In Europe

bundle of telephone wires. Fighting generals – fifty-six British generals were killed during the war – were brave, they were good for morale, but otherwise they simply got in the way. At the same time, the first telephones and other communications systems were still too unreliable to allow generals to work in this way, especially during combat.
    Were there actually switchmen of fate, working behind the scenes? There certainly were. First of all, one had the French brandy merchant Jean Monnet, whom we met earlier in the City of London. As soon as he heard that war had broken out, he asked for a meeting with the prime minister, René Viviani, a friend of a friend. Monnet, twenty-six at the time, raised a matter with Viviani which, as he wrote later, he would probably not have mentioned had he been older and wiser. It was a new kind of problem, a twentieth-century problem. For this mass war, Monnet reasoned, all of the warring nations’ resources had to be brought to bear, and that required new forms of organisation and cooperation.
    War was no longer simply a matter for the battlefield. Winning amodern war involved less heroic things as well, such as supply chains and shipping capacity. Germany, with its massive industrial base, seemed significantly better prepared for such warfare than either Great Britain or France. It was vitally important, therefore, that the two countries combine their economies, ‘as though forming a single nation’. Following on the heels of decades of overblown nationalism, this was an outright revolutionary idea.
    The French prime minister agreed with him. Monnet succeeded in convincing the British as well – he had vast connections due to his business – and there arose an Allied Transport Pool and a Wheat Executive. These bodies focused, for the first time in European history, on common interests rather than on national ones.
    Without the Wheat Executive, France would almost certainly have starved. Without the Allied Transport Pool, the German submarines would have been able to cut off all supply lines to the continent, as they almost succeeded in doing in the spring of 1917. When faced with the same problems in 1940, Great Britain and France established similar cooperative ties, but then in the service of a more ambitious ideal: their possible continuation in times of peace as well. In a certain sense, the Wheat Executive and the Allied Transport Pool were the kernel of what would later develop into the European Union.
    There were other switchmen of fate: Karel Cogge, a Belgian lock-keeper, for example, along with a constantly inebriated ship's mate Hendrik Geeraerd and a local historian, Emeric Feys. It was Feys who found, in his archives, old plans for the inundation of the local marshlands. And it was on his instructions, in late October 1914, that Cogge opened the sluices at Veurne-Sas. When the water did not rise quickly enough, it was Geeraerd who, under cover of night, succeeded in prying open the abandoned and overgrown sluice doors in the Noordvaart canal. In this way they were able, at the very last moment, to flood the plain around the Yser. To this trio belongs the credit for halting the German advance at Nieuwpoort.
    There are still two Cogges in the Nieuwpoort phone book: Kurt and Georges. I call Georges. ‘Yes, he was my great-uncle, my grandmother told me about it once. No, no one knows any more about it, they're all dead. Kurt? He's my son! And I have a grandson, too!’
    And so the Cogges of Nieuwpoort live on, completely undaunted by history.
    During the Great War, the town of Poperinge was the first relatively quiet spot behind the lines. Believe it or not, a sign still hangs in the square which reads SAFE or UNSAFE – depending on where the wind was coming from during a gas attack – but that didn't stop the fun. This was where one found the first glass, and the much-sung last woman:
    After the war fini
    English soldiers parti
    Mademoiselles de Poperinge vont pleurer
    Avec plenty bébé!
    The stately Talbot House stood outside that whirl of activity. It was an Everyman's club, where soldiers from any rank and class could find rest for a while. That egalitarian atmosphere still prevails, around the staircases, the furniture, the candelabras, the books, the paintings, the water jugs, the piano the men sang at. Until the late 1980s, veterans still came to stay here. Even the tranquil garden has remained unchanged, including the sign inviting one to ‘Come into