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Author: Stephen O’Shea
noises punctuate my walk out of the village of Nord-schoote on the road to Ypres. Pfft! Pfft!
Silence.
I take a few more steps, then hear them again: Pfft! Pfft! The detonations are loud but slightly muffled, as if coming from
a great distance. Is it hunting season? Murder month? Has some well-armed cuckold come home too early?
I squint into the flat afternoon light, searching for a better explanation out in the pale green mantle that unfurls to the
horizon. My bewilderment is noticed and misinterpreted as telescopic lechery. A couple of girls bent over double at some vague
agricultural task straighten up and wave at me from the middle of a field. I wave back, embarrassed.
Pfft! Pfft!
The usual parallel about distant echoes is now inescapable. What had been a silent landscape now rings with this faint cannonade,
like a far-off and feeble remnant of one of the most deafening dins in all of history. With every step southward, toward the
villages of Zuidschoote and Boezinge, I walk toward what was once known as the Ypres Salient, a great C-shaped curve in the
Western Front. Seldom, if ever, has any place on earth been rocked by so many millions of pounds of whizzing steel and high
explosives.
For four years the Germans held the low ridge to the east of Ypres. Their lines were on the outside of the C. Inside that
letter, bulging out toward them, were the British and their allies, an entire army of sitting ducks. They could be fired on
from the front and from either side by an enemy who had the distinct advantage of holding the higher ground.
Pfft! Pfft! The sound seems to be growing louder the farther south I go.
The Ypres Salient was a remarkable shooting gallery. Both sides took part in hellish artillery duels that tore up the waterlogged
ground and transformed it into a foul seething swamp. The Salient's defining moment was the week of July 25 to July 31, 1917,
when the British army fired off 4,283,550 shells (or 107,000 tons of metal) along a front twelve miles wide, then had its infantry try to wade through—in the rain — the ensuing soupy morass
in the face of sustained machine-gun fire. Defining, because this place is one of the three or four on the Western Front,
along with Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, and the Somme, where the criminal stupidity of the First World War still seems manifest,
even after the passing of eighty years.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, in more ways than one. I sit down by the road outside Boezinge and massage my feet. A squadron
of mosquitoes arrives from a nearby puddle to keep me company. The mysterious pops continue fitfully, farm dogs bark, cars
whoosh past, the bugs start biting. What am I doing here?
No, that's the wrong question. What were the British and the Germans doing here?
P FFT ! P FFT !
Two shots were fired at 10:34 A.M., on June 28, 1914, in front of Schiller's Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip, the
nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb holding the gun, mortally wounded Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the imperial throne
of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Sophie. When they died, about half an hour after Princip had blasted away at point-blank
range, the nineteenth century entered its death throes. The event was a fluke: The archduke's driver made a wrong turn onto
Appel Quay and had to back up, right into the sights of the scrawny Serb student with the world-historical mission. But for
the chauffeur'sinept driving, the continent-wide car wreck of the next four years might have been avoided.
Earlier in the morning of that June 28, the victims had been celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary. Since Sophie's
soon-to-be-spilt blood was not blue enough—she did not have the requisite degrees, or quartiers, of nobility—to be accorded formal honors at the Viennese court, her doting archduke of a husband made a point of going to
places where she could be given royal treatment. Sarajevo was just such a city. As
Silence.
I take a few more steps, then hear them again: Pfft! Pfft! The detonations are loud but slightly muffled, as if coming from
a great distance. Is it hunting season? Murder month? Has some well-armed cuckold come home too early?
I squint into the flat afternoon light, searching for a better explanation out in the pale green mantle that unfurls to the
horizon. My bewilderment is noticed and misinterpreted as telescopic lechery. A couple of girls bent over double at some vague
agricultural task straighten up and wave at me from the middle of a field. I wave back, embarrassed.
Pfft! Pfft!
The usual parallel about distant echoes is now inescapable. What had been a silent landscape now rings with this faint cannonade,
like a far-off and feeble remnant of one of the most deafening dins in all of history. With every step southward, toward the
villages of Zuidschoote and Boezinge, I walk toward what was once known as the Ypres Salient, a great C-shaped curve in the
Western Front. Seldom, if ever, has any place on earth been rocked by so many millions of pounds of whizzing steel and high
explosives.
For four years the Germans held the low ridge to the east of Ypres. Their lines were on the outside of the C. Inside that
letter, bulging out toward them, were the British and their allies, an entire army of sitting ducks. They could be fired on
from the front and from either side by an enemy who had the distinct advantage of holding the higher ground.
Pfft! Pfft! The sound seems to be growing louder the farther south I go.
The Ypres Salient was a remarkable shooting gallery. Both sides took part in hellish artillery duels that tore up the waterlogged
ground and transformed it into a foul seething swamp. The Salient's defining moment was the week of July 25 to July 31, 1917,
when the British army fired off 4,283,550 shells (or 107,000 tons of metal) along a front twelve miles wide, then had its infantry try to wade through—in the rain — the ensuing soupy morass
in the face of sustained machine-gun fire. Defining, because this place is one of the three or four on the Western Front,
along with Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, and the Somme, where the criminal stupidity of the First World War still seems manifest,
even after the passing of eighty years.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, in more ways than one. I sit down by the road outside Boezinge and massage my feet. A squadron
of mosquitoes arrives from a nearby puddle to keep me company. The mysterious pops continue fitfully, farm dogs bark, cars
whoosh past, the bugs start biting. What am I doing here?
No, that's the wrong question. What were the British and the Germans doing here?
P FFT ! P FFT !
Two shots were fired at 10:34 A.M., on June 28, 1914, in front of Schiller's Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip, the
nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb holding the gun, mortally wounded Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the imperial throne
of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Sophie. When they died, about half an hour after Princip had blasted away at point-blank
range, the nineteenth century entered its death throes. The event was a fluke: The archduke's driver made a wrong turn onto
Appel Quay and had to back up, right into the sights of the scrawny Serb student with the world-historical mission. But for
the chauffeur'sinept driving, the continent-wide car wreck of the next four years might have been avoided.
Earlier in the morning of that June 28, the victims had been celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary. Since Sophie's
soon-to-be-spilt blood was not blue enough—she did not have the requisite degrees, or quartiers, of nobility—to be accorded formal honors at the Viennese court, her doting archduke of a husband made a point of going to
places where she could be given royal treatment. Sarajevo was just such a city. As
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