16 November--Day of Belgian fog . . .
The Germans renewed their epic attacks in which, to make up for their inexperience, the young recruits advanced shoulder to shoulder in a column four men abreast, and singing "Deutschland über alles." It was crazy . . . the human cost meant nothing to them.
Could men have been sent into battle that way? It is a bit improbable. The four-abreast column suggests another scenario. As the tactical historian Bruce I. Gudmundsson points out, this was the marching order German troops adopted when passing through towns or going up to the front. Had the volunteers, singing to keep up their spirits, become lost in the impenetrable murk and blundered into the waiting guns of the French--who must have heard their invisible coming from a long way off? If so, it would be hard to find a better example of the "fog" of war.
The singing attacks happened. Though in a signal twist of the story, recent German historians deny that they did, there is plenty of evidence for them. But their reality is far less exalted and ennobling than the legend would have it.
Begin with the matter of place. Apparently, none of the singing attacks came closer than a mile from Langemarck--and in Western Front terms that might as well have been five or fifty. The Germans did not take the village until the following April, when the French abandoned it during the opening hours of the first poison gas attack. But, in fact, Langemarck did become a convenient generic description for the battles that raged along the whole northern sector of the Salient that fall, the area where most of the reserve divisions, to which the volunteers belonged, were thrown in. On that score--but on that score alone--it would be wrong to fault the legend too harshly.
Why would men sing going into an attack? Except as the stuff of Nazi-era p.r., mystical miracles played no part. Among poorly trained soldiers--as most of the volunteers were--singing must have helped to sustain morale and cohesion in the face of unexpected and disconcertingly heavy casualties, including the loss of most of their officers. Singing performed the function of the defunct battlefield drum, allowing units to keep in touch amid the confusion of noise, autumn fogs, unexpected ditches and hedgerows, contradictory orders, and unseen enemies. Singing familiar soldier songs may also have lessened the danger of friendly fire. Still, that the volunteers sang all that much seems unlikely. It is just that when they did, everyone noticed.
But the myth does not square with the most important fact of all. The majority of men in the reserve regiments were not even students. Recent research indicates that only 18 percent were, and that included teachers, hardly the youths of later legend. "The number of actual volunteers serving in the [reserve] regiments was considerable," George L. Mosse writes, "but most of those who fell in battle were older conscripts or men who had been in the reserves, fathers of families, men settled in their trade or profession." The volunteers, on the other hand, were mostly young men who had mobbed the recruiting depots in August: they had either been exempted from military service while they finished their studies or had escaped being called up because the peacetime army could only handle about half of those legally obligated to spend two years on active duty.
The volunteers went into action two months later not just under- but improperly trained. Their instructors had been mainly older NCOs who taught the close-order tactics favored at the turn of the century, in which men charged in waves, shoulder-to-shoulder, or in squares that would have done justice to a Napoleonic battlefield. Regular officers, especially lieutenants, were in short supply, and the few the reservists did have often led them into battle without maps. It was hardly surprising that they occasionally blundered into enemy lines. As a rule, the better the reserve regiments were trained--which is to say, the smaller the proportion of raw volunteers--the less likely they were to move forward in vulnerable tight-packed skirmish lines, or to rely on song under stress.
One thing is incontrovertible about those attacks. A massacre had taken place, a massacre of innocents in the military sense, and one that deprived Germany of the human potential that a nation wastes at its peril. The violent depletion of the six reserve divisions that fought from Gheluvelt to the Yser was particularly cruel. They lost an average of 6,800 men per division, or about half the infantrymen in each. In the month of fighting around Ypres, some 6,000 were killed in the reserve regiments alone. Their premature commitment to battle was, according to the military historian Dennis E. Showalter, "one of the great mistakes of the World War."
A disturbing command pattern was taking shape: The willingness of Western Front general staffs to continue an offensive long after the prospect of a reasonable return on the investment of lives and materiel had ceased. At Ypres, Germany had suffered its fourth major defeat since September, and one that, coming on the heels of the Marne and the battles for Nancy and the Yser, not only ratified stalemate but ended Germany's chances for a quick victory in the west.
Ypres was the only one of the four that assumed mythic proportions. With casualties somewhere above 100,000, of whom as many as 30,000 were dead, perhaps it had to. The famous army bulletin of November 11--prophetic date--about the youthful regiments at Langemarck must be seen, Mosse writes, "against the background of the rapidly declining enthusiasm of the troops themselves. The myth was necessary, and though it could not influence the soldiers in the trenches, it had an impact on the home front and especially . . . after the war was lost."
The bulletin no doubt originated as an attempted cover-up, but it succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its designers. Der Kindermord bei Ypern would become the Kosovo of the Third Reich, and like the great and terminal defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in 1389, this debacle would be transformed into a holy memory, a moral victory. Would it be churlish to suggest, moreover, that the myth served another purpose? Langemarck was the sector where, the following April, the Germans first released poison gas on the Western Front--and finally took the village. (By this time singing attacks were already a curiosity of the past.) But as far as the home front was concerned, the guilt of a possible war crime would be forever overshadowed, and nullified, by the transfiguring image of a sacrifice raised in song.
In the years that followed, notes the German historian Bernd Hüppauf, the November 11 press release would be glorified in "novels, poetry, dramas and stage performances, (pseudo-)philosophical reflections, public celebrations and monuments, in institutions such as the army, schools and universities, youth organizations and, finally, an NS [National Socialist] program of advanced studies." On the first anniversary of the bulletin, a time when the affliction of stasis had long since begun to spread to the home front, newspapers all over Germany published editorial reflections on the "Day of Langemarck," with the inevitable conclusion that November 10 be made a national day of remembrance. After the war, student and veteran organizations would regularly repeat the suggestions, although the Weimar Republic never acted on it. Not even literature was immune. The hero of Thomas Mann's 1924 MThe Magic Mountain stumbles across a gunswept Flanders turnip field, his voice raised in a song of love and loneliness--a far more likely choice than "Deutschland über alles."
The Nazis in particular seized on the story and exploited it. Langemarck, writes Hüppauf, served as a lure "for the educated youth longing for metaphysical shelter and meaning in history." Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, Langemarck was chosen as the day on which the party inducted students, and after 1938, every member of the Hitler Youth paid a compulsory fee, known as the Langemarck-Pfennig. As a party publicist put it, "National Socialism and Langemarck are one and the same."
There is a place that comes close to being a monument to the student myth--in fact it was specifically created with that in mind. It is the huge but eerily compact German military cemetery just north of Langemarck---in military mortuary parlance, a concentration cemetery. The phrase, in light of subsequent history, is not without irony. What remains of almost 45,000 men lies beneath its placid lawns, including those who were killed at the First Ypres.
The designers of the Langemarck cemetery (which was consecrated in a July 1932 ceremony already heavy with Nazi oratory) tried hard to make the place seem user-friendly, a bit of Germany transplanted. Oaks rise to a modest height, muffling the lawns in shadow. Germans consider the oak, with its symbolic strength, to be their tree. "Nature itself," writes Mosse, "was to serve as a living memorial: The German wood was a fitting setting for the cult of the fallen." Nature's rejuvenating powers would reshape the memory of the war, removing the curse of defeat in the process.
But unnatural things intrude: The reason for this place can't be denied. You feel it in the presence of a pair of blockhouses squatting side by side in the newer, northern section of the cemetery, which is more related to the later years of the war than to that first autumn. Their concrete was probably mixed with high-grade sand imported from the Rhine--another bit of Germany transplanted--but the heavy weight of permanence has caused them to sink so deep into the alien Belgian clay that today only the top foot or so of their entrances shows above ground.
You feel that reason, too, in a discreet low-walled rectangle, its inner surface covered with hemlock shrubs. You pace it out to be roughly seventy by forty feet, a surprisingly small receptacle for the bones of 24,834 men, including no doubt some of the singers in the mists, a calcareous jumble of premature terminations dumped there in the 1930s. Nine men per square foot: eternity at rush hour.
You pause for a moment inside the bunkerlike redstone gatehouse. Behind fretwork screens of iron lilybursts is a chapel memorializing the students slain here in 1914 and known to be buried in the Langemarck cemetery. The official register notes that there are 6,313 names on the oakwood panels of that somber room. The question is, how many of those were actually students? Given the percentage of the reserve regiments that Mosse cites--eighteen, with teachers--there is no way they could all be. Based on that, just over 1,000 would be more like it: bad enough for the future merito-cracy of Germany, a fatal undertow, you might say, in the national gene pool. But if you extend that 6,000-plus figure to include most of the reservists killed at the First Ypres, you probably have a pretty fair estimate of their toll.
The Nazis may be gone, but the myth they promoted lives after them.
This article was written by Robert Cowley and originally published in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History in Spring 1998.
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