I remember the British war buff couple in Albert who told me that this place was impressive. The Douaumont Ossuary impresses so much as to render numb, which must have been the intent of its builders. The great Art Deco monstrosity looks strange in the middle of these obscene forests, and the visitor feels strange in the presence of all these collarbones and pelvises. Unlike the monuments in the city of Verdun, Douaumont goes beyond good or bad taste. For all its immodesty with human remains, Douaumont is and always will be shame. Not a shame, but shame itself. It is the embers of the bonfire—the bonefire—that consumed our grandfathers’ world. More than shame, Douaumont is folly.
Between Douaumont and Thiaumont stands the Trench of the Bayonets. Legend has it that an entire company of the 137th French Infantry Regiment was buried alive in an explosion that caved in a trench on June 12, 1916. Only their bayonets remained sticking above ground. While that is a spooky story, many historians think it more likely that the men were hurriedly interred, perhaps by their opponents, and their bayonets were stuck in the ground to mark the spot. Whatever the truth about the trench, a wealthy American, George F. Rand, liked the story so much that he paid for a memorial shelter to be erected in order to protect the bayonets from theft by souvenir hunters. The supposedly immovable bayonets were dug up and replanted in more level ground to ease construction of the memorial. Yet the tale does not end there. As Jay Winter deconstructs it in his Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning-. “Immediately after conferring with [French Premier] Clemenceau and confirming the gift, Rand was killed in a plane crash. The monument therefore had a double meaning: to remember the giver as well as the event he wished to commemorate.”
The Trench of the Bayonets and the Douaumont Ossuary are the macabre movie stars of the Western Front. Surrounding the bald and beaten hillock that Fort Douaumont occupies there stretches an enormous pocked and pitted dump of rusted metal, bleached bones, and ruined villages, only partly concealed by the forest plantings. Verdun’s hinterland, historian Alastair Home remarks in The Price of Glory, his matchless account of the battle, is “the nearest thing to a desert in Europe.” It took ten months to tear every trace of topsoil from a rolling, fertile farmland and wipe away all mark of man the builder and cultivator.
The battle began on February 21, 1916. The offensive, as planned by German commander Erich von Falkenhayn, was designed to kill as many poilus as possible through the use of heavy artillery. Falkenhayn cynically understood that the French command would not surrender a symbol as important as Verdun, even if that meant sacrificing an entire generation of Frenchmen. He guessed correctly that the leaders of the French army were that inept. In setting the trap, the Prussian planner hoped to break the back of France as a fighting nation. It worked, but it did not win the war. The German forces, spurred on by their own propaganda and by Crown Prince Wilhelm’s ambition to try to take Verdun, eventually lost as many men as the French—which defeated the whole purpose of the operation. A sorcerer’s apprentice, Falkenhayn had let his slaughterhouse get out of control.
After the war the story of the defense of Verdun quickly became overgrown by a thicket of nationalist mumbo jumbo. The Douaumont charnel house was regularly besieged by torch-bearing concelebrants, seeking some transcendent message in this testament to high-level profligacy with human lives. What is certain is that the battlefield, for a few awful months in the late spring and early summer of 1916, became a metaphor of national manhood for both sides. The killing was savage.
In brief, the first half of the battle consisted of several massive German attacks over these hills, and over Hill 304 and Mort Homme on the left bank of the Meuse. The countryside was bristling with French forts that had been stripped of their guns to feed the offensives in Champagne and Artois a year earlier. After each successive incursion, which brought them closer and closer to Verdun, the Germans would pause—always, it seems, at a time when total victory was within grasp. The second half of the battle was the reverse. The French decided, for reasons too criminal to contemplate, that every inch of surrendered territory must be retaken, even the forts now made lethal by months of German occupation and refitting.
The stories of Verdun were once well known. The most amazing concerns a certain Sergeant Kunze. In a coup that rivals Alvin York’s for audacity, Kunze and a half-dozen men of a Brandenburger Regiment single-handedly took Fort Douaumont. Through an incredible series of command blunders, four days into the battle the French still had only a small garrison in this, the most modern and well-protected of forts in all of Europe. Everyone in the French military hierarchy assumed that someone else had reinforced the fortress.
Sergeant Kunze decided to go and have a look. Despite orders to stay away from the deadly construction, the sergeant carefully picked his way through the barbed wire and forests of spikes, only to be blown into the moat by the shock wave from one of the massive Big Bertha shells that the German artillery had been lobbing on Douaumont. He ordered his men down into the moat with him and, like German tourists on a Costa del Sol beach, they formed a human pyramid. Kunze scrambled up their backs and wormed his way into an unoccupied gun casemate. Once inside, he and his men rounded up the shocked French garrison, who had been firing off the Douaumont’s long-range cannons unaware that the enemy was anywhere near the fort.
It was a stunning feat, akin in magnitude to an Iraqi shepherd of today bringing down a Stealth bomber with a rifle. Both the French and the Germans were agog. A Prussian lieutenant named Brandis, the man who stole the credit for the action by lying about who got there first, became a national hero. The acutely embarrassed French command decided that their honor could be salved only by retaking the fort once circumstances permitted. A French staff officer estimated that 100,000 French lives were lost because of the fall of Douaumont.
When I follow a tour of the fort seventy years after the fighting has stopped, the guide ignores the miraculous German capture of the fort—one of the strangest incidents of the entire war—to dwell exclusively on the successful, albeit conventional French attack on it in the fall of 1916. The usual patriotic nonsense spews out of the young fellow’s mouth, as if an embrace of the truth might somehow belittle his country. Perhaps he, and the other custodians of Verdun, do not realize that repeating old lies makes their nationalism look that much more silly.
I walk away from Douaumont and its graveyards dispiritedly, surprised at the disappointment I feel in hearing bombast and rationalization at a memorial for such an important battle. What else did I expect? Perhaps the starkly unintelligent Gaul statue in Verdun is the proper monument for this benighted corner of Europe. Yet the caretakers of this spot do not need to resort to mystification—individual examples of courage abound and are not diminished by the ultimate worthlessness of the larger battle. At Souville I pass the place where the French line held and would not let the Crown Prince’s men gain one more inch of ground. Soon the smashed fort at Vaux appears out of the gray curtain of pines and craters. The story here is mind-boggling. For more than one hundred days the German army was within three hundred yards of the structure, dug into the metal-laden forest I’ve just crossed. During that time, 10,000 high-explosive shells fell on the fort every day. By June 1 the place was surrounded. Then the attackers got onto its roof, started pumping flames and gas into the vents. A wall was breached, and gruesome hand-to-hand combat went on for days in a darkened corridor. The French commander, Sylvain-Eugene Raynal, ordered most of his men to make a break for it. Twenty-nine scampered across no-man’s-land in the dead of night. Raynal sent his last courier pigeon out on June 4, begging for relief. A French attack was launched to break through to Raynal, but it ended in the customary slaughter of machine-gun and artillery fire. Finally, on June 6, the exhausted Raynal surrendered. His men came out of the cadaver-strewn Fort Vaux on their hands and knees, licking at the puddles of water on the ground. The commander followed, walking tall and holding his pet cocker spaniel. Even the Germans treated him as a hero.
A fine mist be
gins to close in on the forests east of Vaux. The rusty shrapnel on the ground all around me begins to glisten with the damp. The crack of a branch resounds through the silent wood. Then another crack. And another. I peer through the dim light, half fearful that some haggard men in uniform will appear out of the mists, marching toward me. What will their faces look like? Ghastly grinning skulls. I stumble down a slope, see a road, and break into an awkward run over the shell craters. For the first time since leaving Nieuport, I am spooked. If it is not ghosts in these woods, then it must be something or someone else. Someone I do not want to meet. What kind of person would want to walk through these forests of death on such an awful day?
I arrive in the village of Damloup. This time I do not need my hotelkeeper to laugh at myself. I’m the kind of person who would walk through those woods.
6. Fresnes to St Mihiel
“The people here never go out much. They keep to themselves. You have no idea how bad it is. They’re an awful bunch.”
I’m sitting in a kitchen, having a coffee with a man in his late sixties. There is a blinding yellow oilcloth on the table.
“I used to go out. Go to dances. But not now. Not with these people. They’re my wife’s kin.”
He invited me inside his home after he saw me rapping at the door of the village cafe. A woman came to the window, wide-eyed, then shook her head. She wagged her forefinger at me.
My host explains that although the lady owns the cafe she serves only locals. She never opens it to strangers because she has no license. Who knows? I might be a spy for the inland revenue service.
“Besides, no one else around here would ever invite you inside. Not like where I come from. People in my country have le sens de la fete. They know how to have a good time.”
I ask the inevitable question.
“Where do you come from?”
He takes a pull on his corn-paper cigarette. “Les Eparges.”
I look at him in surprise. His “country” is a couple of hills away. I just walked through that village two hours ago.
There is no smile on his face. He obviously considers himself an expatriate.
A car door closes outside the kitchen window with a tinny slam. A look of alarm crosses the man’s face. He puts the lid back on the sugar bowl. His wife, a strong-looking woman in her mid-sixties, comes in carrying a clutch of plastic grocery bags. She sees me, then looks at her husband in dismay. She must disapprove of his habit of inviting in strangers and telling them what deadbeats her people are. The bags land on the linoleum with a thud. She stalks off to some other room of the house.
“See what I mean?” the old man says.
I AM NOW in a type of countryside that the French fondly call la France profonde, a region far from the cities and towns that pay attention to their century. These are the sticks, where old people still think that a change in contour means a change in culture and where superstitions about hexes and witchcraft have never died out. It is a place marked by emptiness, as most of the young have left. The woman who served me breakfast in the market town of Fresnes-en-Woevre shyly asked me if distant Paris was “as crowded as they say it is.”
This part of la France profonde is crossed by the Front. As it leaves Verdun the Western Front goes east for a few miles before turning sharply southwest and forming what was once known as the St. Mihiel Salient. The trenches traversed the plain of the Woevre, a low flatland that is mercifully free of the nightmarish craters and hollows of Verdun. The scars from the war all seem to be concentrated on a large hillock near Les Eparges, the fun-loving village from which marriage had plucked the homesick old man who gave me a cup of coffee. The Eparges prominence, like Vauquois near the Argonne, was the scene of a grotesque battle of mines and countermines during 1915. The French command sacrificed men in unimaginable quantity in trying to gain a piece of the summit that they had not bothered defending in 1914. One local action, in the spring of 1915, killed 250 Frenchmen to one German. It was repeated the next day.
The countryside becomes lovely as I head back into the highlands near the Meuse. This is what the region of Douaumont and Vaux would have looked like if German and French artillery had not smashed it into its molecular components. Through the villages of St. Remy-la-Calonne and Dommartin-la-Montagne, small fields alternate with stands of conifers, this time concealing nothing more than the occasional bike path. The area makes up part of the Regional Natural Park of Lorraine, with expansive vistas stretching out to the east. Shadows of clouds race across the deep green plain that stretches beyond the River Moselle and leads to Alsace. In the summer of 1914 the French army tried to emulate those shadows. A wall of death awaited. Great masses of young men loped across these fields, their bright red pants and dark blue coats the relic of an earlier age, in the hope of winning glory for their regiments and redeeming the martial honor of France lost in 1870. The fiasco of infantrymen charging machine guns was enacted time and time again until several hundred thousand lay inert in the farmland of Lorraine.
I think of the beginning of the war as I near the end of my walk, simply because this part of the Front saw the wholesale destruction of a French idealism akin to the spirit animating the doomed Wandervogel youths of Germany. Near the hamlet of Vaux-les-Palameix the writer Alain-Fournier vanished forever during a risky attack in the surrounding woods on September 22, 1914. A survivor of that fatal foray maintained that he saw the twenty-eight-year-old novelist fall to the ground after taking a bullet wound to the head. The image—the brain of a young artist blown away by the war—would be revived regularly by mourners of the generation of 1914. One postwar commentator wrote: ” We are still suffering from that head wound … The brain of the world [i.e., France] has undergone a kind of trepanning.” Le front, in a nice lexical coincidence, means both the front and the forehead.
The notion of an irretrievably lost capital of creative talent took hold as the casualty lists from that horrendous first year of senseless attaques a outrance grew longer. Alain-Fournier, whose real name was Henri Alban Fournier, had written his masterpiece Le Grand Meaulnes {The Wanderer) about one young man’s attempt to recover a lost world. News of his passing was treated as emblematic of this literary theme. An imaginative world was indeed being lost. By the end of the first year of the war, 133 French writers had been killed in the fighting. Ernest Psichari, the prewar darling of the zealous new generation of French nationalists enamored of exalted Catholicism and mystical patriotism, was among those whose reputation ballooned into myth through death on the battlefield. Psichari’s posthumous influence, however, paled beside that of Charles Peguy, a forty-one-year-old polemicist, poet, and essayist whose death on September 4, 1914, during the first day of the Battle of Marne, ensured him a place in the French pantheon within shouting distance of Joan of Arc, one of his favorite subjects for epic treatment. Peguy achieved a sort of apotheosis in death that made him an inspirational figure for combatants in both world wars.
As I set off through the sun-touched woods on the road to St. Mihiel, I feel that I am beginning to leave the war behind me. There is something irresistibly valedictory about this moment spent near the unlocated grave of Alain-Fournier. His hero, Meaulnes, is the type of fellow who would understand the sad beauty in the ruins of Soupir. Indeed, for much of the novel, Meaulnes endeavors to reconstruct a world that he never experienced. His motivation is love, set in the late afternoon of vanishing youth. I decide that somewhere in my ephemeral constitution of lapsed amnesiac, accidental historian, and incompetent hiker, there is a touch of Alain-Fournier’s Meaulnes. The past must not be relinquished without a small sense of moment.
ON MAY 2,1991, Alain-Fournier’s body was at last found in the woods near Palameix. I learned of the discovery by pure chance. At the time I was working on a fashion magazine whose offices floated high above Broadway and West 50th Street in New York City. I was working late, on deadline, filling column inches with a couple of other staff writers. I went to the empty art room to procrastinate. A French g
lossy had been left lying around, so I idly flipped through it for want of anything better to do. The item about the discovery of Alain-Fournier was minute, but it didn’t escape me. There was a blurred photograph of the author taken in 1913.
I looked out the window at the lights of a Manhattan midnight. There was no one to tell how I felt, even if I had wanted to. The sun and the sadness came rushing back. I saw Tommy Conlon’s grave on the Somme, heard the strains of the Merry Widow Waltz, felt the hot breath of traffic on the Menin Road.
Perhaps this was memory, then.
When I returned to my desk, the others were waiting for me. We still had an hour or two of stylish, kicky copy to produce. Unconsciously I began humming “Papa Don’t Preach.”
The fashion editor looked at me incredulously. ” Stephen, do you mind?” she said. ” Madonna’s history.”
Her assistant seconded her. “Yeah, get a life.”
7. Montsec
The grim little logging town of St. Mihiel hosts an impromptu Great War seminar, as a gay English couple and I speak in hushed tones of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in the dining room of our hotel. They are en route to Luxembourg, but want to spend all day tomorrow inspecting the battlefields of Verdun. They wonder if I know anywhere to stay outside the city, which they heard was “dreadful.” I ask them if they like pig’s trotters.
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