Back to the Front Read Free Page B

past, the elevation of irony to a standard mode of apprehending the world,
     the unbuttoning of moral codes, and the conscious embrace of the irrational. Admittedly, the emphasis once again is on destruction,
     on disintegration, but not of the exploding car crash variety deplored earlier. It is far more serious—more punk—than that,
     and to be fascinated by it may betray an inner malevolence greater than the one tapped into by the guys watching a demolition
     derby on cable. On this second list, with few exceptions, absence wins. Liberating, insecure, ironic absence.
    I closed the books. The Western Front was out there, ready for my pilgrimage, my own private hajj. There was a lot to think
     about, a lot to look for. This book follows that journey, or rather those journeys, along the Front. In concrete, historical
     terms, the Western Front stretched from the North Sea on the Belgian coast to the border of France and Switzerland, some 450
     miles, between the autumns of 1914 and 1918. I walked the length of it in the summer of 1986, precisely seventy years after
     the war's worst period of murderous immobility. It was the Front as it stood in mid-1916 that I then attempted to trace, the
     time of stupendous, static carnage that is now meant whenever the phrase "Western Front"crops up in conversation. Wherever
     possible my path kept to what had been no-man's-land, the treacherous moonscape lying between the German and Allied trenches,
     where the scar of barbed wire and shell holes disfigured the face of Europe. My first hike, from mid-July to late September,
     was succeeded in subsequent years by quick forays to different parts of the Front whenever I got the chance. I went back to
     the Front, again and again.
    What follows, then, is a record of frequent visits to a vanishing metaphor, a scrapbook of journeys made between 1985 and
     1995. I did not go to the Front to lay wreaths, or to say again what has been so well said by writers closer to the conflict
     in both time and temperament than I could ever hope or want to be. Stirring words are for speeches, not for travelers with
     sore feet, self-doubt, or eyes that seldom see beyond the present. At times I went to the Front as an amateur historian, at
     other times as a map reader, a literary tourist, a picnicker, a boyfriend, a trend hound on holiday, a curiosity seeker, a
     (I'll admit it) weekend war buff, a family researcher, a Canadian, a hiker, a married man, but always as a Boomer, trying
     to figure out why I was reaching for something beyond the horizon of living memory. Perhaps I did it out of an impulse to
     "mark the spot,"as described in Michael Ignatieff's splendid family history, The Russian Album:
    I still cannot shake off the superstition that the only past that is real, that exists at all, is the one contained within
     the memories of living people. When they die, the past they hold within them simply vanishes, and those of us who come after
     cannot inherit their experience, only preserve the myth of its existence. We can mark the spot where the cliff was washed
     away by the sea, but we cannot repair the wound the sea has made.

C HAPTER
2
    Flanders
    I. Nieuport to Dixmude
    U BENT HIER. You are here. Or, fancifully, you are twisted. A municipal map of Nieuport, Belgium, tells me where, and perhaps who, I am.
     I have arrived in Belgium from Paris today, ready to set off on a summer-long hike down a metaphor. My light backpack contains
     a fistful of maps, a change of clothes, a bottle of mineral water, a couple of novels, a six-pack of chewing gum, and a notebook
     for collecting trivia. I have come back to the Front.
    The First World War has been preying on my thoughts ever since I visited the Somme in the dead of winter. Throughout the following
     spring I invariably steered conversations toward the trenches, like a tiresome old soldier who wears out his listener's patience
     by telling and retelling the same stories. Now, in the summer of 1986,