Back to the Front by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online Page A

fictional. Like his unfortunate compatriots, Hercule Poirot,
     Agatha Christie's sleuth, was chased from his homeland by Schrecklichkeit. (Why else would a Belgian detective be living in
     London?)
    The Belgian refugees were welcomed as heroes. In Britain enthusiasm for the war ran high. Shopkeepers with German surnames
     had their businesses patriotically looted, and, in just the first month of a recruiting drive for a volunteer army, half a
     million young Britons rushed to sign up to avenge what was called "poor little Belgium." It is difficult to imagine the naivete
     of expectations, the trust in one's country, the excitement of being young in that summer of 1914. Rupert Brooke, genteel
     England'sundisputed golden boy for both his godlike looks and his felicitous way with words, came to symbolize the vaguely
     homoerotic ideal of youth in arms. Previously he had been the athletic, intelligent, effortlessly irresistible upper-crust
     Brit, a sort of ur-Calvin Klein male; now he was a noble Galahad off to grapple with the awful Hun. The opening to the first
     of Brooke's "1914" sonnets, once committed to memory by a nation swooning over his early death (in 1915), then subsequently
     ignored out of embarrassment at the work's politically incorrect martial ardor, deserves to be cited at least one more time
     before it no longer catches the heart. The end of the nineteenth century is speaking directly to us when Brooke limpidly writes
     of August 1914:
    Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
      And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
    With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
      To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
    Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
      Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
    And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
      And all the little emptiness of love!
    On August 23, 1914, a small force of the British army fought the advancing Germans at Mons, Belgium. It was the first time
     the British had fought in Europe since defeating Napoleon at nearby Waterloo, ninety-nine years previously. Although ludicrously
     outnumbered, since neither the French nor the British command had yet figured out that the main German offensive was coming
     through Belgium, they held off their attackers for a full day before beating a tactical retreat. The engagement, minor in
     comparison to the suicidal French maneuvers in Lorraine, nonetheless loomed large in the collective imagination of the British
     Isles. My favorite of the many Mons stories concerns the preparations for the first battle by a British sergeant, as related
     in oral historian Lyn Macdonald's 1914. Ordered to post four lookouts to warn of an eventual German attack on the town, the officer sets up only three and is later
     forced to explain his negligence to an enraged superior officer: "I'm sorry, Sir. I didn't think it necessary to post one.
     The enemy would hardly come from that direction. It's private property, Sir."
    This quaint attitude, straight out of a Galsworthy novel, would change radically in the following weeks, becoming scarcely
     contained panic. The British and the French fell back in desperation as the size of the German onslaught coming from the north
     dawned at last on the dim minds sharing dinner with Joffre. The French commander, unflappable as ever, ordered a full-scale
     retreat so that his shattered armies could regroup and finally do something other than die in futile assaults in the east
     of the country. In the meantime, the Germans continued their march south and came closer and closer to Paris. When Alexander
     von Kluck, the commander of the now tired 350,000-man corps on the extreme right of the German lines, elected to go east rather
     than west of the French capital and cross the River Marne, the reinforced Allied legions wheeled about and attacked. The Battle
     of the Marne raged from September 6 to 9, and involved more than two million men. The