Men groaned in the same language and died in the same language — in east and west. In the region of Alsace-Lorraine on the Western Front many young Frenchmen had cheerfully plunged into the first border battles, convinced that one shot, one shout and one charge would resolve everything. Waiters rushed into battle together with the artists they served, who had just recently ‘avoided alcohol so as to better prepare for war’. Light-headed as they were, they thought it wouldn’t take much, not much at all, for everything to be over and done with, and what a shame it was that their sweethearts weren’t there to watch them after seeing them off in Paris with unforgettable cheers and sticking flowers in the barrels of their rifles; flowers which each of the men now wore under his shirt like a shrivelled rosebud.
Everything was different to how the soldiers had imagined it. The recklessness of senior and mid-level commanders in the border battles in north-western France saw that the flower of young French manhood and their officers perished in the last days of August 1914. Death trawled and netted big fish, not stopping even when the catch was so heavy that it could hardly be dragged from the field of death. For the junior officer Germain D’Esparbès, the Great War began when he wrote a letter to his superior commander after the great slaughter in Alsace-Lorraine:
I think the work of the French Red Cross is simply disgraceful. I woke up near the town of Lunéville to find myself in a sea of dead soldiers and spent three whole days with them. Nothing unusual, I hear you say. But I wish to describe to you those three terrible days, which passed before one of our Red Cross crews finally found me. I commit these lines to paper in the deepest conviction that I am about to lose my mind, so I need to write quickly, however illegible that makes my handwriting even for me.
I woke up at dawn in a wood beside a road. At first I was unable to move, so I tensely felt myself all over with my right hand: first my left arm, then one leg and the other. On realizing that I hadn’t been blown apart by a shell, I passed my hands over my belly and shoulders and licked my forefinger and thumb. By the taste of dust on my fingers I realized I had no blood on my coat, so I probably hadn’t picked up a Hun bullet. Oh, how I rejoiced at that moment, but I shouldn’t have! I lay there until afternoon on top of something soft, only hard and uneven in a few places, so I thought it a mound covered with grass. I was unable to move much or swing my arms; if I had been, I would have realized that the mound was not one of earth and grass but of the dead bodies of my poor comrades.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized where I was and what I had been lying on; that was to be my second day spent among the dead. I jumped up fresh and almost healthy that morning — I think it was the last day of August — when, oh my God, I saw the carnage. There were dead as far as my eyes could see. In many places they lay one on top of another, entwined and entangled, and completely covered the ground like human humus which monstrous plants of war were to germinate from. I found some of the soldiers in a sitting position, with their eyes open, seeming to me to be still alive. I rushed to one and then to another in the hope that they would answer, but in vain. The grim reaper must have cut them down so abruptly that the life hadn’t managed to flee from their eyes, and so they sat, and the occasional one almost defied gravity by still leaning against a tree or a worn-out old nag. Two comrades, with their arms around each other, had crawled into death in a patch of wild strawberries. The blood on their faces mingled with the juice of the strawberries they seemed to have eaten with their last strength before they expired.
I started shouting and calling for help, but no one from the Red Cross came that second day either. What a poor wretch I was, whom an evil demiurge had condemned to life. I wanted to run away and escape, but where could I have gone when there was an endless tangle of corpses all around, and it seemed to me that not even a whole day’s running in the summer sun would have led me to anything new — except to the next trench full of dead soldiers. That’s why I stayed where I was. Straining my senses, I summoned all my presence of mind. I thought it would be much harder for them to come to my aid if I wandered about rather than staying put. I still don’t know if it was the right decision.
On that second day among the dead, I identified a plot of bodies I’d be able to put in some kind of order. I set about disentangling the bodies of these comrades and cleaning their wounds as best I could. I sat them up or at least had them reclining, like in a Roman theatre. It must have been about a hundred corpses I repositioned in this way, maybe more. Towards evening, I wanted to see who they were, so I took out each one’s identity card and read their particulars. Jacques Tali, student; Michel Moriac, wholesaler; Zbigniew Zborowski, member of the Foreign Legion. I was still perhaps the man I had been before the war until I got to know them and looked each one in the face. At that instant, they ceased to be unknown heroes. I thought about what they would have gone on to do if they had survived the attack near Lunéville. Tali would have become a famous curator of the Autumn Salon; Moriac would have made a fortune dealing in vinegar; Zborowski would have become Polish ambassador to France. But like this? Like this they were simply dead, but certainly not silent.
Before the day was over, my reason definitely began to leave me. That’s right, I heard them talking. I answered them and even began to argue with them, although I was still aware that everything was coming from my mouth — their voices and mine. I took a real liking to some of the comrades, to others not so much, and when I woke up on the third day I pulled the ones up to me who I’d become especially close with. On that third day we had a kind of group session, but the conversation didn’t hold us for long. I discovered a deck of cards in the pocket of one of my best friends, the wholesaler Moriac. Decency restrained me for a while, but the terrible loneliness drove me to do what I’m about to describe with a shudder of shame.
I sat my comrades in a circle and started playing Lorum with them. I shuffled the cards and dealt them first to one fellow, then to a second, a third, a fourth and lastly, myself. I moved their hands and fingers, which by now were stiff, so they could hold their cards, and then the game began. I’d play my card and set off around the circle. There was no cheating; I didn’t abuse my role. Everyone would play a card, and whoever had the best hand would win the round. Then I’d deal again and start off around the circle once more. Another game for my comrades and me.
The Red Cross found me in the middle of a round I was set to win and sent me to Metz for a regimen of therapy, and then on to Paris. Please treat all that I’ve written as the complete truth and take whatever steps necessary so that our medics make it to the survivors faster and don’t consider it futile to search among hundreds of bodies to find one who still has breath in his lungs. If they had noticed me on the first day I would have remained who I was, but now I’ve become someone else, a different person who I’m frightened of and who will forever be foreign to me.
Thus wrote Germain D’Esparbès, though hardly anyone was likely to have read the young officer’s letter at the time. At the beginning of the Great War, the Germans concentrated the bulk of their army in the west, on their borders with France and Belgium, based on the strategic plan of first defeating France and then transferring their forces to the east to reckon with Russia. Since the defences along France’s eastern border from Belfort to Verdun were considered impregnable, the German Supreme Command deployed the larger part of its forces on the right flank along the Aachen-Metz line, in the spirit of the old Schlieffen Plan from the nineteenth century. At first, war seemed some way away because Germany only requested ‘free passage’ through Belgium. Since Belgium declined, and since Britain sided with the brave Belgian King Albert and his people, Germany set General Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies in motion. They advanced through Belgium like a mower through a wheatfield, and as early as 24 August 1914, the German cavalry entered Brussels — the first city on the wartime tour of Hans-Dieter Huis, the great German baritone.
Fêted Huis arrived in Brussels together with the staff of Kluck’s 1st Army. Cheerful cavalrymen stood by their animals’ sweat-glistening necks and sang ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and for Huis this was all a little absurd. But he didn’t think of laughing out loud. The next day he was to hold a concert, and he alone knew how much