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In Europe

Titel: In Europe Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Geert Mak
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couples touring the front lines. The museums compete by offering even more audio and visual effects. For the first time in ages, I can receive Dutch channels on the TV in my room. On the news they are interviewing tourists who were stranded for a few days in a snow-bound Swiss village. ‘What we've been through!’ one tanned woman says. ‘We felt just like refugees.’ Another one cries ‘Everything, we've lost everything!’ She's talking about a suitcase full of skling outfits and make-up.
    It is foggy outside, and as the day progresses the fog grows thicker. I drive carefully to the Somme. The blue contours of a ship are barely visible at the locks on the Canal du Nord. Close by is a stand of black willows, a few coots are swimming around, then all this dissolves again into silence and greyness. All the trenches, all the craters, all the forgotten remnants, all the lost bodies are covered in a white veil from sky to earth.
    The Somme was the battle of total planning. On paper, there was no way this offensive could go wrong. The confrontation had been on the drawing boards for months on either side of the front, while at least a million soldiers and 200,000 horses, along with untold quantities of rifles, cannons and munitions, were being assembled. The countless tents, field kitchens, field hospitals, command posts and halting-places looked like little cities. ‘It was one big anthill,’ Louis Barthas wrote on 9 October, 1916, when he arrived at the Somme halfway through the battle. ‘There were convoys driving back and forth along the roads that passed through the camp, heavy munitions trucks, ambulances and all manner of military vehicles. Railway tracks had also been built, along which massive convoys of supplies, ammunition and food were transported …The camp was too big to be taken in at a glance. All you could hear was the noisy hubbub, mixed with the thundering of cannons in the distance.’
    The British had even built a special bunker along the front line for Geoffrey Malins, the man assigned to make their victory film. The Germans,supposedly wiped out by days of shelling, nevertheless proved to be alive and kicking at the start of the battle. Their barbed-wire barriers, their strong positions, their machine guns, all were still intact. It was the greatest slaughter in British military history. Of the 100,000 men who moved out that day, more than 19,000 had been killed by noon. Forty thousand were wounded. General Sir Beauvoir de Lisle reported: ‘It was a remarkable display of training and discipline, and the attack failed only because dead men cannot move on.’
    It took weeks before the British were able to recover the bodies of their comrades. ‘Wounded, they had crawled into shell craters, wrapped themselves in their waterproof blankets, pulled out their bibles and died like that.’
    Thanks to tips from Lyn MacDonald's veterans, I am able to find Malin's cinematic vantage point. It is, in all probability, this large hollow beside the Scottish monument at Beaumont Hamel, now covered in tall grass but an excellent place indeed for a camera. I squat down in it and see the images in my mind's eye. A group of soldiers has taken cover against the shoulder of the rutted road in front of me, ready for a renewed attack. They are young boys, half calm, half tense, one of them turns and looks boldly into the lens, another moves off camera, some are fussing with their equipment and take a swig from a canteen. One is casually smoking a cigarette, while another lies in the foreground, acting tough, showing off. One final draw on the cigarette, a signal sounds, the bayonets are mounted on the rifles, and then it all breaks loose.
    What the film does not show is how it ended: less than two minutes later, all these men were dead.
    I take the bus along the old infantry lines. The war cemeteries stand like orchards along the farmers’ roads, stop by stop. I visit the field where almost the entire Royal Newfoundland Regiment was mown down during a senseless attack, a case of collective suicide that even today could serve as an example for Muslim fundamentalists. No fewer than 700 boys. Their desperate passage can still be precisely traced. Sheep graze around the bomb craters and trenches. The barbed wire is gone, the bodies have vanished, but the Canadian fir trees planted here make a fearsome noise: hear their branches talking in the wind.
    I am reminded of a conversation that Vera Brittain, as an army

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