The Battle of the Somme would last four and a half months, and even before the shooting stopped, people were debating whether even a fraction of the slaughter could be justified; historians have been doing so ever since. It is true that the Allies succeeded in their objective of relieving the pressure on Verdun. But doing so cost them as many casualties as they had incurred in that longer battle. The lines hadn’t shifted appreciably. The Germans took a lot of casualties, too, but they were still there, and still standing. As for Verdun, it is generally seen as a French victory—though perhaps a Pyrrhic one. Yes, the Germans took tremendous losses at Verdun, too; but not as many as the French. And yes, the Germans failed to bleed France white. But they got pretty close.
Verdun and the Somme were two of the greatest battles of the war. But they were just two, among thousands.
And yet, for most French, Verdun is the Great War. And most British feel the same way about the Somme.
* * *
Raon-l’Étape is a picturesque town in the foothills of the Vosges Mountains, not too far from the German border. It saw fighting during the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914, and sent a lot of its men off to fight, and die, elsewhere on the Western Front. Like every other French city, town, village and hamlet I have ever visited or heard about, Raon-l’Étape built a monument to its war dead sometime after the armistice, in this case a large granite pedestal topped with a bronze sculpture of three poilus doggedly advancing across a muddy battlefield, two of them on their knees. At the base of the pedestal is a small, polished plaque:
An urn containing soil
From DOUAUMONT
Was buried at the foot of this monument
June 3, 1956
Douaumont, one of the nineteen forts that ringed Verdun, is two hours away; there’s plenty of soil upon which French blood was shed right there in Raon-l’Étape. “Typical,” one French historian I know said when I told him about it. “It seems like people only want to remember Verdun.”
It can be hard to argue with that. It can be hard, even, to describe the space Verdun occupies in the collective French psyche.
To begin with, because the French Army rotated just about every man it had on the Western Front through Verdun at some point in 1916, most living French people have at least a tenuous connection to the place. And most of them, it seems, have either visited it or hope to someday. Anyone I mentioned Verdun to Over There—history buff or history agnostic, deeply religious or profoundly secular, militarist or pacifist, old or young—revered it.
The city of Verdun, though large for the rural département of Meuse—always referred to by residents as La Meuse—is fairly small, with a population of fewer than twenty thousand. And the city itself, though it fell under German guns, was never the site of any actual fighting. That happened in a crescent around it, at and in between those nineteen forts that ringed the city. It’s a sizeable area, larger than all of Paris, and greater by an order of magnitude or two than places like Gettysburg that Americans typically envision when they think of battlefields. And though there are plenty of monuments in that sizeable area, it’s nothing like Gettysburg, where it’s all but impossible to find a spot from which you can’t see at least one. This battlefield is much too vast for that. And many of the monuments are quite different from the stout stones and statuary you would see at Revolutionary or Civil War sites.
They look like something else: like the dimples in the forest floor that line the path to Colonel Driant’s memorial, so many of them that there is no flat ground anywhere. And like the signs that warn you, as you enter a patch of woods, to stay on the marked trails and leave your picnic baskets and soccer balls in the car—not out of respect for the history of the place, but because it’s quite likely there are still unexploded shells nearby, just below the dirt, or perhaps sitting on top of it. You could call all the “red zones” around Verdun—places that have not yet been sufficiently cleared of unexploded Great War ordnance to be deemed safe, or “green”—monuments. Potentially interactive ones.
Some of the largest monuments at Verdun are its villages détruit, nine villages that were destroyed during the battle and never rebuilt, but are all still marked on maps, and still elect mayors, even with a combined population of zero. (I’m not sure who, exactly, does the voting.) One of them, Fleury-devant-Douaumont, changed hands more than a dozen times in 1916, though during the latter months of the battle there really wasn’t anything left to take possession of. The only edifice there today is a small stone chapel built after the war. Fleury’s landscape is more dramatic than the surface of the moon: Littered relentlessly with mounds and shell holes, it is difficult to traverse without rugged shoes, strong calves, and a really good sense of balance. Worn footpaths wander where once there were streets. Small signs mark what was where before February 21, 1916: Plumber. Weaver. Blacksmith. Farm. Tinsmith. Baker. Vineyard. Road-mender. Café/Grocery. Smelter. Wash house. School. Church. Parsonage. Town Hall. Fleury was first settled in 1212. Some four hundred people lived here before the war. None returned afterward.
There is no museum at, or of, Fleury; aside from those little signs and that small chapel, which houses old photos and descriptions of the village before and during the war, nothing has been done to it since the armistice. A plaque offers a multilingual exhortation from the French historian Gérard Canini:
In front of the chapels erected in memory of the destroyed villages, you will remember that there were men, women and children who loved this Lorraine landscape, who plowed its heavy, meager soil. There were men here who lived at peace and the mortal remains of their ancestors are now mingled with those of dead soldiers! All are now protected by the Ossuary where the soul of the battlefield still quivers and where burns the eternal flame of devotion.
The ossuary—L’Ossuaire de Douaumont, which contains the bones of 130,000 unidentified men, French and German, killed at Verdun—is a couple of minutes away. An enormous shrine that from the outside vaguely resembles an airport light-rail car impaled upon a barbecue skewer, it’s more like a monastery inside, a long corridor bisected by an entry foyer and pocked with alcoves, all of it coated with an eerie orange light that pours in through tinted glass cubes. Each alcove is dedicated to a specific sector of the battlefield; remains that are discovered in that sector—and remains still surface at Verdun all the time—are interred in or underneath a pair of marble sarcophagi in that alcove. The inside walls are all composed of stone blocks upon which are engraved the details of men who were killed at Verdun: names, thousands of them, along with their units and their birth and death dates, or at least the date they were last seen alive. There’s a chapel off one of the corridors, a good-sized chamber where mass is celebrated several times a day, although it rarely intrudes upon the quiet that prevails outside its closed doors. Conversation is strongly discouraged; so are photographs. Footsteps resonate. Just being there makes you want to walk softly, and behave.
The skewer is a slender, pointed 150-foot tower; for a fee, you can ascend (by foot) to an observatory from which you can view much of the battlefield. You can talk and take pictures all you like up there, but it’s a small space, cold in winter and hot in summer, and you probably won’t linger very long.
Stepping out into daylight, you are immediately confronted by a vast French World War I cemetery, the largest one in the country; it’s hard to take in the whole thing even from the observatory. All of its markers—crosses, tablets and minarets, more than sixteen thousand in all, each one a dull tan concrete—were replaced for the centennial by new ones that are the same, only whiter. These men, all of them French or colonial troops, do not represent all of the known dead of Verdun. They do not even represent all of the known dead of Douaumont.
Fort Douaumont, the largest and best positioned of the nineteen forts that were supposed to protect Verdun, is just a couple of minutes north and east of L’Ossuaire, but it is, in ways both visual and r
hetorical, a different world. If the ossuary is like a cloister, the fort is like a jungle gym, rugged and inviting, there to be touched and climbed all over, marveled at aloud, selfied. It’s nothing at all like one of those forts constructed along the American eastern seaboard between the Revolution and the Civil War, all brown block walls and clean angles. Built between 1885 and the eve of the war, Fort Douaumont is set into the sloping earth, stone and dirt commingling to form something that is somehow both ancient and futuristic, rugged and ruined, something you would not be surprised to encounter in Mad Max or Dune. Stone turrets that would not be out of place in a Crusader castle are interspersed with metal observation cupolas that resemble Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars. You look at its solid but haphazard sprawl and wonder how anyone could either defend it or take it.
The French high command probably wondered the same thing; despite pleas from men like Colonel Driant, they left the place virtually unmanned and unequipped by early 1916. On the fifth day of the battle, a small German raiding party managed to capture it, almost by accident. Despite the propaganda victory that represented, the Germans probably regretted doing so shortly thereafter, as they discovered how costly the place was to defend, or even to man. At one point, nearly seven hundred German soldiers were killed in a fire that started, according to some accounts, when a few of them inadvisedly used flamethrower fuel to heat up their coffee. Still, it took the French eight months, at a cost of tens of thousands of poilus, to take it back. If you know these things, the fort seems haunted; if you don’t, as is apparently the case with most of the children who visit, it just seems like a big playground. They probably don’t feel guilty after scampering around a place that once cost so very many men their lives.
But I did.
* * *
The first time I visited L’Ossuaire, as I exited the cloister and walked around to my car, I noticed several people outside crouching down along the outer wall and peering into little windows set just above their ankles. Something interesting must be going on in the boiler room, I thought; but when I bent over and pressed my face against one of the thick old panes, I snapped back in horror: Just on the other side, a human skull, complete with a large, jagged hole in its forehead, gazed back at me. It bobbed on a sea of bones several feet deep; other windows revealed chambers equally full of femurs, clavicles, ribs, and scapulae. I felt like I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to, something so unlike the beautiful, dignified space I had just left. And yet, I thought, this must be part of the memorial. There are no signs directing visitors to it; indeed, to get to it you have to step over or under a little rope. But there are windows there, and no one to chase the curious away. Maybe the strangeness of the place was intentional, a wordless commentary on the strangeness of war itself.
Perhaps the strangest monument at Verdun is the Tranchée des Baïonnettes, the bayonet trench—a concrete enclosure, built after the war, within which you can see, poking up through the soil, the bayonet tips of a company of French soldiers who were buried alive by a German shell as they were about to go over the top. Or, I should say, supposedly see; I’ve been several times and, squint and strain thought I might, I’ve never really been sure if I was seeing the tips of bayonets or, for that matter, anything at all except a bed of cold, dark dirt. I mentioned this to a few French friends after my last visit, and they quickly assured me that the whole story is fanciful speculation mixed with a healthy dose of fabulism. A lot of people line up to see it anyway. A lot of people also drive the length of La Voie Sacrée, and wander through the woods, green zones and red, looking for markers, or cartridges, or the spot where their great-uncle was killed; stroll through cemeteries, open fields, villages détruits. You’ll find a lot of people crawling over just about every corner and crevice of Verdun—French people, and Germans, and Belgians, and even Dutch.
But not, in my experience, British.
One evening, as I sat at an outdoor café in Sainte-Menehould, a charming old town in the Argonne about twenty-five miles west of Verdun, a middle-aged English couple strolled by, chatting; grateful to hear my native tongue—a rare sound in that area—I said hello. They sat down, told me they were passing through on their way to Germany, asked if I was doing the same.
“No,” I said. “I’m visiting World War I sites.”
“Ah,” the man said. “We’re crossing paths. We just came from there.”
“Where?”
“The Western Front,” he said. “You know, the Somme.”
Hm. I thought about telling them that the Somme was not the entire Western Front, then decided to be more diplomatic. “There are lots of fascinating World War I sites around here, too,” I said, trying on a tone that, to my inner ear, sounded more enthusiastic than scolding. “You should check some out while you’re here.”
“There are?” they said.
“Sure,” I said. “You’re actually in the Argonne right now.”
Blank stares. Pursed lips.
“You’ll probably pass through the Saint-Mihiel salient on your way to Germany. Lots of fighting there.”
Silence. No change in expression.
“Verdun’s just a half hour to the east.” I nodded conspiratorially.
The woman looked at her feet, the man at his watch.
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that, to most British, the Somme is World War I. You could (and I did) say something very similar about the French and Verdun, but the French are aware that there was a lot of fighting elsewhere in France and Belgium, and that there was still more fighting in other parts of Europe, and Asia, and Africa; they probably even know a fair bit about at least some of it. But to them, Verdun is the apotheosis of the Great War—its essence, really, the gravest existential threat France had ever faced. It helps that France prevailed, or at least that one could make a defensible claim that France prevailed. The Boche threw everything they had at Verdun; they did not pass. Defending Verdun cost the French terribly, but Verdun did not fall.
It’s hard to construct a similarly triumphant narrative of the Somme.
You can try. You can say that the British never took as many casualties afterward as they did that first day, or that the Germans ended up taking a lot of casualties, too. People do; but if they know even that much about the battle, they almost certainly regard it as a horrific catastrophe. Pétain may have been a villain in the Second World War, but at least he was a hero at Verdun. The standard narrative of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the British commander at the Somme, is that he was an incompetent butcher untroubled by the prospect of sending many thousands of his men to their deaths for absolutely nothing. His great battle of 1916 has become synonymous with senseless, purposeless, exorbitant slaughter.
And yet, the British cannot get enough of the place.
The Somme is the only area in France where you might hear more English spoken than French. Not that the locals speak English; they don’t, not even in places you might expect them to, like tourism bureaus. But for much of the year, they’re simply outnumbered. You are more likely, at those times, to see the Union Jack flying than the Tricolor; to hear “God Save the Queen” being sung than “La Marseillaise.”
Local shops cater to British appetites. In the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, you can enjoy a nice pot of Darjeeling at the Old Blighty Tea Room after a solemn visit to the nearby Lochnagar Crater, a massive bowl created at 7:28 a.m. on July 1, 1916, when the British set off 48,000 pounds of ammonal buried in underground chambers. The site is staffed entirely by British volunteers, mostly retirees; every July 1, at 7:28 a.m., they re-create the explosion with lights and smoke. “Then the pipers start in,” one told me. “It’s very moving.” And always very well attended; some ceremonies, another volunteer told me, draw more British tourists than the site can accommodate.
They come over on their own, and by the busload; take the ferry to Calais or Zeebrugge. There are English
tour guides who ferry over their own packed tour buses. Other visitors bring their own cars, and have to adjust to driving on the right with their steering wheel also on the right. It can take a while. You’ll know when you’re behind one who hasn’t quite gotten it yet. You’ll really know when one is coming at you. Following them isn’t a whole lot easier. They brake frequently, and unpredictably, to read signs, check maps, eyeball cemeteries and monuments. Some will pull over just because they spot another group walking through a field somewhere and figure there’s got to be something worth checking out there. People have pulled over just to find out what I was looking at. It usually turned out that they knew more about it than I did.
They stay at inns where all the guests are English. The owners, too. They dine together at tables festooned with HP Sauce, drink English tea, eat English pudding for dessert. The conversation is of British politics and football teams, which British politicians or celebrities are secretly gay or pedophilic or cross-dressers, who deserves to be a member of the royal family and who doesn’t. And, of course, the war: battles and units, tactics and weapons, the failures of generals and politicians, the occasional figure who actually knew what he was doing but was ignored until it was almost too late. Occasionally, another war might creep in; one night, I returned to my inn late and passed two gentlemen avidly discussing the merits and shortcomings of the B-17 bomber, down to minute specifications.
Mostly, though, it’s the First World War—specifically, the exploits of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the First World War. English visitors to the Somme seem split about evenly between first-timers and perennials; the latter come every year, if they can manage it. Some have been doing so for decades. They run into other perennials and celebrate the reunion joyously. Some live just a few miles apart back home, but only know each other from the Somme, and only see each other here. Some come the same week or two every year, and see the same people every year. They visit the same sites, walk the same ground. Every year.
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