German soldier engaged in the Battle of the Somme, 1916. (Wikipedia)
The Western Front was the site of the worst fighting of the First World War.
It refers to Germany’s western front, even though it’s located in southern Belgium and northeastern France.
A fertile farmland that rolls to the English Channel, the western front remains scarred by the activities of 100 years ago.
My husband and I were there on Monday.
I’m writing a novel set during World War I and the final third of the book takes place in France. My heroine and her journalist father take a trip to the Somme River area, and I wanted to see what it looks like.
The western front is deceptive in appearance.
Our French guide began the tour at Lochnagar Crater Memorial, the site of an explosion that, at the time, was the largest and loudest one ever heard. Reportedly felt as far away as London (250 miles), it marked the beginning of the June 1916 battle.
The crater is enormous.
Somme 1916 (Wikipedia)
It sits on a rise that overlooks the pastoral countryside. In October, the fields were newly plowed or still green with the end of summer crops. Clumps of trees and stone farm houses dot the landscape. On that rainy day, it felt sleepy and tranquil. Our guide waved his arm: “1.2 million people died in this area over a two year period.”
1.2 million casualties is a number difficult to contemplate.
It made me think of the battle of Helm’s Deep scene in the movie The Two Towers, when (though computer animated for the screen) soldiers filled the scenery for as far as you could see.
It must have been like that on the Somme.
Except the soldiers were dug into trenches zig-zagging across the landscape with a “no man’s land” covered in barbed wire.
Like the Cliffs of Dover, some sixty miles away, the coastal farming areas of France and Belgium sit on top of chalk limestone. The guide pointed out plowed fields littered with white flakes.
“Everywhere you see white chalk in the ground, you know that was a battlefield. So many bullets flew, they stirred up the chalk which all these years later, still comes to the surface.”
The newly-improved machine guns manned by the Germans swept the no man’s land with a wind of bullets so thick, bodies were obliterated and groves of trees splintered.
The bullets contained lead and so much was fired and left in the ground, the water in the town of Pozières is contaminated. Residents cannot drink tap water. Fish in the Sommes River cannot be eaten.
“They estimate it will be 800 years until the lead has fully leached away and the land will be as it was before the war.”
The soil, of course, is very fertile because of all the iron leftover from the spilt blood–100 years ago.
No Man’s Land
Our French guide hates Germans.
“How would you feel if they invaded your land? We did not invade their land, yet they came here and murdered our grandfathers and raped our grandmothers. I will never have a German in my car.”
He added his was not an opinion shared by all in the European Union.
Indeed, universities on the continent do not call the “Great War,” World War I.
“In Germany professors call it the ‘European Civil War.’ In France we consider is a very long war with a long cease fire.”
World War II was caused by unresolved issues from the first war, a generation before.
“Somme” comes from the Celtic word meaning “tranquility.” The river now runs through the quiet countryside still farmed, beets and corn, and studded with 950 cemeteries.
As you drive through villages rebuilt by the Germans using reparations money following the war, it’s hard to imagine anything happened here.
But over the rises and in the distance, monuments stand and everywhere signs recall the events of 1916.
It’s sobering, as it should be.
What do you know about World War I?
Have you ever heard of “The Somme?”
Tweetables
98 years later, you still can’t drink Somme River water Click to Tweet
What’s the Somme battlefield like today? Click to Tweet
How could 1.2 million people kill each other in two years? Click to Tweet
Oh, yes…I do know a bit about the Somme, and the Great War. I’m building – slowly – a replica of a Fokker D.VI (from which the Red baron’s Triplane was developed), to fly.
For those who would want to understand the War, I would recommend the books of Peter Hart (who wrote a range of books) and Peter Kilduff (for the German side of the air war).
Peter Hart is particularly accessible, in that he’s taken the voices of those who were there and woven them into the narrative. For a brief moment you can see those days through their eyes. They feel very close in outlook, sometimes…they have the same hopes and fears we do, use the same slang.
The bloodbaths of the Somme and Passchendaele were something we simply can’t comprehend today. The sheer numbers of dead – 20,000 on the first day of the Somme – our society could never take that.
And it begs the question – SHOULD any society be prepared for death on that scale, and for what cause?
You make me think of the line from the poem…in Flanders field the poppies grow…
The author of that poem was a physician stationed at a forward station–he later died there, of course. Our French guide said poppy seeds are very tiny and light (you know that from your muffin) and get all over the place. He said they turn up everywhere.
That’s also true in California. They’re the state flower and I’ll surprised if some don’t turn up in my new yard–they’re all over my old one!
Wow, Andrew, your own plane? Thanks for the lead on Peter Hart. There is So MUCH I could spend time reading, it helps to have things narrowed, if only slightly!
I’ve really gotten a lot out of GJ Meyer’s A World Undone for an overview, and The Last of the Doughboys for some addition insight–the author interviewed veterans in the early 2000s!
Death on that scale? Absolutely not. The generals should have been shot–more on that next time. This was three years of sheer murder after the first couple battles. I become more a pacifist the more I read. 🙁