Nonetheless people came back, to pick their way through the rubble and putrefaction and to rebuild their lives. German POWS were put to work cleaning up the place. The Zone Rouge shrank in the 1920s as the Front became overlaid with a palimpsest of new villages and farms and as time began to level the peaks of suffering. Ypres, Armentieres, Bethune, Lens, Arras, Noyon, Roye, Soissons, Reims, and other cities arose from their ruination, some more artfully than others, as did many of the lesser towns. Miraculously, the Front began to breathe again, and the zone went from red to orange to green. The polders of Passchendaele were drained, the valleys of the Somme replanted. Even at the Chemin des Dames, farmers took to the sloping fields again, and highway engineers rebuilt the vanished roadway.
In only one place was it found impossible to perform cosmetic surgery on the scar of the Front: the hills north of Verdun. Here the Zone Rouge would remain red. The villages, or rather the powdery traces of them, were washed away forever in the spring runoff of 1919. Intrepid farmers lured to the zone for its rock-bottom prices could only do so much with the fields. Places like Avocourt and Esnes were rebuilt, as frontier towns at the fault line of two centuries. Tractor drivers plowed as far up the hill as they dared, harvesting hundreds of dead with every new turning of the soil. Explosives went off, maiming and killing men and their livestock. Classrooms around the area carried posters—some still do, in fact—warning children not to play with shells that they found in the schoolyard.
In the 1930s, Verdun’s Zone Rouge was planted with hundreds of thousands of Austrian pines on both banks of the river Meuse. Parts of the zone became a firing range for the French army’s artillery teams. A few thousand shells every year would hardly matter to a landscape where millions of tons of metal had fallen. To the contemporary hiker, the presence of pine trees is the giveaway. What is a slightly scarred but nonetheless pastoral area of mixed farmland suddenly gives way to acre upon acre of evergreen forest—a highly un-French note of wildness on the landscape. It is this area, the unrecoverable Front, that I have just entered.
I look ahead of me into the woods. The lower limbs of the pines have perished from the lack of sun. The light that does filter through is soft and makes the gray and wispy dead branches look like a network of warm cobwebs hanging above the reddish-brown undulations of the forest floor. Carpeted in pine needles, the floor is scarred with trenches and battered by shell craters. Within minutes of entering this soundless place, I see rusted rifles, helmets, and shells lying about in abundance. I walk through the eerie quietness for about a half hour before coming out onto a road and the final slope up to the summit of Hill 304.
It is well marked. A few picnic tables stand unused under the trees—who would want to eat here?—and a signboard explains trilingually the importance of this hill in the defense of Verdun. It was shelled almost continuously in the spring of 1916 after the German attacks to the east, on the right bank of the Meuse, failed to advance any closer to the city. There were repeated attempts, which the French repulsed, to capture the cratered hill. Thousands died. The poilus were told by the commander of the region, a certain General de Bazelaire, that any able-bodied man found retreating down the slope to Esnes would be taken to the rear of the lines and executed by a firing squad.
The forestation of the hills north of Verdun, the signboard explains, has been done to expedite the work of nature, which would have taken three to four centuries to make the area look vaguely terrestial. A nature trail has been cleared through the woods, which I take to spare myself the bother of consulting the map at every change in contour.
Here, on the path rising slowly to the summit, the landscape becomes truly cataclysmic, as unearthly as anything I have ever seen. What had been glimpsed in the copses of the Somme is now all around me, as far as the eye can see, a heaving sea of mortified land. Not one square yard of the forest floor is level—the place is madness come to ground. A few grave markers and private memorials rise and fall from sight in the shell-scarred bedlam as I continue upward. There is none of the perverse sense of companionship I felt for the trenches that led me out of the Argonne. It is all too obvious that this forest was a charnel house. This is the still-bleeding scar of the Great War, that which I had only divined in the cold December twilight east of Albert. I feel almost nauseated as the full ugliness of what I have been walking these past few weeks comes home to me. Small wonder that Bartholomew never spoke of the war or of his brother Tommy’s death; small wonder that Daniel preferred a dance in the parade ground to tales of the trenches. The shock wave has been transmitted, even if the memory is now gone.
The monument at the top of the hill is a simple, tall monolith to the “10,000 dead whose blood impregnates this soil.” When the Germans finally took the hill in 1916, the front-line troops asked for their tobacco ration to be doubled, because the stench was so strong. Small signs, written in three languages, are posted at several points on the clearing’s perimeter:
This land has been the cross of the soldier, each patch bears the stamp of its stations. Passerby, the respect of thousands of dead men demands the utmost silence.
As I copy this down, two combat helicopters come screaming over the treetops of the glade, shattering the “utmost silence.” The air rings after their departure.
Hill 304 descends toward the east and a vale cut by a brook. The hill opposite is Mort Homme, a prewar name that became only too apt in the spring of 1916. Like 304, the prominence was pounded day and night by artillery. I stand by the stream between the two hills, away from the nature trail now and glad to be free of the leg-breaking landscape of shell craters, if only momentarily. My map shows a place to ford the rushing water of the brook. A few moss-covered yards to the north, I find the bridge and continue my trek to the lower slopes of Mort Homme. I pass through an unkempt field of tall grass, worm my way under a fence, and sit for a moment under a shade tree. Beside me are two old hand grenades, one of the “pineapple” variety, the other a German “potato masher,” a wooden stick with a can-shaped appendage on its end. Despite my native caution I decide to pick one up. As I reach for the German grenade, I hear a low hiss, then a viscera-shaking roar. A fighter aircraft has thundered less than a hundred yards overhead, threading the needle between Hill 304 and Mort Homme and almost causing me to slough my bowels. I am furious when a second jet catches me unawares a few seconds later. I decide to head for the woods. I get up and make for the fence that surrounds this paddock-like pasture. In my ill temper, I don’t notice until it is almost too late that an equally upset bull is galumphing over in my direction. There is no time to be squeamish about scraping my way through a meadow muffin to get under the fence.
After washing myself off in the stream, I tackle the slope of the Mort Homme. The hill is a mirror image of 304, its surface an obscene sea of shrapnel litter. At the top stands a statue representing a skeleton holding a flowing French flag and standing on a pedestal inscribed with the words: Ils n’ont pas passé (They did not pass). As I am contemplating this remarkable piece of kitsch, a lone German BMW cruises slowly along the summit’s laneways, the tinted window on its passenger side lowering so that a woman’s hand can point a camera at some unseen vista. The window quickly closes again. The car picks up speed and heads back downhill, leaving me alone with the grinning skeleton. I should be going too.
NEAR THE HAMLET of Chattancourt, on the road to Verdun from the Mort Homme, I gratefully stumble across Le Village Gaulois, a neo-rustic restaurant with a miniature golf course. I order an Asterix-burger and a beer and settle down on the patio to watch a young guy of about twenty-five putt his way around the course with the seriousness of a PGA professional. The exertions of the morning and afternoon are forgotten in this mesmerizing moment of triviality. The past falls away, as does any sense of incongruity, leaving only a callow backpacker with sore feet.
The golfer turns out to be a youthful businessman indulging a hobby. He drives a burgundy Alfa Romeo and gives me a lift into town. As we reach the River Meus
e, the road broadens into a highway. It looks as if we’re approaching a major city. I ask him what there is to do in Verdun.
“I wouldn’t go out at night in Verdun,” he says. “If I were you, I’d grab a quick dinner somewhere about seven, then rush back to my hotel. You can get stabbed in the streets of Verdun.”
“Is that because of the army base?” I ask with knee-jerk antimilitarism. “It’s dangerous because there are so many soldiers on the loose?”
“No, no, no! There’s a constant war between the teens of Verdun and the soldiers. But the soldiers are okay. It’s the local teens who start all the crap. I know—I was one of them once.”
“So you like the army?”
“Not at all! The army’s filled with dumbos. I did my military service so I can tell you what bullshit it is. The career officers have got absolutely nothing between their ears.”
“So the teens of Verdun are rotten and the soldiers are stupid.”
“You got it,” he says with a laugh. We zoom through the city’s industrial park, which, for reasons unfathomable, is called Chicago. “You got it,” he repeats. “No one ever said this was a great town.”
We pass a war memorial. The inscription is almost gleeful in describing Verdun’s woes: “… besieged, destroyed or damaged in 450, 485, 984, 1047, 1246, 1338, 1562, 1790, 1870, and 1916-18.” Like Canadians who boast with masochistic pride about month-long blizzards, the Verdunois city fathers seem to take delight in their own misfortunes. I have a sneaking suspicion that my driver’s pessimistic prologue to the city may have been accurate. No one ever said that this was a great town.
4. Verdun
Verdun is an odd, unsightly town, which somehow does not live up to its world-historical significance. It is the place where France and Germany broke themselves and Europe in a futile exchange of steel, where the fruits of fascism were first seeded, and, finally, where the two countries agreed to bury the hatchet. When French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand at a military cemetery in the Verdun battlefield in 1984, the symbolism could not have been better chosen—even down to the doctoring of the resulting photograph to make the Frenchman seem less dwarfed by his German counterpart. Verdun was the most Pyrrhic victory of this most Pyrrhic of wars.
The garrison town sprawls over a humped-back hill on the right bank of the River Meuse. Of the 2,407 buildings of the town before the war, 2,305 were completely destroyed. Directly to the north of Verdun, where most of the fighting took place, the dark bluffs of Belleville loom on the horizon. The pine forests of desolation begin shortly thereafter, on the slopes that make up the Heights of the Meuse. Other than this touch of the extreme, the city seems devoid of any dignified drama or coherence, as if the Great War had taken away its life once and for all. At the turn of the first millennium Verdun was known throughout Europe for the production and resale of eunuchs. A thousand years later it is famous for its mass graves.
To anyone familiar with the First World War it is difficult to stay for very long in this city and not feel one’s gorge begin to rise. Unlike Britain’s apologists, who portrayed the war as an inhuman catastrophe visited upon the British by the abstract forces of history, France’s shills made the conflict into a nationalist victory. The impulse is understandable—after all it is through France, not Britain or Germany or the U.S.A., that the Front meandered for most of its murderous length. In 1914 millions of men came marching over France’s frontiers; in 1918 they, or their successors, went walking back home. Seen in these simple terms, the Great War was a Gallic victory and Verdun, France’s finest hour. The postwar urge to cocorico (cock-a-doodle-do), the French term for jingoistic patriotism, proved irresistible to the myth-and monument-makers commissioned to commemorate the dead and whitewash the men responsible for the carnage.
The leaders of the French army, especially, needed what would now be called spin doctors. The notion of Verdun the victorious was used to erase from the collective memory of the war their record of disastrous decisions and wrongheaded policies: attaque a outrance, the Plan XVII, the repeated offensives in Artois, the repeated offensives in Champagne, the Chemin des Dames, the near-rout of 1918. All of these sanguinary items have been forgotten, the defense of Verdun retained. Were it not for modern Europe’s recent descent into tribalism in the Balkans, Verdun could be viewed as a harmless museum piece. Instead, its triumphalism seems dangerous. The shops peddling war porn and the brochures singing the praises of the French army spread like a contagion. Statues of French generals abound near the city ramparts, as a sort of provocation to historical decency. Only the city’s own monument—a poilu Abu Simbel with five ordinary soldiers emerging from a granite wall—puts some proper perspective on exactly who should be remembered in war memorials.
The main national war monument at Verdun is another matter. It occupies a large terraced lot off the main shopping street of the city and looks as if it would be out of place no matter where it was set down. A towering plug of stone that represents the eternally vigilant Frankish warrior ready to defend his Dark Ages turf, the memorial may be the only Merovingian phallic symbol in Europe. On either side of the structure stand two artillery pieces, their snouts reared up in a pose of aggression. The thing is one of the tacky wonders of the Front, a schoolyard bully’s idea of macho posturing. The stone Frank narrows his eyes at the unseen Goth, ready to cleave any comers in two: Make my day, Germanicus. It is a depressing sight and a terrible thing to have in the middle of a town, even a town called Verdun. Graceful little Joan in Reims, the arch at Thiepval, or, if one must erect towers, the Doric American column at Montfaucon, the Canadian tuning fork at Vimy—everything except the Flemish nightstick at Dixmude is more tasteful than this awkward attempt at making myth. Giant Merovingians did not stop the Germans in the hills north of town; poor unfortunate men did, by being placed by the hundreds of thousands in the way of a curtain of whizzing steel and high-explosive shells.
I DECIDE TO leave Verdun as soon as I can. No one ever said that this was a great town, but neither did anyone warn me that the worst of cocorico was waiting around every corner. A brief visit to the citadel of Verdun, the grandest of Vauban’s creations, leaves me shaking my head at the skewed sense of narrative of those in charge of this attraction. An enormous underground city that was almost autarchic in its functioning, the citadel could easily house 7,000 men, including generals and their staffs in the style to which they were accustomed. Instead of being told about the functioning of this marvelous wartime warren, the spectator is invited to scurry along through dank hallways dripping with groundwater in order to catch up with the recorded patriotic spiel and martial music coming out of hidden speakers. We pause before a Madame Tussaud-like reconstruction of the moment in 1920 when the casket containing the Unknown Soldier was chosen for inhumation underneath the Arc de Triomphe. The commentary describing this unique occasion seems too brief, especially when compared to the painfully detailed part of the recording that lists the long-deposed monarchs and long-dead statesmen who have bestowed medals and honors on the city of Verdun for being such an exemplary victim. Clearly, someone is immensely proud of his badges and baubles.
My last stop of the day takes me across the canals near the city center to Verdun’s tourist office. I ask at the desk for a pamphlet listing the visiting hours of the forts and battlefield parks to the north of the city. I am told by a young woman that all that information can be found in a book on sale in the display case. Yes, but I don’t want the book, I just want the information.
We look at each other. She is pretty. Her male colleague leans over and says it’s all in the book, and that’s all there is to it. I look around the office—not a brochure, a leaflet, or even the kind of approximate placemat map that fast-food places offer in tourist destinations. Nothing. The city of Verdun wants visitors to spend the equivalent of seven dollars to buy a book that they do not want. Is it just vultures that feed on the dead?
“Thieves!” says my h
otelkeeper over dinner later that night to placate me. “The place has always been crawling with them.”
He points out the heterogeneous elements in his dining room. An Empire console, a gilt mirror, a swath of red velvet curtain—all of them scavenged, he explains, when people started drifting back to town in 1919 and 1920. It was a very confused time, he says with a smile. He’s a very large man, sitting serenely behind his cash register.
His grandparents had been among the first to return to Verdun after the war. Many of the rooms are furnished with “found” objects.
“The Zone Rouge was a place for people to do business. All kinds of business. Even you’re doing business—what else is this book you’re going to write?”
I open my mouth to protest, but the sage of Verdun is already laughing at me.
5. Douaumont to Vaux
Fort Douaumont is in the heart of the battlefields of the right bank. It is the Western Front’s hinge of desolation, like the vale at Passchendaele and the plateau at Craonne. The forests surrounding it give way to great clearings of tortured ground and landscaped mass graveyards. It is the Frenchman’s postcard image of la guerre de quatorze.
I stand atop the fort on a morning so gray that no distinction can be made between ground and sky. Even the earth and heavens have deserted the prominence of Douaumont today, preferring to leave the place in some intermediate limbo. Nearby is a neatly kept graveyard with 15,000 headstones stretching off beyond the mist. Beside that, a lighthouse sticks up into the grayness, its top lopped off by low-hanging clouds. At the base of the beacon is an ossuary containing the remains of 150,000 soldiers whose blasted skeletons were found scattered around the vicinity after the war. You can walk around inside the base, peering through windows at the heaps of bones piled high. Femurs go with femurs, tibias with tibias, skulls with skulls, and so on. Off in the woods, wild boars dig up unrecovered skeletal parts and make a meal.
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