Memento Mori

By Timothy Foote

NO MAN'S LAND

by John Toland

Doubleday; 651 pages; $17.95

These days, American veterans who want to relive the horrid past make pilgrimages to Bataan or plan fraternal parties in Huertgen Forest. But when it comes to war stories and patriotic gore, World War II trails well behind memories of another war, as John Toland amply proves in this plodding yet passionately detailed resurrection of 1918.

In the spring of that year, General Erich Ludendorff launched the greatest military assault in history (62 divisions, more than 600,000 men, a 6,000-gun artillery barrage), and after years of stalemate blew a wedge, at places 100 miles wide and 40 miles deep, in Allied lines. By early summer, Germany seemed within a hot breath of taking Paris, driving the British army into the sea and winning the war. Then the Americans, as Toland puts it, finally got a chance to "show the world that [they] could fight as well as talk," and the counterattacks began. The overextended German army collapsed. In November the Kaiser resigned, and a scrappy little corporal, twice decorated for gallantry, flung himself on his hospital cot and wept. On the spot, Adolf Hitler swore he would devote his life to avenging his betrayed country.

If none of this is news, it has rarely been so methodically worked over. Toland's main intent is to evoke the sweep of battle from the Chemin des Dames to the Marne, from Belleau Wood to the Argonne. He sometimes wrings from familiar historic horrors memorable touches of contrary humanity. What was it like to listen to 8,500 guns, a sound that no human ear had ever heard before? For Winston Churchill, who visited France to see the war firsthand, the crescendo rose "exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass." For Private Frank Gray the thunder was "one roll, one roar, which never diminished and never increased, and which, indeed, imagination refused to conceive could be increased." After listening to a similar barrage, a U.S. Marine exulted: "I never want to have a grander feeling or I'd just naturally die of joy."

How do you cope with fear? No less bellicose a personage than Lieut. Colonel George S. Patton Jr., 32, found himself trembling before a battle. Then he thought of all his martial ancestors looking down upon him. "I became calm at once," he recalls, "and saying aloud 'It is time for another Patton to die,' " he strode forward into a hail of fire. Brigadier John Seely turned his mind to boyhood sayings--"Death is better than dishonor" and "By Faith ye shall move mountains"--before leading a do-or-die attack. Once engaged in combat, men were often too absorbed to be frightened. When hit by shell splinters or .30-cal. slugs, some thought they had only been whacked by a stick or smashed a knee against a rock.

It is the conventional view that modern wars decide nothing, and that, in any case, individuals have no effect on their outcome. Toland cannot manage the magic of historic imagination that will make a reader really believe, as many Frenchmen and Englishmen believed in 1918, that the Germans were about to win the war. But it is hard to read his book without concluding that the course of these sprawling, murderous battles was often changed by individuals or small groups of men, whose sense of honor, courage, comradeship or simple professional efficiency drove them to extreme effort. Toland's most touching example: a Canadian cavalry officer named Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, who was exhorted to lead a squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horse straight at entrenched machine gunners on a ridge. Flowerdew, Toland writes, "a mild-looking young man, smiled gently as they started forward. 'I know, sir. I know it is a splendid moment. I will try not to fail you.' " As the doomed cavalrymen rode past, an appalled cockney rifleman yelled, "Strathcona's Orse! You'll be bloody bully beef if yer don't get art the way!" Flowerdew and half his men were killed. But they took the ridge and saved Amiens--at least for a while.

Wicked waste? Of course, since we now see the war as cruel and unnecessary. But it made some difference to the people of Amiens.

--By Timothy Foote

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