At first sight, Verdun is an
unremarkable little town, nestling into a bend of the River Meuse. What
gives Verdun such ominous associations was the ghastly battle fought
between February and November 1916 on the bleak wooded uplands
overlooking the town. These infernal events left lasting scars on the
landscape around Verdun, but also scarred the spirit of the French
nation and widowed a whole generation of young women.
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Verdun
In the aftermath of French defeat in the 1870~71
Franco-Prussian War, expansionist Germany occupied Alsace-Lorraine,
making Verdun a frontier town. Guarded by Vauban's 17th century
Citadelle, Verdun now became a heavily militarised zone, defended by a
ring of fortifications to protect France's border against German
imperialism. To breach this line of defences, and break the French
army by a war of attrition, the German Chief of Staff, von
Falkenhayn chose
Verdun in February 1916 as the target for the most devastating offensive
in military history. His intention was, by "bleeding the French army
white", to knock France out of WW1, leaving Britain isolated. The German
advance came within 5 kms of Verdun, but the town with its ring of
fortifications on the hills to the north, resisted; and the war bogged
down into a 2 year stalemate of murderously bloody trench warfare across
a front
stretching across the Meuse hills. Hundreds of thousands of
young men died in the fighting to save Verdun, so many were scarred for
life by the unspeakably ghastly experience, and an entire generation of
young men was decimated. Most of the names inscribed on war memorials in
every hamlet, village and town across the length and breadth of France
recall the slaughter at Verdun which was to France what the Somme was to
Britain and the Commonwealth. It was also the battle which made the
reputation of General Philippe Pétain, the Hero of Verdun, and led
to his later being called on to lead the
collaborationist Vichy régime in 1940 and consequently to his being
condemned for treason after WW2. German imperialist aggression and Pétain's rallying call 'Ils ne passeront
pas' brought death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.
It was to
Verdun we came next to gain some understanding of what happened in 1916.
Our base for these few days was the excellent if crowded Les Breuils
campsite, and from here we walked into town to explore Verdun 90 years
on from the suffering of 1916. To see Verdun today, it is impossible to
comprehend the devastation the town and its civilian population must
have suffered. The wide River Meuse still glides silently by the town's
medieval Porte Chaussée (Photo 1) and fountains now play along the
riverside marina where shells must have exploded in 1916 (Photo 2).
Brooding gloomily over the town are the overgrown walls of Vauban's
Citadelle, built to protect Verdun in the 17th century when France first
acquired Alsace-Lorraine. In 1916, the miles of underground galleries
provided safe shelter from the shelling for a hospital, communications
centre, supply depots for food and munitions, and barracks for the
war-weary Poilus, a slang term for French WW1 infantry, meaning
literally 'hairy ones' - shaving was a rare luxury in the filth, mud and
artillery bombardment of the trenches. A bronze statue by Rodin stands
in the town, recalling the so-called victory of Verdun. The memorial
takes the form of a Winged Victory figure, but not at all in the
triumphant conventional form: this one is battered and bruised, 1 wing
drooping; her features are tormented with rage and horror, screaming for
survival, and her legs are tangled in the body of a dead soldier. It was
a fitting memorial to the destruction. Verdun's Cathedral, now restored
to its former Romanesque glory, stands proudly up on the hill, and next
door, the Bishop's Palace now houses the Centre for World Peace, an
organisation with a forlorn task at a time when a moronic war-monger
masquerades as US President. On the northern outskirts of the town, a
French war cemetery with 5,000 burials accounts for just a fraction of
the dead (Photo 3). The regular lines of stark crosses stretched
away into the distance towards the hills where the battle had raged.
Many of the graves were marked simply 'inconnu', and it was from here in
1920 that the Unknown Soldier, whose grave now stands ceremoniously
under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, was selected. The plaque movingly
invoked the passing visitor to 'pause and pay respects; one of these
might be your father, brother or friend'.
In order to
gain a more empathetic, if uncomfortably realistic, feel for the inhuman
events of 1916, we again needed to tread the ground in the hills north
of Verdun where the battle was fought 90 years ago. We
followed a forest
track, past shell-holes and lines of trenches snaking across the churned
up ground, to find the remains of Fort de Souville, part of the French
lines of fortified defences where their infantrymen finally halted the
German advance. Nearby were the remains of French concrete machine-gun
casemates, the gun ports resembling the menacing eyes of some crouching
infernal reptile (Photo 4). On a sunny morning, the forest was bright, and as at Mametz, the birds now sang. But the woods were heavy with the eerie
feeling of death: one could almost sense the distant thunder of guns,
and imagine this now peaceful if scarred scrub-land at the height of
battle: stumps of wrecked trees, mud, filth and more mud, deep
water-filled shell craters, trenches filled with Poilus huddled in fear
alongside the mutilated remains of their comrades, the overwhelming
noises of artillery and mortar fire, the whine of mutilating shrapnel,
and the all-pervasive stench of death and destruction. We stood in the
now silent wood, with this mental picture of 90 years ago; perhaps
the pock-marked ground around us still contained the remains of the poor
men who fought and died in these horrific conditions (Photo 5),
such was the savagery of human destruction by artillery fire, machine
guns, gas attacks, mortars and flame-throwers. By the battle's end, 9
villages in the 'zone rouge' had been totally destroyed, literally wiped
off the face of the earth, never to be re-built. The entire area was
reduced to utter devastation. It was a sombre experience walking through
the former village street of Fleury, the sites of destroyed houses and
shops now marked by white posts. This was without doubt the most
dispiriting low point of our sorrowful 3 days at Verdun.
The
massive German artillery barrage lasting 10 hours and firing 2 million
shells into the French lines, focussed on the Forts of Vaux and
Douaumont which formed a key part of the French defences around Verdun.
Originally built in the late 19th century at unimaginable national cost,
these enormous structures proved hopelessly inadequate against
20th
century high explosive armour-piercing shells. Despite the reinforced
concrete and armour-plating, the retractable gun turrets were soon put
out of action (Photo 6). The forts were manned as advanced
outposts by infantrymen, crammed into the dark damp underground
galleries, dying of thirst from inadequate water supplies. There was no
means of burying the dead or removing corpses, no toilets, rats gnawed
at the living and the dead, and the atmosphere was foetid from lack of
ventilation, blocked to prevent gas and flame-thrower attack. It was a
Dante-esque scene of Hell for those defending the forts, with
hand-to-hand fighting in the darkness and stench of the underground
passages. The French commander sent off his last carrier-pigeon with the
message, appealing for reinforcements: 'We are still holding but are
undergoing a heavy gas and smoke attack. Come and relieve us urgently'.
The poor bird, appropriately named Valiant, delivered its message before
expiring, and received a posthumous award for bravery. We visited the
Forts to see for ourselves the appalling conditions under which men
died. Externally the forts resembled squat scarred heaps of crumbling
concrete topped by rusty barbed wire and the Tricoleur (Photo 7).
The open top of the forts was deeply pocked-marked from artillery fire,
and 8 inch thick steel armour-plating lay around, smashed like egg
shells. Inside was a maze of dark passageways, running with water; it
was a ghastly place, where even today, death seemed to lurk at every
turning. What these labyrinthine and foetid galleries, running with
water, would have been like in 1916 defied imagination.
Unlike the
Somme, where at least token graves were assigned to most casualties even
the unknown, so intense was the all-destructive artillery shelling at
Verdun, concentrated in such a localised area that little in
the
way of human remains, let alone bodies, could be gathered for burial.
When the battle finally ended and the Armistice signed in 1918, the
devastated ground must have been littered with fragments of human
corpses; only 120,000 French bodies were ever identified, a third of the
total killed. The unidentifiable remains that could be found were
accumulated in a vast Ossuary at Douaumont, over which was built the
French National Memorial to the Fallen at Verdun. This vast 1920s
limestone monolithic structure, lacking any human grace or charm, is
visible for miles around, its low wings resembling the vile reptilian
machine gun casemates seen in the forest (compare Photos 4 and 8 for the
likeness). Its tower rears into the heavens like a gargantuan artillery
projectile (Photo 8). There was nothing of benign sacred imagery
here. But the most ghoulish aspect is seen from close-up. Peering in
through low-level windows, one sees massed heaps of human bones piled
high in the Ossuary's basement, the detritus of a battlefield, gathered
like the Grim Reaper's harvest. And as if to underline the death toll, a
cemetery with 15,000 burials stretched out across the lawns in front of
the Ossuary. Here was the most effective anti-war statement ever seen,
far more chilling than all the guns and uniforms displayed in the
museums.
The visit to Verdun had proved even more gruelling
than our time in the Somme; hopefully our morbid fascination with the
history of this dreadful period of WW1 has been leavened by our attempts
to comprehend the levels of human suffering - both directly for the
young men whose lives were cut short or scarred by the experiences, and
for the countless families left widowed and fatherless by the war. This
trip was billed as Alsace-Lorraine, but WW1 has consumed more time than
planned. Next week, it's on to the Alsace Wine Road ... at last. Stay
with us to share in our tastings of the incomparable Alsace wines.
Sheila
and Paul
Published: Monday 18 September 2006