Stephen O’Shea “Back To The Front: Walking the Trenches of
WWI” D&M Publishers., 1997, Kindle
library edition, 194 pp.
I have always had an interest in WWI. Maybe it is because of the absolute stupidity
displayed by the Generals, especially that of General Haig and Joffre. Then
again, maybe it is because “WWI is a great divide. First, but not foremost, were the political
changes it helped engender. Even an
incomplete list of them goes on and on: the fall of the Romanovs, the fall of
the Ottomans, the fall of the Hohenzollerns, the fall of the Hapsburgs, the
rise of Soviet Communism, the dress rehearsal of American hegemony, the
dismemberment of Austro-Hungary, the creation of Poland, the creation of Yugoslavia,
the creation of Czechoslovakia, the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France,
the birth of nationalism in New Zealand, the birth of nationalism in Canada,
the revolt, independence, and partition of Ireland, the guarantee of a Jewish
national homeland in Palestine, the creation of Turkey, the birth of Arab
nationalism, the fall of the monarchical principle, the extension of voting
rights to women, the introduction of income tax, the introduction of
Prohibition, the acceptance of total war, the rise of Fascism, the rise of mass
pacifism.”(p. 8). Although this book is
not really about those connections, it is those that led me to read this book.
Anyway, in the summers between 1986 and 1995 Canadian
author O’Shea walks the entire 450 miles through no man’s land that separated
the German Army and the Allied Armies from 1914 through 1918. His journey from the Atlantic to Switzerland
and describes how the terrain now appears and what significant events occurred
during the war in selected sectors. He
is accompanied by the ghosts of two Irish grandfathers who fought in this
conflict as he chronicles the unbelievable useless loss of life along this line
of trenches.
I don’t suppose many people will be interested in
this kind of detail, such is life.
My Notes:
Pg. 2: Every
generation is said to dismiss the experience of its predecessors as a sort of
tedious overture humanity had to endure before the real divas stepped onstage.
Pg. 20: The
Ypres Salient was a remarkable shooting gallery. During the week of July 25 to July 31, 1917,
the British army fired off 4,283,550 shells along a front twelve miles wide,
then had its infantry wad through--in the rain—the ensuing soupy morass in the
face of sustained machine-gun fire. This
place is one of the three or four on the Western Front, along with Verdun, the
Chemin des Dames, and the Somme, where the criminal stupidity of the First
World War still seems manifest, even after the passing of eighty years.
Pg. 27: In
the summer and fall of 1914, France lost as many men on the battlefield as the
American army would in all of the twentieth century. In the month of August alone, more than
210,000 Frenchmen died in the headlong offensives of Plan XVII.
Pg. 28:
Author’s favorite story concerning British attitudes at the beginning of
the war: Ordered to post four lookouts
to warn of an eventual German attack on the town, the officer sets up only sets
up three lookouts instead of four and is later forced to explain his
negligence. “I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t
think it necessary to post the fourth lookout in that direction. The enemy would hardly come from that
direction. It’s private property, Sir.”
Pg. 41:
Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) October
1917: What happened can be stated
baldly: an army was forced by its own generals (Haig) to drown in the mud. This was three years into the war and the
generals had learned nothing.
Pg. 79: The
Battle of the Somme occurred near a town called Albert.
Pg. 85:
Verdun. (I took the wife to Verdun on our honey-moon). The German General
Falkenhayn had no intention of taking Verdun; he just wanted the French to die
in front of it. The sad truth was that the town of Verdun and its
fortifications served no appreciable military purpose in trench warfare—and the
French generals knew this. Yet, Falkenhayn gambled that the French would throw
good sense to the winds and perish in droves in defense of a symbol—and he was
correct. Later the German’s would judge
the capture as important as the French judged retaining it and 400,000 from
each side died.
Pg. 86: The
Somme, July 1916, was the biggest fiasco in British military history. Within a matter of hours, 40,000 British
soldiers had been wounded and 21,000 killed.
This battle was fought from July to November and saw the British and
German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer 1,300,000
casualties between them in an area just seven miles square.
Pg. 117:
Chemin des Dames, Spring 1917: For
an appreciation of the French stupidity in this arena, see Stanley Kubrick’s
“Paths of Glory—a film made in 1957—that was successfully kept off French movie
screens until well into the 1970s.
Pg. 124: The
American century began in 1917. The U-boats ushered it in, with the help of the
new German foreign minister, Dr. Zimmermann, and the strange, unsolicited
telegram he sent to the Mexican government.
Zimmermann promised lavish German support, in the event of an American
entry into the war, should Mexico wish to wrest the southwestern states of the
union back from their Yankee usurpers.
On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the war.
Pg. 149: Sergeant
Alvin York: Near the village of
Chatel-Chehery Sergeant York performed a barely credible stunt that would
eventually make him the most decorated American soldier of the war. During an attack, York crept away from his
decimated platoon and hid in a place near the enemy lines. He then began picking off German
machine-gunners without giving away his position—he single-handedly killed 28
German soldiers and captured 132 others.
Pg. 172: St.
Mihiel (American Battle Site): This September
1918 battle was the first U.S. commanded military action on European soil and
preceded the Meuse-Argonne effort by a couple of weeks. The World War I Montsec American Monument is
located on the isolated hill of Montsec (Thiaucourt), France 12 miles southeast
of our St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial and 10 miles east of the town
of St. Mihiel. The entrance to the memorial's access road is immediately west
of the center of Montsec Village, France. American soldiers fought in this
region in 1917 and 1918.
Pg. 185: In
early November, 1918, the Second Reich finally collapsed and the Kaiser, forced
to abdicate, fled to the Netherlands.
The war was over. Sixty-seven
million men in uniform participated, one in every six was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were
wounded. On the Western Front alone,
more than 4 million had died in their ditches.
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