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A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914--1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front In Flanders Fields the poppies grow These are the first lines of the most famous World War One poem, "In Flanders Fields," by the Canadian Major John McRae, who was there. McRae's friend had just been blown to bits and, within twenty minutes of the burial, McRae sat and wrote his poem. Winston Groom quotes it in A Storm in Flanders. He could have used it as an epigraph as well. The fighting in Belgium, in Flanders, from 1914 to 1918, was incessant, but flared up into four horrendous battles. Hundreds of thousands of men died in spans of less than a week, to gain, and then give back, a few yards of land. Reading this book, you wonder how anybody could have stood it for four hours, never mind four years. But they did. Baseball and battle. If you are a "fan," so to speak, you can't get enough statistics. If not, not. But there is no way to talk about the battles in Flanders, most of which were fought around the salient, or bulge, in the lines east of Ypres, called by the British Tommies "Wipers," without speaking of the numbers. In the First War 9 million soldiers from 26 countries died. Not civilians, military men. 1. 8 million Germans, 1.3 million Austro-Hungarians, 1.7 million Russians, nearly a million British subjects and former subjects, 1.4 million Frenchmen, and 615,000 Italians. 50,000 Americans were killed. Is it any wonder this war looms larger, almost obsessively so, in the minds of Europeans than it does in the minds of Americans? To help bring the statistics to life, A Storm in Flanders has many moving photos of the trenches and men at war, including before and after photos of towns such as Ypres. Groom also provides some clear and useful maps to help us understand the different battles. The German thrusts through Belgium and at Paris stalled into trench warfare, as we all know. Why then, did the casualties become so obscene? Groom explains. To begin with, technology had again outstripped the tactical imaginations of the generals. Men were massed and went "over the top" to be cut down by long-range pinpoint artillery and by the newly invented machine gun. Pill boxes and other defensive emplacements were concrete, not piles of brush or wood, although towards the end of the war, corpses were occasionally used as parts of the parapets. This was building material abundantly available, after all. The Germans, already famous for their industrial know-how, developed the flame-thrower, which threw an oily flame 75 feet. Four hundred British were roasted alive in the first flame-thrower attack. The Germans also introduced gas warfare, which had been outlawed by the Hague Convention of 1907, which the Germans had signed. The German chemicals factories back home first sent up chlorine gas. When some defense was found for chlorine, Phosgene was developed and employed and then, towards the end of the war, the infamous mustard gas. It would be a useless exercise to rank these in order of obscenity. The descriptions Groom gives, and quotes, of the effects of these gases on the human eyes, lungs, and so on cannot be read over the radio. Although everyone knows something about WWI, how it comes out---we won, for example---it is fun to come upon bits---not trivia---but bits of information we didn't know. For example, there is the myth of Chateaux Generals, British officers safe in comfort, far from the front, eating caviar and drinking champagne while their men suffered and died in the mud and horror of the trenches. Groom remarks that 232 British Generals were casualties, 78 of them killed. An extraordinarily high figure. I also was intrigued by "The World's Biggest Pig-Sticking." The British naval blockade made food scarce in Germany. But as Groom puts it, "some genius" pointed out that there were 25 million hogs in Germany and they ate more potatoes and grain than the entire human population. So the Germans killed the 25 million hogs and then, for several months, "binged in a gluttony of pork until they were virtually wursted and brattened to their limits." Later, of course, there was no pork. Equally fascinating to me was Groom's description of the war underground. English and German miners were employed to dig long, dangerous tunnels beneath no man's land, fill them with explosives, and blow the enemy lines up. On some occasions this worked very well. At the Messines Ridge, ten thousand Germans were sent skyward in a single moment. Adding to his narrative overview, Groom from time to time zooms in on a particular British or Canadian or German soldier and follows his progress, quoting from his journals or letters home. He quotes numerous times from one German corporal, Adolf Hitler, who did fight on the Flanders front for four years and never overcame his bitterness at the German loss and humiliation. Groom does a fine job of describing the battles and life at the front in this small place for four years. He may seem to some an unlikely author for such a book. Many may know him only as the author of Forrest Gump, think of him as a humorist. But remember, Gump served in Vietnam; Groom's first novel, Better Times Than These, is a war novel; his interview book, Conversations with the Enemy, is about Vietnam, and his previous work of history, Shrouds of Glory, a Civil War book, is also military. Groom is as much a military writer as he is anything. Professional, academic historians will probably either pretend not to notice this book, or else criticize it as amateurish. Let them. Groom is writing for the common reader, not history professors. There are very few footnotes in this book. In a perfect world, in which we all had an ocean of time to read, we could indulge ourselves and read all we wanted. I would like to read a hundred books about WWI. When I had finished, I would have a good idea of what happened. Sometimes authors do this for us. Groom has read a hundred books about Flanders, digested them, processed them through his own consciousness, and in his own sometimes ironic, even sarcastic, voice has now given us a narrative summary, a synthesis of what he believes happened there, and this man can tell a story. We either trust his account or go read the hundred books for ourselves. |