Back to the Front Read Free

midst of the bungalows with their backyard swing sets stood a vacant lot that could not be
     anesthetized into the present. It was an expanse of tall tortured mounds rising in unlikely and unnatural ways from a heaving
     plane of pockmarks and craters. The pale green fuzz of grass and weeds that covered each contour did not hide the violence
     that had once been done there. It looked as if a raging sea had been frozen, then made land. In between the Danger and Keep
     Out signs I spotted a small mountain bike, lying there as if some heedless boy had just popped a wheelie and then been dragged
     home for a spanking. The rear wheel turned slowly in the slight wind, its spokes glinting in the cold December sunshine. Seeing
     it comforted me.
    That weekend on the Somme—we trudged all over the map—gave me a strange sort of thrill that I didn't fully welcome. I feared
     I'd fallen victim to the exuberant nihilism of the battlefield enthusiast, and that soon I would be whooping with joy at coming
     across a trench in the forest, or a skeleton behind a barn. There is a sort of macho romance to the futility of war, an attraction
     to seeing things fall apart, born of the same impulse that makes setting fires or watching the wrecker's ball such a fun pastime
     for so many men. Visiting sites of significant bloodshed—braking to gawk at humanity's biggest smash-ups—seemed a habit better
     left to groupies of the military. And I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that infatuation with uniforms and battles was
     entirely foreign to me, given a family animus that verged on the fanatical. A reflexive hatred of the army formed the sole,
     unarticulated legacy of my grandfathers'Great War experience. In our home, career soldiers were routinely referred to as "professional
     assassins,"and in the Vietnam War years of the 1960s and early 1970s our mother, her three sons in their teens, daily congratulated
     herself for not having chosen to immigrate to the land of the domino theory and the draft. Even the Boy Scouts had been suspect,
     their badges and uniforms seen as the thin edge of the warrior wedge.
    But what if learning about history led me, against all odds, to a love of war lore? To a geek passion for guts and guns, to
     fetishism about medals and stripes, to furtive erection at the sight of fighter aircraft, to anachronistic anger over enemies
     never met, to hand-over-the-heart hypocrisy at monuments to massacres, to voyeurism disguised as compassion, to the fetid
     bath of patriotic cliche—what if it led, in short, to the woodenheaded fellowship of war buffs? If that's where it was leading,
     then there was no point in being a lapsed amnesiac. My dinner companion may have been right to despise me, after all. History
     is for the dead, or for rednecks. Perhaps I would become the expatriate equivalent of a Civil War reenac-tor who spends his
     Sundays playing Johnny Reb and pining for slavery.
    Perhaps not. I felt that there had been something else out there, at the Somme, something other than a temptation to yield
     to a boyish love of destruction. I had seen it. The scar of the Front pointed to a curiosity that I did not know I had. In the months following that visit, reading brought
     home to me some of the connections between a generation long dead and my own, between those who witnessed the start of a century
     and those who would see it out. (Not that they are all gone: In March of 1995, the literary supplements of newspapers celebrated
     the hundredth birthday of Ernst Jiinger, fourteen times wounded in the Great War and author of the classic German war novel In Stahlgewittern y or Storm of Steel) If initially the code of the past seemed as hard to crack as the strange turns of phrase that had stumped me as a child, it
     eventually revealed itself to be a compelling language of irony, bitterness, and great beauty. I could scarcely believe that
     these loud, vital, angry voices, the voices of my grandparents'generation,