In Europe

officer, William Pressey, reported seeing 200 French cavalrymen advancing across a hilltop close to Amiens, a stirring sight with their plumed helmets and gleaming lances. ‘They laughed and waved their lances at us, shouting “
Le Bosch fini
”, “Death to the Kraut!”’ Just after they disappeared from sight he heard the dry rattle of machine guns. Only a few stray horses came back.
    At Houthulst, where these days St Christoffel Church organises weekend masses and the blessing of automobiles, there is a huge Belgian war cemetery. Schoolchildren have hung letters on the bluish slabs. To the dead they have written: ‘You were given only five bullets a day. Too bad it happened. But you fought well.’ And: ‘If another war comes, you won't be there to see it. But I hope a war never comes. See you in heaven.’
    I hear a dull thud. A blue mist comes floating across the frosty fields.In the field behind the cemetery, the DOVO, the Belgian War Munition Demolition Service, has blown up another heap of First World War ammunition. They do it twice a day, one and a half tons a year. When the farmers find grenades they leave them at the base of the utility masts, and the miners collect them. And so it goes on here. Generation after generation, this soil continues to vomit up grenades, buttons, buckles, knives, skulls, bottles, rifles, sometimes even a whole tank. The Great War never ends.

Chapter EIGHT
Cassel
    THIS PLACE SHOULD BE VISITED IN NOVEMBER, OR IN FEBRUARY , when no grass, wheat or barley is growing, when the ground has returned to earth again, damp, muddy, full of puddles and wet snow. Late in the afternoon I drive to Cassel, just across the French border. The sun is hanging low over rolling fields, a huge orange ball about to sink into the ground. After that the sky turns a very fragile light blue with little pink clouds. Then darkness falls.
    Hôtel de Schoebeque has, they say, changed little since the French commander-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, and King George V stayed here. Here sat the switchmen of fate, the chiefs of staff, the men who encountered the tens of thousands of dead only in statistics. The gate is locked. I hop over the fence and wander through the gardens, and in the last light of day I see what they saw: the plain stretching out past Ypres, with all the roads, fields and hedgerows like a chessboard at your feet.
    The First World War already had a few of the characteristics that would make the next one so murderous: the massive scale, the technology, the alienation, the anonymity. The civilian, though, was still being spared: only five per cent of the victims of the First World War were civilians, compared with fifty per cent in the Second World War. The war, though not yet about race, was about origin, nationality and rank. And everywhere the governing classes willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of farm boys, workers and office clerks, without mercy, on behalf of a few vague moves on the chessboard.
    From all those soldiers’ humiliating experiences at the front there gradually rose new social and rebellious movements, each with its own tone and its own appearance in every country. The fronts became in this waythe breeding grounds for a series of mass movements that would dominate European politics for decades, varying from angry veterans in Italy to frustrated officers in Germany to hard line pacifist-socialists in France and Belgium.
    An almost aristocratic distance was maintained between French officers and their men. Maréchal Joseph Joffre refused to be told how many soldiers had been killed, for this would only ‘distract’ him. Corporal Barthas regularly describes the comfort enjoyed by French officers, while exhausted soldiers marched through the countryside like ‘cattle’, ‘slaves’ or ‘lepers’, hacked away at trenches and slept among the rats. But the British commander-in-chief, Earl Haig, was the most ruthless strategist.
    Some later characterised Haig as ‘the Scot who seized the opportunity to liquidate more Englishmen than anyone before him’. But during the war years he was idolised. No matter how you looked at it, within only a few years he had succeeded in whipping the little British Army of regulars into an excellently trained military force with millions of troops, and so saved the British Empire. Here too, the technological lag played a role. The only wise place for a general to be in modern warfare is, in fact, behind the lines, at the end of a