The Old Front Line: The Centenary of the Western Front in Pictures

By Stephen Bull

Now that the last veterans are gone, the First World War is now a completely historical subject—governed by archaeology and genealogy, battlefield tourism and military history. The anguish and privations are a bit further away, but there is still huge interest in the awful conditions and carnage endured by a generation of youth who sacrificed their lives for their country.

“The Old Front Line” is a phrase first coined by the poet John Masefield when he looked back on the battle of the Somme from a distance of just one year, in 1917, and speculated how the Western Front might look in the future. Stephen Bull’s copiously illustrated work—part travel guide, part popular history—a century on, answers his speculations. The main source material is new and contemporary photographs, as well as some from the intervening century. Taken together these provide a series of exciting vistas and informative details that tell the story of the battles and landscapes. Aerial photography, old and new ground shots—and in a few cases even images taken underground—provide an authoritative summary of the war on the Western Front.

Following an introduction that sets the scene and looks at the early stages of the war, eight chapters examine the Western Front geographically, looking closely at the main areas of fighting and what is visible today: not just the “iron harvest”—the scars left by trench and battle—but also the cemeteries, war memorials and statues that remind the visitor starkly of the loss of a generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate
• Release date: Aug 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612003313

Stephen Bull

Dr Stephen Bull worked for the National Army Museum and BBC in London before taking up his current post as Curator of Military History and Archaeology with Lancashire Museums. A consultant to the University of Oxford he is also a Member of the Institute for Archaeologists, and has made TV appearances that include the series Battlefield Detectives, news and archaeology features. Published on both sides of the Atlantic and in several languages, he is the author of a number of works for Osprey including titles on tactics in World War II. Dr Bull has been one of the key contributors to the accompanying television series screened in the United Kingdom and North America.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

At the Illies German war cemetery near La Bassée nearly 3,000 lie under the trees. One group, apparently arranged in a circle, are suggestive of a shell hole or pit burial.

Acentury on from World War I Western Europe is still gashed by a broad sinuous line snaking its way from the Channel Coast to Switzerland. This strip of the concentrated architecture of war and memorials of peace, contains the mortal remains of over three million dead soldiers. Many have no known grave, and others lie in mass graves, in what was easily the most significant killing ground of 1914–18. It is as Frederick Voigt, a British soldier of German parentage, observed, ‘a stupid, terrible and uncouth monster.’ Yet, just as battles pushed No Man’s Land back and forth with time and there is physically more than one front line, there have also been many different interpretations of the Western Front. For some it is the ultimate monument to futility; to others a warning, or a symbol of fortitude and sacrifice. Yet, and particularly for the young, it is becoming something more hopeful, a place of mystery, wonder, and even of adventure into a past where discoveries can be made not only about war and history in general, but the very personal past of the lives of one’s own ancestors.

Moreover, the meaning of the Western Front has changed radically over time. Between 1914 and 1918 the names of its villages, forts, and rivers and the heights of its hills were the essential markers by which both generals and the European public at large gauged progress, or the lack of it, towards the ultimate goal of victory and the end of what had become an increasingly exhausting struggle. Newspapers were not allowed to report on many aspects of the war for reasons of security, and rarely gave much more than the haziest notion of strategy. They were, however, fed the names of villages and hamlets, most already abandoned and some entirely obliterated from the landscape, as evidence of success. So it was that many civilians became as familiar with the names of the Verdun forts, or the villages of Flanders and Picardy or the Argonne, as they were with Balaklava or Waterloo. Many were unaware how insignificant those settlements really were, and even on military trench maps names like Thiepval and Passchendaele were left much more as an often forlorn attempt to aid navigation, and warn what their cellars might now contain, than as any indication that these places still operated as living settlements. Arguably much more important figures on these wartime maps were the red and blue lines, the spots, dots, hatching and crosses that indicated trenches, machine gun nests, wire and pillboxes.

The interior of Fort Pompelle, near Reims. Built in the 1880s, Pompelle was originally garrisoned by 270 men with six 155mm guns and a variety of lesser pieces. Disarmed on the eve of war, it quickly fell to the Germans, but was retaken in the wake of the battle of the Marne. Though bombarded and assaulted several times it did not change hands again. Classified as an historic monument in 1922 and sold in 1955, it became a museum in 1972. The artillery piece, right, is a French 75mm quick-firer, a prewar weapon that set the pace for gun development.

One of the first serious attempts to describe the battlefields was John Masefield’s 1917 volume The Old Front Line. Masefield had, at first, thought to write a volume about the battle of the Somme, but like journalists of the time, was stymied by lack of access to official documents. He fell back on describing the terrain upon which the battle had been fought, and produced a lyrical and evocative picture in which he both looked forward to victory, and imagined how the fields of war would appear in future. He foresaw a time in which ‘all this frontier of trouble’ would be forgotten, the trenches filled in, the plough erasing the ‘look of war’. In many ways, therefore, Masefield is our starting point, and what we are attempting here is an answer to his imaginings that enjoys not only the advantages of modern digital colour photography and access to memoirs and documents unreleased, or even unwritten, in 1917, but the very great luxury of hindsight. For Masefield’s victory, expensive as it was, was indeed won, and a century on a less partisan and much more inclusive sketch can be attempted.

French scene 1915, showing typical elements of fire trench design. In this example the garrison man a fire step, and shoot through loopholes providing both protection and concealment. To the rear of the walkway is an additional deeper channel for drainage. The cylinders are food containers.

To an extent John Masefield was correct, for by the time of his death in 1967 much of the Western Front had not only returned to farming or nature, but been entirely damned by a new generation who saw only folly in the belligerent activities of their fathers. By now the orthodox popular view of the ‘war to end all wars’ was that it had been more stupid than pretty well any other, before or since. Gradually the conflict had come to be viewed through the eyes of the War Poets, perhaps more accurately ‘Anti-War Poets’, skilled and emotive wordsmiths such as Owen and Sassoon, masters of the description of the hopelessness and death, which were indeed one important aspect of the front. Only comparatively recently has this verdict been systematically questioned. For ‘mud and blood’ were only ever part of a complex story, involving diplomatic and political failure, technical and inventive ingenuity, an incredible mass mobilisation of nations and industry, and a change in attitudes to war, even as it progressed. Passage of time and increased information has given us a far more nuanced picture and one which allows a far wider variety of interpretation, both of the Western Front, and of the war itself. Arguably we have become much freer about what we can say, as the passing years make the front less of a living wound, and more a part of history. With some degree of detachment it also becomes possible to make comparisons with other great fortifications of the past—Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China, or the forts and castles of antiquity.

The game of war: a contemporary French postcard Dans les tranchées (in the trenches). Until at least late 1916 the French were indubitably the senior partner of the Entente on the Western Front. Military deaths totalling approximately 1.4 million would adversely impact French demography for decades.

Even before the struggle was over, the Western Front became a place of pilgrimage, with the first pioneers of the many thousands of grieving parents, wives, and siblings wanting to gain comfort from seeing the place where their son, husband, or brother had fallen, and to visit a grave. The lack of a definitive final resting place for the many torn beyond recognition or buried by bombardment would later be partially filled by memorials to the missing, such as those erected by Britain, the United States, and Canada. As the Michelin guide Battlefields of the Marne 1914, written even before the Armistice was signed, explained, a visit to the front, ‘… should be a pilgrimage, not merely a journey across ravaged land. Seeing is not enough, one must understand: a ruin is more moving when one knows what has caused it; a stretch of country which might seem dull and uninteresting to the unenlightened eye, becomes transformed at the thought of the battles which have raged there.’ This idea, of the front as place of pilgrimage, gathered strength in the immediate postwar years as with the coming of peace dangers receded and transport links were restored.

German troops marching through Lille, northern France. Damaged during the fighting, the important town of Lille was occupied in October 1914, and remained in German hands until recaptured by Gen Sir William Birdwood four years later.

Just one of the hundreds of French World War I town memorials. This example, at Suippes, is unusual in that it emphasises the mourning female relative rather than the fallen warrior who is represented only by his Adrian helmet.

Archaeologist Martin Brown at work during extensive excavations on the slopes below Messines. In addition to the usual crop of shells, this dig mapped the line of the German trenches and discovered a spade still stuck deep in the frozen mud. For several years an employee of the British Ministry of Defence, and more recently a consultant with the WYG Group, Martin has been a leading light of the longterm Plugstreet Project. The best Western Front archaeology has become increasingly professional in recent years, rescuing information and artefacts prior to developments, as well as informing research and tourism initiatives.

Outside the newly redeveloped In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, a group seeing the Western Front by bicycle, 2013. As green and healthconscious alternatives walking and cycling promise less intrusive forms of tourism, combined with an ability to reach places inaccessible to motor vehicles. Tour courtesy of Bike and Culture Flanders.

A French demarcation stone near the Chemin des Dames. Designed by sculptor Paul Moreau Vauthier (1871–1936), these markers, about 3ft (1m) in height, were erected to show the limit of the German advance of 1918. One per kilometre (5/8 of a mile) of front was the original idea, later reduced to 240, and far fewer were actually placed between 1920 and 1927, with some added subsequently and others destroyed, mainly in World War II. A recent count lists 96 stones in France and 23 in Belgium. There are three basic types, depicting French, Belgian or British steel helmets and equipment.

Visitors on a battlefield tour examine the 1957 memorial to the heroes and martyrs of the French offensive of 40 years earlier, located 10 miles (16km) east of Reims on the D931. Its steps mark the years of war. The struggle referred to is the Nivelle offensive, commenced on 16 April 1917. The new French Commander-in-Chief, Robert Nivelle, promised great things, deploying over a million men, 7,000 artillery pieces, and tanks between Roye and Reims, focused on the Chemin des Dames ridge. In the event the tanks were shot to pieces and the attack quickly faltered. Morale suffered a heavy blow, the rumbles of mutiny began and Nivelle was replaced by Petain within weeks.

Battlefield visits rapidly extended to veterans, and to their families and children, some of whom were too young to have known those whose graves they were taken to see. Comradeship and curiosity joined mourning as motives to view, or revisit, the front. There had of course been well-heeled tourists before 1914, enjoying the spas of Northern Europe, the grand tours of Italy, or the liners of the oceans. Arguably, however, what began in the interwar period on the Western Front was a new phenomenon: the first stirrings a sort of worthy and highly respectable form of mass tourism, an essentially classless journey with moral purpose. Nevertheless the memorials, battlefield parks, and neat rows of graves, most of them still much the same now as when they were erected in the 1920s, were originally intended as solace to those who survived and the families of