In Europe

one huge grey plain full of knee-high rubble, with the charred ruins of the monumental Lakenhal sticking up like a broken molar. My hotel, Old Tom on the Great Market, has been wiped away as well, from the looks of it. In fact, the Great Market in its entirety has been reduced to dust.
    Even today, Ypres has something unreal about it. It resembles a normal old town, but it is obvious: everything here has been reconstructed. Houses and buildings that were two, three, five hundred years old are all replicas built with the greatest care and attention. The crowning glory of this intense predilection for the past is the Lakenhal. The broken molar of 1918 is still in my mind's eye, but the huge hall is so beautiful, so unmistakably ancient, that I stop believing in anything else.
    A friend of mine once found in a flea market a pastel drawing of a bare and blasted landscape, with a little steeple in the background and in the foreground a few half-frozen puddles and some barbed wire. There's not a living soul to be seen, but the drawing is covered with a sort of haze that suggests the passing of some huge catastrophe. At the same time the light is frozen, as though everything is in waiting. Beneath it: ‘Février 1917, Pervijze, G. R.’
    Where did G. R. stand to draw this? My friend comes down for a day and together we drive through the countryside around Ypres. We view the overfull German cemetery at Langemark: had fate not missed by a hair the addition of one other name to the list of the dead, between Hirsch, Erich von, and Hoch, Bruno, the history of Europe would have been very different indeed. At Zillebeke we visit the Museum Hooge Crater and the Hill 62 Museum, two private collections of the sort found everywhere along the front, full of photographs, rusty helmets, mortar shells, rifles, bayonets, old bottles, buckles, bones, pipes. Many of the finds are also for sale. In the garden of Hill 62 there are still a few of the original trenches, now filled with yellow meltwater.
    At Houtem we watch a carnival pass by with about sixty children in it, dressed as devils, Chinamen, cats, witches and fairies, a flutter of bright little birds in a grey, quiet street with all the shutters closed.
    And then suddenly we find the view from the pastel drawing, along the deserted railway tracks between Diksmuide and Nieuwpoort. It is the same spot, unmistakably, close to where two roads intersect. The sceneseems almost unchanged: fields, water, barbed wire, houses and barns stuck loosely to the plain, as though they could be peeled off again at any moment. That same haze is still hanging over the land.
    ‘Everywhere mud and rats, rats, piles of them! In the winter the sentries had to be carried off because their feet were frozen. And the shooting! A friend of mine, he came from Lier as well. At one point he suddenly said: “I never knew I had such beautiful flesh.” And he grabbed his leg like this. Calm as you please. Then he asked a buddy for a cigarette and sat there smoking it. His leg had been shot off at the knee, it looked like it had been sawed in two!’
    Belgian veteran Arthur Wouters (b.1895) is telling his story, probably for the umpteenth time, to a Belgian TV crew. When the war began, the Belgian Army had 200,000 soldiers. A little more than two months later, at the first battle on the Yser, only 75,000 of them were left. By Christmas 1914, 747,000 Germans and 854,000 French had already been killed or wounded, and the original British Expeditionary Forces — 117,000 men in total – had been almost completely decimated.
    On 31 August, on the Eastern Front, the Germans had won a bloody battle with 70,000 Russian casualties and 100,000 prisoners taken. Afterwards, this battle at Tannenberg became enveloped in a mist of all manner of Teutonic tales of heroism and whatever else the German Empire had to offer in the way of mythology. The truth was that a high price had to be paid for that victory: the Germans deployed dozens of regiments there which were badly needed on the French front. That is one reason why their western offensive became bogged down. In France, General Alexander von Kluck's 1st Army had to advance an average of twenty kilometres a day over a period of three weeks, with 84,000 horses which required more than a million kilos of feed each day. It was madness to suppose that one could work an army that way for weeks and still have them fresh enough to defeat the French.
    But the Allied forces were in bad