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| No Man's Land (Douai Plain) by Maurice Galbraith Cullen |
By James Deutsch
Originally presented in Smithsonian magazine, 8 September 2014
During World War I, no-man’s-land was both an actual and a metaphorical space. It separated the front lines of the opposing armies and was perhaps the only location where enemy troops could meet without hostility. It was in no-man’s-land that the spontaneous Christmas truce of December 1914 took place and where opposing troops might unofficially agree to safely remove their wounded comrades or even sunbathe on the first days of spring.
It could also be the most terrifying of places; one that held the greatest danger for combatants. “Men drowning in shell-holes already filled with decaying flesh, wounded men, beyond help from behind the wire, dying over a number of days, their cries audible, and often unbearable to those in the trenches; sappers buried alive beneath its surface," wrote scholar Fran Brearton in her 2000 history The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley. No-man’s-land, said poet Wilfred Owen, was “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”
In the Oxford English Dictionary, Nomanneslond, c. 1350, comes from the Middle English, and was “a piece of ground outside the north wall of London, formerly used as a place of execution.” The phrase took on a military connotation as early as 1864, but it became an especially prevalent term during the First World War. The German equivalent was Niemandsland, while the French used the English term le no man’s land.
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| Gunner Officers Correcting Their Battery Fire by Field Telephone from a Disused Trench in No Man's Land by Colin Gill |
It was during the Great War that a legend arose out of the real-life horrors that occurred in this wartime hellhole. Part Night of the Living Dead and part War Horse, like all oft-told tales, it had several variants, but the basic kernel warned of scar-faced and fearless deserters banding together from nearly all sides—Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, and Italian (though none from the United States)—and living deep beneath the abandoned trenches and dugouts. According to some versions, the deserters scavenged corpses for clothing, food and weapons. In at least one version, the deserters emerged nightly as ghoulish beasts, to feast upon the dead and dying, waging epic battles over the choicest portions.
Historian Paul Fussell called the tale the “finest legend of the war, the most brilliant in literary invention and execution as well as the richest in symbolic suggestion” in his prize-winning 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania who had served as a lieutenant during World War II, knew well the horrors of combat, which he vividly described in his 1989 memoir, Wartime.
One of the earliest published versions of the “wild deserters” legend appeared in the 1920 memoir The Squadroon by Ardern Arthur Hulme Beaman, a lieutenant colonel in the British cavalry. No other telling of the legend—at least in print—is as horrifying as Beaman’s. Written just two years after the war’s end, Beaman's tale begins in early 1918 on the marshes of the Somme in northern France. This is where some of the bloodiest battles of the war were fought, and Beaman is convinced that he witnessed two dozen or so German prisoners of war vanish into the ground. He wants to send a search party into the maze of abandoned trenches but is advised against it because the area “was peopled with wild men, British, French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights to plunder and to kill. In the night, an officer told him, mingled with the snarling of carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and rifle shots coming from that awful wilderness as though the bestial denizens were fighting among themselves.”
One poet described the horrors of the no-man’s-land between the encamped armies as an "abode of madness."
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| Wire by Paul Nash |
Artist and writer Deanna Petherbridge describes Wire in these terms:
Great bomb craters filled with sullen waters, possibly concealing rotten corpses; the pitiful paths up and down dunes that speak of some hidden human presence; the pall of smoke partly filling the sky; the imagined stench. We assume that it is winter from the degraded palette, but it could just be the winter of the soul – war allows no other season than that of desolation. What makes this painful watercolour so memorable is the blasted tree, a great ripped phallic symbol enmeshed with barbed wire. There is a long tradition in Western landscape art of decaying tree stumps as symbols of destroyed civilisations. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century landscapes such signs of decay signify renewal, but in this modern work about the horrors of war, rebirth has been suspended.
"Paul Nash and World War One . . ." at Gerry in Art
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In the 1930 novel Behind the Lines (or The Strange Case of Gunner Rawley, its title in the U.S.) by Walter Frederick Morris, who served in the war as a battalion commander. The protagonist, Peter Rawley, a second lieutenant, deserts his Royal Field Artillery unit after killing his company commander. Somewhere on the battlefields of France, Rawley meets up with Alf, another deserter, who leads him underground. “Rawley squeezed through the hole, feet first. He found himself in a low and narrow tunnel, revetted with rotting timbers and half-blocked with falls of earth. . . . The whole place was indescribably dirty and had a musty, earthy, garlicky smell, like the lair of a wild beast. . . . ‘Where do you draw your rations?’ asked Rawley. . . . ‘Scrounge it, [Alf] answered, . . . We live like perishin’ fightin’ cocks sometimes, I give you my word. . . . There’s several of us livin’ round ’ere in these old trenches, mostly working in pairs.”
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