Free Back to the Front by Stephen O’Shea

battlefield.
    G ASSING, THE KINDERMORD —the associations of these hours spent in the orbit of Langemarck are depressing. Despite foreboding
     about what lies lies ahead this afternoon, I break into a smile when the village of Poelkapelle finally appears. At its central
     crossroads there stands an unusual statue of a stork in full flight. The monument honors French flying ace Georges Guynemer,
     whose plane was shot down in the skies above Poelkapelle on September 11, 1917. However strange the stork looks, in perpetual
     mid-flap twenty feet above a traffic circle, the inscription on the base of the memorial seems even more bizarre. The language
     of outdated chauvinism, a specialty of French war memorials, now amuses more than it inspires. An excerpt:
    Héros Légendaire Tombé en
    Plein del de Gloire après Trois
    Ans de Lutte Ardente Restera Le
    Plus Pur Symbole des Qualitis
    De La Race: Tenacite Indomptable
    Energie Farouche Courage Sublime
    Anime De La Foi La Plus Inebranlable
    Dans La Victoire . . .
    (The Legendary Hero Fallen in the
    Full Glory of Flight after Three
    Years of Fiery Combat Will Remain
    The Purest Symbol of The Strengths
    of His Race: Indomitable Tenacity
    Fierce Energy Sublime Bravery
    Inspired by the Most Unshakeable Faith
    in Victory . . .
    It's likely that Guynemer, a twenty-three-year-old daredevil who had already been shot down seven times before his fatal encounter
     over Poelkapelle, might find this epitaph too pompous to describe his accelerated, exhilarating life span. Like other successful
     airmen, Guynemer reveled in scarcely credible risks—although for sheer combat mania few could match Frank Luke, an American
     ace who died at the age of twenty-one after making an emergency landing behind enemy lines. Luke emptied his pistol at the
     admiring German infantrymen on their way to take him prisoner; naturally, they forgot their admiration and fired back.
    Poelkapelle is made less lugubrious by its stork. The air force was the only murderous innovation of the Great War to have
     received good publicity. The ballet of aerial battle—English Sopwith Camels and French Spads rat-tat-tatting through the skies
     against German Fokkers —enchanted minds starved for a coherent narrative. The dogfight suggested a life-and-death contest
     in which the individual had some say. The conflict on the ground, with its machine guns, artillery, and mortars, was viewed
     as an industrial abattoir; the conflict in the skies, with its attendant legends of dashing chaps buzzing about in aeroplanes,
     silk scarves snapping in the breeze, came to be seen as the acme of glamour.
    The glamour of war, destroyed when the horseman left the field to be replaced by the troglodyte in the trench, was a mystique
     badly in need of novelty. The aces, a new breed of warriors for the new aerial battlefield, met the modernist need perfectly.
     Before a peacetime aviator, Charles Lindbergh, appeared on the scene to establish his preeminence as celebrity airman of the
     new century, the names of Great War aces were well known to an adoring public, as was their tally of kills: the American Rickenbacker
     (23), the Canadian Bishop (72), the Frenchmen Fonck (75) and Guynemer (53), the Britons Mannock (73) and Collishaw (60). The
     one who has survived the longest in the public mind, thanks to Charles Schulz and Snoopy, is the German Manfred von Richthofen
     who, as the Red Knight (or the Red Baron) commanding his Flying Circus of aviators, was responsible for 80 kills. Richthofen
     was shot down over the Somme on April 21, 1918, either by Canadian pilot Roy Brown or by an Australian machine-gunner on the
     ground.
    F ROM THE SKY to the pits. The rest of today's walk will bring me to the worst of the Salient's imaginative landscape. Few
     places along the Western Front have witnessed such destruction as the countryside beyond Langemarck and Poelkapelle. In the
     windows of some farmhouses, displayed like religious statuary, are