacation, so to pick on him for making us march all over every town looking for the cheapest lunch option would be unfair.  And mostly untrue.  But sometimes we just want to sit down, and we don't particularly care if the restaurant looks like it will be "a bit much."

The Story of The Know-It-All
Fans and friends of Peter Laskin know that he knows a lot.  And does not hesitate to share his knowledge.  Nor does he suffer fools gladly.  In what was debatably a bad-mommy moment,* after being interrupted with a correction for, oh, I don't know, maybe the five-hundredth time?, I told Bill to just ignore him and carried on with our conversation  To Peter's credit, this caused him to burst out laughing.  We now ignore each other regularly.


*I adore my son, but sometimes he needs to just shut up for a minute.

Over the Top with the LEF in France - August, 2015

Over the Top with the LEF[1] in France:  August 2015

or

How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?

Following are posts from our recent awesome trip to Belgium and France.   I hope you enjoy them! You can see the photos at our Shutterfly share site.

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[1] LEF = Laskin Expeditionary Force.  Chef d’ Expedition:  Moi.  Transport and Payroll Officer:  Billy Yank.  Information Specialist:  Pierre.  Private Hokey Pokey:  Mademoiselle Isabel. 

Over the Top in France - August 2

Here’s how you know you are not in figurative Kansas anymore:  the bathrooms in the new arrival terminals at Charles de Gaulle airport are wicked cool.  They are paneled in deep orange and magenta Lucite, and have these chic slanty trough-like communal sinks.  That’ll wake you up after a red-eye.

But after the large numbers of disturbingly well-armed young security guards at CDG, the Excitement of Being In Europe diminishes.  First of all, the enfants fall asleep in the car about 30 seconds into the drive, leaving it to me to keep the Transport Officer awake. 

Also, the European Union has totally taken the fun out of international travel because there is no frontier between countries anymore, just a sign.  No border guards, no stamp in the passport, no red-and-white gates that say ZOLL.  But if you miss it, Verizon will helpfully send you a text saying “Welcome to Belgium!” and detailing the rates should you go over your paltry international calling plan. 

And, the town names become even less pronounceable than they are in France, because this is the Flemish speaking part of Belgium.  Siri is game for Flemish but just can't cut it.  She pronounces our destination (Ypres, in Flemish, Ee-per):  eye-ee-pee-ee-are-ess.  This cracks us up.  Those of us who are awake, anyway.

It is not surprising that she has trouble with it.  Everyone does, because as it turns out, Flemish as spoken in Belgium has many dialects.  Through the fog of his fatigue, Bill engages our lunch waiter in a little chat to learn about the language.  It is the same thing that they speak in Holland, but there they all speak the same version.  Here in Flanders, it might be spoken differently just ten k. away!

It is a bit weird arriving in a small-ish European town on a Sunday because everything is closed, and it is kind of quiet and not hugely welcoming.  The fun fair is in town, but even that is closed, until evening anyway.  Clearly, napping is the order of the afternoon. 

We note immediately that everyone is on bikes!  Big heavy comfortable touring bikes, with handy baskets or panniers, riding around the flat Flemish countryside with nary a helmet, but perhaps smoking a cigarette or with pants tucked into black socks (with sandals, natch). 

Things perk up a bit in the evening and our Information Specialist eats a ham hock as big as his head while the Payroll Officer and I sample some excellent Belgian beer and Private Hokey Pokey discovers that great love of Brits, spag bol.  This whole area really caters to British tourists because this was one of the two centers of British fighting during the war.  So you see things like spaghetti Bolognese (which British people adore for some reason) on menus.  This being Belgium, there are also frites with everything.  They would probably give them to you at breakfast if you asked.  And they are good.

But let’s get into it.  We are here to learn about the War, the Great War, the War to End All Wars (Except That It Didn’t), the only war that really matters around here, the First World War.  It turns out that our itinerary will give us an Entente-flavored tour:  starting here with the British (and by that we mean Commonwealth) war in Flanders, then to the great French scene of action in Verdun and the Argonne, and finally some American sights around the Meuse and the Marne.

Ypres itself was pretty much destroyed during the war, so the pretty old buildings and the grand medieval Cloth Hall are all reconstructions from the 1920s and 30s.  It became a place of memorial very quickly, the centerpiece of this being the nightly Last Post at the Menin Gate.  During the war, troops would march out of town through a “gate” (really just two stone lions) out the Menin Road.  In 1927, a massive memorial arch was built, that lists the names of all Commonwealth soldiers who died in the fighting around the Ypres Salient but have no known graves. This being your first exposure to the almost incomprehensible numbers and massive memorialization of the war, you might spend more time wandering around and looking at the names.  You would wonder at the many colonial regiments – not just Irish and Canadian and Australian but Indian of many kinds as well.  If you tried to count them, you would find that there are almost 55,000 names here.  And if you come at 7:45 or so, you would be there for the Last Post.  Every evening since 1927, a bugler plays the Last Post (it is a kind of British Taps) at 8 pm.  Some nights, like the night we were there, there is wreath-laying, and saluting from veterans – tonight’s were a shaky WW2-era vet who surely brought a tear to all those present, and a troop of scouts from the UK (this is clearly a standard UK scout pilgrimage).  Flags are dipped, silence is maintained, more bugling, and the ceremony ends.  Every night.  All year.  Since 1927.  There are crowds in summer, but none in winter.  But still the Last Post Association honors these dead.  During the Second World War they could not have the ceremony for four years, because the Germans occupied the town.  The day the Germans left, September 6, 1944, the Last Post sounded again.  (shivery, yes?)

We are far north of home here. It is still quite light at 9:30!

Over the Top in France - August 3

We have brought many books with us to study the War and travel the countryside, but our most indefatigable guide is the late Miss Rose Coombs, MBE who wrote Before Endeavors Fade:  A Guide to the Battlefields of the First World War (Essex, UK: After the Battle Magazine, 2006).  This unbelievably comprehensive and detailed volume is invaluable both for its precision (“Drive another two kilometers, and then take the left on the other side of the road past the farm gate.  The road is dirt, but passable in dry season.  When it ends, walk 75 meters to the copse of trees at your left.”) and its history lessons.  You can learn the essentials of any battle, as well as how and where it is memorialized.  There is an emphasis on the British (Before Endeavors Fade:  BEF, get it?), so mostly Ypres Salient and the Somme, but plenty about the French and the Germans and us Yanks as well.  Miss Coombs was a WW2 vet herself (Radar operator) and worked at the Imperial War Museum.  She led tours of the Western front for vets and authors and interested parties, and documented it all exhaustively.  She shuffled of this mortal coil in the 1990s, but faithful editors have kept the book remarkably up to date.  Much of what I will pass on you to in this journal comes from Miss RC, a gal whom I would very much like to have met. 

I feel that this journal needs a little intro to the war, so you have a sense of what we’re talking about.  So – ta da – here is the First World War (Western Front – I’m embarrassed that I don’t know from the Eastern) in one paragraph.  By 1914, everyone in Europe is tangled up in complex alliances that fall out either Germany-Austria Hungary-Ottomans (the Central Powers) or everyone else which is really Russia and France and eventually England and then the US (the Entente Powers or Allied Powers) or neutral (Brave Little Belgium).  Austria-Hungary gets mad at Serbia for shooting their Archduke and his wife, so they mobilize and that means Germany has to mobilize against Russia which means France has to get ready because Germany wants more of France back so the Germans barge uninvited into Belgium which pisses off the Brits who don’t like the buildup of the German navy (Poor Little Belgium is just an excuse).  The Germans get pretty far into Belgium until the Brits (and their colonials) hold them with just a teeny tiny salient around Ypres, and pretty far into France until the French hold them along the Marne.  That’s 1914, and the Germans, being clever, basically just dig in and build these incredible fortified lines with concrete trenches and bunkers.  (And here, boys and girls, we learn the power of the defensive position)  In 1915 and 1916 the Brits and the French try to dislodge the Germans in Flanders and eastern France along the Meuse, to no avail and millions of dead.  In 1917 the Brits try in the Somme and again in Flanders – more hundreds of thousands dead.  Meanwhile at home in France and Germany there are riots and food shortages and currency deflation, and worst of all, Russia is having a revolution, which really gets everyone going.  Then the Americans get into the mix and the Germans think, we have got to end this before Billy Yank gets here so they have a big big push in the spring of 1918 and get within 40 miles of Paris!  But the US pushes back at the Marne and at the St. Mihiel Salient that summer, and Germany hasn’t got anything left so the Kaiser is advised to abdicate and Germany sues for peace and there you have it. 

See, one paragraph!  You know, people have written multi-volume works on this topic.  Now that we’re done with that, you can follow along.

A great thing about staying in hotels pretty much anywhere in Europe is that you can get German breakfast:  brötchen and meat and cheese and yogurt and eggs.  Also, the good French stuff, croissants and excellent jam and the like.

A word on the whole poppies thing.  Your first impression of Ypres, should you come here, is that it is all poppies, all the time.  Poppy pillows and t-shirts and wreaths and Over the Top! Tours and whole English-language bookstores devoted to this war and the other one that doesn't get much traction around here.  Why here?  Well, the author of the famous poem “In Flanders Fields,” John MacRae, worked at a dressing station just a few miles away.[1]  The poem is about how the poppies, a summer wildflower here, bloom after a battle.  The legend is that white poppies on a battlefield in ancient China turned red after a terrible battle.  The biological reason is that things grow after battles because the disruption to the earth turns up seeds, and poppies grow here anyway, battle or no. Regardless, poppies as a symbol of remembrance in this war started as a Canadian thing and quickly spread among the Commonwealth dead.  You see wreaths of poppies, and individual crosses of poppies and plastic poppies and crocheted poppies and ceramic poppies and all manner of handmade poppies.  You do not see poppies in any other countries’ cemeteries or memorials or battlefields. 

The irony is that we saw not one live poppy in Flanders.  We had to go to France for that.

But the excellent In Flanders Fields museum has a Marimekko-style poppy as its logo, and that is the place to start if you are touring here.  You get a little poppy bracelet that you can use to log in and learn about personal experiences of people in the area, based on your age, sex, nationality, etc.  There were not a lot of middle-aged American women in Flanders so I get some artists and Marie Curie and others, but it is still pretty cool.  The whole museum is fantastic, but the highlights include a really cool animated computer graphic that shows how the lines formed and stabilized around Ypres in the first months of the war and excellent filmed monologues from actors portraying soldiers and nurses and doctors.[2] .  We are particularly struck by a monologue from a German soldier about entering Canadian lines after the first gas attack.  Nothing was living, not the men, not the rabbits or rats or squirrels, not even the insects. 

The museum thoughtfully puts the really gruesome pictures – for this was a photographed war and the imagery, while reminiscent of the American Civil War is far uglier – into dark pyramids so you can avoid them if you wish.  On the outside of one of the pyramids are projected, one by one, the name and country of a soldier fallen in the Ypres salient – one hundred years ago today, so August 3, 1915.  The names change every 30 seconds or so, providing a slow realization of the scale of casualties.  All of this museum is accompanied by a soundtrack of relentless gloom and doom – lots of slow minor chords and doleful bell tones.  It is fantastic.

A striking thing about all of these museums and memorials is how balanced they are.  There are plenty of German items here, and stories, but it doesn’t come across as accusatory.  There is more a sense of plus jamais, nie wieder, never again.

Before the museum we visited the British-built St. George Chapel, which is an entire memorial to the British and Commonwealth effort in the Salient.  Each chair has a kneeler cushion, hand-needlepointed with a regimental crest.  The walls are covered with bronze plaques memorializing various units.  We are struck by the dozens of memorials to the fallen from various British and Commonwealth schools and colleges:  To the memory of the 147 or 205 or 78 Old Throckmortians who died in the Ypres Salient.  I’m making light but when you realize how many of these plaques you have read, you start to get a sense of the generational toll of this war.  

Oh I forgot about the Bell Tower in the Cloth Hall!  This, to Bill’s relief, has nothing to do with the War.  There is a magnificent carillon up high, and a good climb to get there, not to mention a spectacular view.  And during the Middle Ages (well actually all the way into the 19^th) they had a festival every year where someone in a jester’s suit would climb up to the top of the Bell Tower and throw cats off, to rid the town of evil spirits.  Now they do it every three years (why three?) and they throw stuffed cats instead of live ones.  The carillon plays while we are there and it is pretty loud!

This was a big day.  We are not quite half-done yet.

Cemeteries are a key part of visiting the Western Front.  It sounds morbid, but it is in fact moving and peaceful and beautiful and you can learn a lot.  The biggest British cemetery in the area is Tyne Cot, named after a structure that was once here (like everything), that the soldiers from northern England thought looked like a Tyneside cottage – a Tyne cot.  The building served as a dressing station and bunker for both sides, changing hands a couple of times in 1917-18.  The remnants of the actual building are preserved under a big plinth with a giant cross that you can apparently see from Dunkirk on a clear day.  Immediately behind this memorial are arrayed the original 300+ graves, as they were found at the end of the war, in some disarray due to the heavy shelling.

This cemetery contains the remains of almost 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers, 8,000+ listed as only “A British Soldier in the Great War, Known Unto God,” with another 35,000 or so names on a wall surrounding, of men lost whose remains were never found.  There are four German soldiers buried here, too.  Miss RC tells us that six recipients of the Victoria Cross (the British equivalent of our Medal of Honor) are here.  When you enter, you go through a modern structure (dedicated by QEII just a few years ago), and surrounding you is the sound of a young girl’s voice reading just names and ages.  The voice follows you into the structure and out again, as you walk around the walls and into the cemetery.  This is the first cemetery we will visit, ultimately we will see spaces representing five different countries.  There are more poppies here – the British are far more active and personal in their commemoration than any other nationality. 

At one point, we are approached by a jovial fellow who is a representative of the local tourism agency.  He asks if we’d mind answering a few questions about our visit.  Always happy to promote war tourism, I offer him my email when asked for follow-up.  “Ooh, Har-vard!” he says. 

Think we’ve seen enough?  Retreat, hell, we just got here!  (That will come later in the trip.)  The thing about Flanders is that the sites are all within just a few kilometers of each other, so you can see dozens in a day. 

After lunch, we visit the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, recommended by Miss RC as having an excellent Trench Experience.  Never ones to pass up an Experience (see Ireland 2013), we explore what at first appears to be a slightly musty museum that threatens kitsch – hey kids, want to try on a gas mask? – but ultimately delivers a solid on the Experience.  Private H-P has about had it at the samples of mustard gas, but perks up when she gets to try on a helmet.

THEN we descend into the Dugout.  Under the building, a carefully-reconstructed facsimile of a German dugout, a sort of underground barracks, has been built.  You tramp from room to room, ducking if you are our Transport Officer or our Information Specialist because the ceilings are so low, and looking at convincing cook rooms and storerooms and bunkrooms and dressing stations.  It is impressively large and complex, and you begin to understand the power of the defensive position.  When you finally ascend into the light and go outside, you are in the Trenches, and walk through reconstructions of French, British, and German trenches, with quite good explanations on the different engineering techniques of each.  We revise our impression of the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, not the least because of the Poppies (brand) Gin in the gift shop. 

Passchendaele is a name that lives in infamy for Britain.  The Germans had a tight hold on the Ypres Salient for two years, but in August 1917 the Allied Powers decided to try a breakthrough, which became known as the Third Battle of Ypres.  They tunneled under German lines, setting huge mines (the Germans were tunneling too, and sometimes the two sides ran into each other, at which point they’d have a little firefight underground and re-block the tunnel).  A massive artillery barrage preceded the mines blowing in early August, and the British troops rushed in – as did the rain, torrential downpours for days, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in decades.  With rain and shelling, the ground turned to ghastly sucking mud.  Trenches and shell holes filled with water, drowning wounded soldiers as they sheltered from the barrage and waited for help.  The numbers here are stunning.  Over the course of four months, almost 600,000 men died for a gain/loss of five miles.  435 men for each square meter (or metre, if you are writing in British).  Today it is cows and nice towns and farmland. 

Not just mud and mines, but gas.  Just a few kilometers from the museum is a marvelously massive monument known as the Brooding Soldier, commemorating the more than 2,000 members of a Canadian regiment who died in the first gas attack of the war, in 1915.  The attack allowed the Germans to occupy the town of Langemark, site today of a German cemetery.  We check it out because here we are and there it is.  There are fewer visitors than Tyne Cot (although that is not saying a lot) and this cemetery has a small entry structure with interior walls covered with the names of students who died in Flanders during the war.  There is much restoration work being done here, so we can’t walk around much.  But we do find not one but two Peter Lauterbachs among the 24,000 named who are buried in the Kameradengrab.  Another 44,000 German soldiers lie in the ground here.

Wow, six pages in and we are just at our second day.  Fasten your seat belts, you are in for a long ride!

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[1] In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

[2] Including Harvard man Harvey Cushing, a surgeon at the Brigham.

Over the Top in France - August 4

Actually we were in for a long night.  Izzy, plagued by terrible jet lag, cannot get to sleep and so pads tearfully back and forth between our rooms, finally sleeping with me while our Information Specialist is surprised to find Billy Yank in the neighboring bed the next morning. 

I should point out that the visitors at these museums and sites are overwhelmingly male.  Ladies are few; girl-children even fewer.  Everywhere you see groups of middle-aged men, or adult sons and dads poring over maps and consulting lists, even at breakfast.  Even our hotel has a modest but nice little collection of uniforms and medals and shells and posters, and a little statue by the koi pond, of nurses and sandbags.

A spot of rain last night adds a note of muddy authenticity to our visit to the quirky (or creepy, depending on your perspective) Hill 62-Sanctuary Wood Museum.  Here the uniforms are on frankly scary mannequins, and the weapons and photos and helmets are dusty and rusty and all jumbled together willy-nilly.  And it smells funny.  But there are two great things about this museum that make it worth visiting.  First, it has a collection of about eight stereoscopes, each containing a few dozen images that, when viewed through the Minion-like box, present a 3D photograph from the war.  As far as I can tell, these are mostly French and Belgian, and at least the ones I saw were positively grisly.  Lots of bodies, men and animals, in places where dead bodies just shouldn’t be, like in trees or barbed wire.  This is how people used to see the war, in stereoscope.

The other great thing at this museum is the trench system outside.  The same family has owned the property since the war, and they just kept the trenches in the woods intact so what you are walking around in – or, if you are our Information Specialist, following scary underground tunnels much to your mother’s consternation – is an actual trench system.  Miss RC says it is the only extant system in the Salient.  The woods are, as we will find across the front, not only marked with corrugated-tin-lined trenches and makeshift shelters, but also pocked with deep shellholes, that today have standing water in the bottom.  While the copse was originally deemed a sanctuary for straggling British soldiers (hence the name), by 1915 it was contested land.  There are two raggedy stumps covered in memorial crosses and poppies and flags, which are supposedly all that remain of the original trees.  There is a rag-tag aspect to all of this:  piles of discarded trench refuse like wire and stakes and tin and shell casings, all over the place.  Some German gravestones from who knows where lie in a random line.  In the second house are even creepier exhibits, with one-eyed generals and bandaged baby dolls in cribs.  

Yet all around the wood is pastoral farmland.  At the end of the trench system, you are next to field of placid cows.  If you drive a k. up the road, you come to the top of a hill (or what passes for a hill in these parts) with a memorial to the Canadian men who fought to secure this, Hill 62 (because it is 62 meters high).  The views are lovely.  You have to work pretty hard to imagine it otherwise, and yet the woods down the road give a sense of what it was, almost exactly 100 years ago. 

The poppies may have grown in Flanders Fields, but what really grows here now is cows and corn.

Und now comes the big driving portion of our trip.  Fortunately, I have brought a soundtrack of popular music from the day, so at least I am happy humming along to such delights as Over There! and Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser.  One of our albums is actually a collection of restored original tracks so you get to hear scratchy vintage recordings from artists like Al Jolson, Enrico Caruso, and The American Quartet.  I’m mad for it all, the rest of our party, perhaps less so. 

Damn you Google Maps you data succubus. This drive takes forever, you never quite know when you’ve left Belgium and returned to France, and lunch was too much AAAAA andouillettes.  We haul grumpily into Charleville, which Transport Officer Bill tells us is the puppet capital of the world or something.  As usual, he is correct.  Here on Place Winston Churchill you can find a fine WWI monument AND the Institut de la Marionette, which has a marvelous automated clock.  Each hour, a door below the clock opens and a scene is played out with marionettes, from an allegorical tale featuring Charlemagne and some hunters.  (We think; the description of the hourly scenes is challenging our translational skills.)  In the scene we see, the hunters mostly march around.  Still, the clock has a giant head above it that moves constantly, and great golden legs below. It is a kind of giant with a puppet theater in his belly. 

Our trail turns south and we follow the Meuse River for kilometers until we reach . . . VERDUN.  You really can’t spell it without all caps and a tone of disaster in the background (cue the doom music from the In Flanders Fields museum).  An old fortress city, Verdun is famous for holding off the Germans in 1916, albeit at catastrophic loss of life.  “Ils n’ont pas passé” is the phrase, and all the monument iconography is that of a wall or a tower – terribly stern and a bit at odds with the very friendly welcome we received at the teeny Hotel de Montalbain.  “You are the chef of the expedition?” the owners ask me after watching us all during the check-in process. 

There is not much happening in Verdun – a tiny riverfront area with pubs catering to tourists with English menus is about it for nightlife.  But we follow the hotel owners’ recommendations for dinner and eat in a teeny restaurant that is quite nice. 

Information Specialist Peter remarks that you know you are not in Cambridge, Mass anymore when the owner asks if the jeune homme would like some wine, too.  Almost as satisfying as the bottomless Shirley Temples in New Orleans.