The GWA
"Authenticity Regs & More"

War Games
by Steven Smith, National Post

Editors Note: Reporter Stephen Smith enlists in the most scrupulous of war re-enactments -- a First World War battle whose participants steal precious sleep in trenches, sing German carols, eat historically accurate cheese and storm enemy lines with 85-year-old rifles (but not with bullets or bayonets).

NEWVILLE, Penn. - Just off the Pennsylvania turnpike, on a quiet country road where Amish horse-drawn carriages set the pace, the heavy, staccato thump of machine-gun fire and the crackle of rifles break the calm of a perfect Saturday afternoon.

Standing in a rough trench at the heart of the commotion, Captain Robert Zienta, an officer with the Great War Association's IR63 Infantry Regiment, barks last-minute instructions to his men before raising his whistle to his lips and blowing three short blasts and one long -- the signal to attack.

Fifteen men in reproduction field-grey uniforms, jack boots and vintage equipment, and armed with period Gewehr rifles, clamber up a three-rung ladder and spill out over the trench's top, past the barbed-wire entanglements of their front line and toward the frenzied chatter of rifles and Lewis guns from the Allied trenches 50 feet opposite. Two minutes later, all 15 lie "dead" a few feet in front of the Allied barbed wire, awaiting the signal to get up, return to their line and go at it all over again.

Twice a year, the 400 or so members of the Great War Association come from around the United States and Canada to the Caesar Krauss Great War Memorial Site, located roughly 50 kilometres west of Carlisle, Penn. With its pock-marked 32 hectares of abandoned farm buildings, fortified trench networks, bunkers, barbed wire and No Man's Land, the site is an eerily convincing tribute to the memory of Corporal Caesar Krauss, an American veteran of the First World War and grandfather of the land owner, Mark Anderson.

For most of the GWA's motley membership of salesmen, actors, teachers and ex- military men, among others, re-enacting aspects of the First World War's Western Front is an expensive hobby and opportunity to rough it while putting reality briefly aside. For others, it's a chance to meet kindred spirits for whom an interest in the Great War verges on passionate obsession.

From their uniforms, trenches and bunkers down to the glasses they wear and the cheese they eat, the attention to period detail displayed by the GWA's members has earned their hobby a reputation as the "re-enactor's re-enactment." In other words, at a cost of $1,500-3,000 for a complete uniform, you won't find any of those bargain-basement hacks American Civil War stagings are reputed to attract. Yet, much to the consternation of some GWA members, a few anachronisms still sneak through. In a GWA discussion forum called "Authenticity Issues on the Internet" in the association's newsletter On The Wire, members become livid about the presence of modern cigarette lighters, filter cigarettes, modern wristwatches and members not playing their period roles convincingly -- ie., using modern slang.

Sitting at his desk in the candle-lit confines of the Allied headquarters dugout, Allied commander Captain Michael Lowe, a.k.a. Michael LoCicero, a coordinator of instructional media services at Beaver College in eastern Pennsylvania, offers his guests a mug of sherry as he discusses the finer details of his bunker. Above his desk, an illustration of a woman from a 1915 edition of La Vie Parisienne is pinned up next to surveillance photos and a reproduction of a period trench map. Opposite him, vintage tins of corned "bully" beef rations, jam and other supplies occupy a shelf, and period issues of the British magazines Punch and Country Life lie on a bunk nearby. Almost all, he says, are details he noted in soldiers' diaries and memoirs from the war.

"We've spent way too much time and money on this to tolerate anachronisms," LoCicero says, stepping briefly out of his Capt. Lowe character. "We want to do this right." LoCicero goes to impressive lengths to ensure his portrayal of Capt. Lowe, a British officer with the Cornwall Light Infantry, is as accurate as possible. He's had three hours sleep in the last 48 hours, partly because he was busy walking his trenches at 2 a.m. and stirring his chilled, slumbering men to "stand to," or man their spot in the line, with a poke of his officer's riding crop.

Like LoCicero, most participants strive to make their characters believable. Most carry period identification papers and many have even created fictional histories of their lives prior to the outbreak of war in August, 1914 -- professors, journalists and bakers, for example. Some, like the dandy officer from the Royal Engineers seen running about the woods with a butterfly net, come complete with eccentricities.

For many GWA members, the effort to recreate the Western Front as realistically as possible stems from a desire to establish a convincing "living history" for themselves while humanizing the men and women they ultimately strive to honour, German and Allied alike. This commitment is such that most participants have even had Nirvana-like moments where they felt they were actually experiencing what life was like on the Western Front. "All of sudden, I thought to myself 'I'm there -- this must be how it felt,'" said one after describing a snowy overnight watch spent shivering and numb in his muddy trench.

As to why they even want to experience life in the front lines of the First World War, whose ferocity consumed almost 10 million lives and maimed and wounded millions more, history teacher Chris Semancik openly admits he has "very sick personal reasons" for participating.

"I have this macabre, almost unhealthy desire to understand, to know the complete and total fear felt by soldiers of the First World War," he said. "I know I can't, I know I'll never realize that doing this but I want to."

Minus the presence of artillery barrages, bullets, gas and disease, the GWA does what it can to offer the hungry a taste of life on the Western Front. Although the rats are rubber, the bone fragments aren't human and the "gas" is merely green-tinged smoke, the adrenaline is real, especially when you're stuck in a hole in No Man's Land with a jammed rifle and the khaki-clad men of the Irish Guards or the Buffs are overrunning your position. Fortunately, GWA policy forbids assaults with fixed bayonets.

Semancik's self-conscious fascination with experiencing the fear front-line soldiers knew so well is tempered by a healthy dose of what could be considered pacifism, one he said is fuelled by his time with the GWA.

"I started this when I as a lot younger thinking war was cool," he said. "I've come out of it knowing better. My attitude really changed when I got married and I came to appreciate the thought of losing somebody I love."

Semancik's views are oddly typical of a group devoted to recreating one of this century's most horrific wars. In fact, the GWA's event takes place at the height of deer season, a hunt Semancik and other GWA members said they used to participate in but can no longer stomach.

While there are elements who obviously enjoy the opportunity to play with vintage armaments and marvel at the killing potential of weapons like the German MG08/15 machine gun, what the majority of GWA members seem to value most is the chance to put a human face to the First World War's mind-numbing body count and celebrate the men who somehow found spirit enough to survive. In an age when taking two minutes for silent reflection on Remembrance Day causes anxiety and debate, the GWA's two-weekends-per-year commitment takes on a vital importance to its members.

"The Toronto Stock Exchange didn't even shut down for a minute last year," said a Toronto re-enactor with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. "I find that offensive."

By humanizing what historian John Keegan called "the anonymous millions" who fought and died on the Western Front, a GWA event can also prove a haunting experience. One participant, a cherubic German soldier accompanied by his dog, was a vivid, tragic reminder of the innocence and optimism wiped out in battles like the Somme, Ypres, Vimy and Verdun. While most members of the GWA deny romanticizing the First World War, there is something incontestably sentimental about their portrayal of its soldiers.

"They were everyday men compelled by a sense of duty that you don't find anymore," said the GWA's German combat commander, Robert Zienta. "It was the end of the age of chivalry and an age of innocence." It's a sentimentality felt throughout the weekend, in songs sung around an Australian campfire and in the lantern-lit bunker of the German 8th Kurassier Regiment, where men sat quietly around a vintage Victor Victrola 10 record player, lost in period recordings by Sulzbacher Landler and Emil Muench.

Scenarios such as this are what GWA members refer to as "living history." And of all the meticulously re-enacted units in the GWA, few come close to the lengths the 63rd German Infantry Regiment go to to recreate front-line army life, circa 1918.

In a bunker carved deep into the slope of a hill, supported by heavy 6"x 6" beams of oak and warmed to cozy by a wood stove, 25 members of the 63rd were busy celebrating Christmas. Storm lanterns and candles cast a mellow glow on faces warmed by alcohol and the antics of a girthsome Father Christmas and his bearded, jovial apprentice. At the centre of the bunk-lined room, a small sapling decorated in paper cut-outs sat atop a table cluttered with beer bottles, preserves and red and green glass lanterns.

To the raucous cheers of the men, Father Christmas' assistant doled out spankings with ladles, spoons and entrenching shovels to members of the regiment whom he deemed to have misbehaved during the year. Once he was finished, an officer distributed parcels and letters from "home" (penned by GWA volunteers), a hilarious pile of divorce notices, bills -- including one for damages to a tavern -- and a pair of letters to a soldier from different girlfriends, one of which announced that twins were on the way.

Then, as cookies, candy, dried fruits and liquor circulated, the 63rd broke into numbers from its regimental song book -- songs like Die Wacht Am Rhein and Stille Nacht, to which most men knew the German words.

Outside the bunker, in a biting November wind, a lone German soldier stood admiring the stars in the clear sky while a company of moonlit silhouettes made their way like ghosts back down the line. And, as they faded once again into the night, only the heavy fall of their hobnailed boots remained to remind you of their passing.