In Europe

consequences.
    Corporal Barthas’ company arrived at Verdun on 12 May, 1916. They were to relieve the troops of the 125th Regiment. When they entered the trenches, all they found was ‘one huge pile of ripped-apart human flesh’. The day before, it seems, there had been a massive mortar attack.‘Everywhere lay wreckage, ruined rifles, torn knapsacks from which tender letters and carefully cherished memories had fallen and were scattered in the wind. There were also shattered canteens, shoulder bags torn to shreds, all bearing the insignia of the 125th Regiment.’
    One day later they were allowed to leave again, in a terrible nighttime journey on foot across the battlefield, ‘across barbed wire, poles, split sandbags, corpses and assorted wreckage … After each lightning flash of mortar fire, the darkness seemed only blacker.’
    Across those same fields today hangs a thick, cold layer of fog. The landscape, in Barthas’ day shelled into barrenness, is now covered with gaunt trees. Until not so very long ago, nothing would grow here at all, except the hardy Canadian firs. Trenches and shell craters are still visible everywhere, filled with brown meltwater. All the war sights are indicated with large signs. I work my way quickly past all the highlights of this macabre Disneyland: the monument, the charnel house, the firebombed village, the fortress of glory, the sacred trench with the bayonets of seventeen stalwart soldiers who, according to legend, were buried alive in a mortar attack. (Sticking a bayonet into the ground was a quick way to mark the grave of a few poor sods, but of course no one here cares to hear about that.)
    The Douaumount ossuary rises up from the mist. The enormous grey charnel house, the size of a large secondary school, contains the bones of more than 130,000 of the fallen. You can see them through the little half-misted windows at the back of the building; here and there some orderly soul has neatly piled them up: femurs with femurs, ribs with ribs, arms with arms, whole and half skulls, all with lovely young teeth.
    The fog makes everything quiet and introverted. The snow melting off the roof drips on and on into the gutters, and that is the only sound.

Chapter Ten
Versailles
    LOUIS BARTHAS, EARLY AUGUST 1916, AT THE FRONT IN CHAMPAGNE : ‘Two days later, our 6th Group went to occupy Guard Post Number Ten. It was only a normal barricade in an old corridor connecting the German lines. Six metres from our barricade, the Germans had set up one of their own. Barbed wire had been scattered between the two, but only four leaps separated the two peoples, two races bent on exterminating each other. How amazed, how perturbed patriotic civilians would have been to see how calm and peaceful it was there. One soldier would be smoking, the other would be reading or writing. Some were arguing without lowering their voices. Their amazement would turn to dismay if they saw the French and German sentries sitting on their breastworks, calmly smoking a pipe and, from time to time, taking a breath of fresh air and sharing a little small talk, like good neighbours.’
    What our corporal describes here is a situation that in no way fits the commonly accepted view of suffering and heroism. It does not correspond to the military historians’ dissertations on strategy, or with the official accounts of battles and bloodshed. Little research has been done into such ‘live and let live’ situations. Still, they must have presented themselves rather often, between battles and along the endless stretches of front line where nothing ever happened.
    There was always a certain sense of understanding between the enemies: foot soldiers, whether German, British, French or Belgian, all die in the same way, and they knew that. They had, after a certain fashion, respect for each other. And they came to their enemy's defence when the home front characterised them as ‘cowardly’ or ‘stupid’.
    In his autobiographical novel
Le feu
, Henri Barbusse speaks of twodifferent worlds: the front, ‘where there are too many of the unfortunate’, and the hinterland, ‘where too much good fortune exists’. In the former world, mutual understanding occasionally led to outbursts of fraternisation. At the spot where the Yser Tower now stands, at Diksmuide in Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914. The Germans plied the Belgians with schnapps. A German officer returned a