“At the beginning of the war, the French had no big guns in the area,” Denis explained. “They were all in Brittany, facing the channel; the French still thought their biggest enemy was England, not Germany.” The guns had to be brought to the Argonne, hundreds of miles away, by rail, and that took time. But Joffre didn’t want to wait. In October, Denis said, “French soldiers lined up, and a band played the ‘Marseillaise’ as they marched up the hill to the German trenches. The Germans had machine guns every ten meters.” He pursed his lips, shook his head. “They killed 1,430 French in thirty minutes.”
It was only the beginning. The Germans had already brought in a thousand Silesian miners to dig into the gaize under Vauquois. They carved out more than ten miles of tunnels beneath the hill going down to a depth of some three hundred feet and created, in effect, an underground city. At its peak it housed two thousand men; had two hospitals, fourteen kitchens, and 154 barracks. Two large generators powered ventilators, thousands of light bulbs, and cable cars that hauled men and materiel in and out. Soldiers lived there for twenty-eight days at a stretch, and never removed their shoes in all that time. The French managed to establish a foothold on the far side of the butte’s crest, out of view of the Germans but also without a view of anything strategic; they used it mostly to harass the enemy and launch attacks, none of which were very successful. Still, they built their own tunnel system, about four miles’ worth and also electrified, that ran to a depth of about 140 feet and could harbor two thousand poilus if necessary, though not to sleep—just for temporary shelter. They even built a large chamber, well below their deepest manned tunnel, and filled it with explosives. The Germans built three of those; their plan was to blow the entire hill sky high if the French ever managed to breach their defenses.
It never came to that. The two sides achieved stasis—not a stalemate, really, since the Germans already had what they wanted. But their positions held. Things did happen, of course, the first one being that the village of Vauquois, caught in between the two lines, was destroyed, its residents scattered or dead. Reduced to rubble: a church, a school, a bakery, a music hall, the mairie. I have a German postcard featuring a photo of several German soldiers in Mütze posing behind the church’s bell, fallen with its tower, and a bit of verse, titled “From Difficult Times”:
Church bell of Vauquois, you rang and
Invited so many in to pray.
Church bell of Vauquois, you ring no more
Around you all is dead and empty.
You have been hit and from your own mouth
Fell from your height even death’s mouth
Your ring died in death’s pains
As did around you many a brave warrior.
The last thing left standing was the Maronnier, the Liberty Tree, a huge chestnut planted during the revolution a century and a quarter earlier. The symbol of Vauquois, it did war service by blocking the Germans’ view; they wanted it gone, but it was too dangerous to send their Pioniere, or combat engineers, out to cut it down. So they trained five machine guns on it and started firing. It took them twenty-four hours to bring the old arbor down that way.
But it’s what happened after that that made Vauquois the otherworldly fantasy-scape that remains to this day: Each side began tunneling toward the other, carving out large subterranean chambers, packing them with many tons of explosives, and blowing them up. This was not unique to Vauquois, of course; they did it at the Somme, and in the Bois de Mort-Mare, and even elsewhere in the Argonne. In one nine-month period, 223 large underground explosions were set off just in the Haute Chevauchée, most of them French. One crater there, which sits right behind the ossuary and is the product of a German mine loaded with 105,000 pounds of explosives, measures more than fifty yards across and ten deep. Should you decide to stroll down into it, you’ll have an interesting time getting back out; I had to scuttle up like a crab on my hands and feet, clutching the grass with my fingers, and still it took several tries. I heard another cuckoo bird during my first few attempts, so at least there was that.
According to Denis, no fewer than 540 mines were dug and detonated on Vauquois Hill alone over the course of four years—an average of one every three days. In February 1915, the Germans detonated one that killed 106 French, but also 43 of their own. A French lieutenant left his company momentarily to confer with superiors, heard the blast, rushed back and found every last man gone. Evaporated. “He went crazy,” Denis told me. “Started running around and screaming. Then he dashed out toward the German lines, still yelling like a madman. They shot him dead.”
How he ran anywhere on that hill is, frankly, a mystery. There is absolutely no earth on it that is flat. It’s just craters upon craters, all of them deep, some really deep. If you stand at the crest of the hill and face away, the view—of woods and farms and villages and Montfaucon—is pretty, even lovely; but if you turn around and look back down the hill, the terrible beauty of all those green-lined holes hits you like a fist to the sternum, making you want to flee and linger at the same time. For some French, this hill epitomizes the war even more than Verdun.
The French have been visiting the Butte de Vauquois—what remains of it—since the armistice, but it wasn’t until 1956 that a professor at the seminary in Verdun, a monk named Kock, started to explore the tunnels below its surface. Others followed; today the local historical association has some 850 members, 20 of whom, volunteers, work there every weekend to shore up the tunnels and make them safe. Another 20 guide visitors through them. It’s not an easy tour: The tunnels look pretty much as they did a century ago, and they were not built for comfort. While there are a lot of chambers throughout the underground network, some of them wide and deep enough for several cots or a couple of long wooden dining tables, the passages that run between them can be tight, sometimes only a couple of feet wide, with ceilings so low that visitors must spend much of their time underground hunched over. The gaize out of which all the passages are carved may be strong, but it’s very slippery; it is, by definition, damp. (Dry gaize crumbles like sand.) Guides offer guests hard hats before entering the tunnels, but don’t insist. If you refuse one on your first visit, you won’t do so on your second.
You can actually explore both sets of tunnels if you dare, French and German. The French ones are an easier descent, the German more extensive. The French tunnels are built right into the hillside; to get to the German tunnels you must first wind your way through some concrete trenches, then duck under one of those corrugated metal arches—set into the earth at an angle, like the bunker entrances in Bois Brûlé—and slowly ease your way onto a steep set of rough stone steps that have, thankfully, been fitted with a handrail since the war. There are light bulbs, too—suspended from the ceiling in the taller passages, attached to the wall in the shorter ones—which don’t sully the experience, since they had them in there a hundred years ago, as well. You can see stretches of the original electrical and telephone line, punctuated by white porcelain insulators. The first level down is fitted with certain amenities—street signs, for instance, replicas of those that festooned the tunnels originally. One chamber contains a wall map of the entire tunnel system, both sides; here and there hang enlarged old photos, taken in these tunnels, of soldiers eating, resting, writing letters. There are artifacts: a bed frame, a table and chair, water pumps, parts of a ventilator, helmets, and, of course, bottles.
Most visitors don’t go any further down than the first level, the only one that’s officially open to the public. If you know the right person, though, and you visit at the right time, you can, and I did. The going gets rougher, darker and tighter; at one point, despite Denis’s recommendation, I crawled into a chamber from which a soldier remotely fired a Minenwerfer located two levels up. It took me fifteen minutes to crawl back out, backward—wriggling like a freshly caught fish—and most of that time I wasn’t entirely sure I would make it.
Sophistic
ated and technologically marvelous in their design, yes; safer than being on the surface, yes. But the tight, slippery underground cities at Vauquois make the mines at the Chemin des Dames feel like a Holiday Inn by comparison. I went in twice, and emerged, the first time, feeling like I had been paroled from prison. The second time I felt like I had been sprung from death row. I’ve read about these tunnels extensively, seen many photos of them. I lay down on a bed in one, sat at a table in another, touched helmets and boots, ran my finger along electrical line, picked up bottles. I know for a fact that men lived in them for twenty-eight days at a time while the end of the world played out overhead. But don’t ask me to believe it.
* * *
The last time I visited Vauquois, the site was hosting an annual ceremony for pompiers, firefighters. A dozen men in uniform lined up in front of the hilltop memorial, holding aloft flags—a tricolor, ten French regional banners, and a stars and stripes. A marching band played. Officials made speeches. During one of them I spotted, standing among the flag-bearers, an older gentleman dressed as a poilu, his 1914 uniform perfect: long blue coat with tails, bright red trousers, red epaulets on his shoulders and a red kepi on his head. Pack on back; canteen at side. He stood perfectly erect, holding up what I recognized as a Lebel rifle, also period-appropriate.
Afterward, Denis and I stopped for lunch at a café he favors in the village. It was a bright, warm day, and we sat outside under an umbrella, joined by a friend of his, another older gentleman named Pierre Picard. Like my late uncle Gilbert, his American twin, Denis is a good-natured fellow with a ready smile, neither quiet nor loud; he emanates both resolve and kindness. He’s also a deeply religious man, one of the few I ever met in France. So I found it strange when, a year earlier and sitting at this same table, he had expressed the opinion that Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader and outspoken pacifist who had been assassinated on the eve of the war—shot dead on July 31, 1914, as he sat at an outdoor café, just like this one but in Paris—was to blame for all the carnage to follow, including what had happened just up the hill. I was a bit stunned; it felt like blaming a pompier for a conflagration. But Denis was adamant. “If Jaurès hadn’t been so insistent on demilitarizing French society,” he’d said, “we would have been ready for the Germans in 1914. The war would have been over very quickly.”
That had struck me as some twisted logic: Jaurès had been trying to talk Europe down from the ledge; it seemed Denis was blaming him for the fact that it was killed once it hit the pavement. But Denis was otherwise such a reasoned and humane person that I couldn’t quite believe he had said what I had heard, so a year later, sitting at the same table with M. Picard as well, I asked him about it again. He reasserted the point, and quoted Napoleon: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” I had never heard anyone express such an opinion about Jaurès before—he is generally a beloved and mourned figure in France, often called the first casualty of the war—but I got the sense, from the way Denis put it forward, as if its logic were unassailable, that more than a few French agreed with him.
As I struggled with a serious bout of cognitive dissonance, M. Picard just sat there, a thoughtful look on his face. A few minutes earlier, he’d told me that one of his grandfathers and two of his uncles had been killed at the Chemin des Dames, and that later, when he himself was 6 years old, the Nazis occupied his hometown, a small city south of Reims called Chalons-sur-Marne (known today as Chalons-en-Champagne). “I remember them taking away the old Jewish woman who lived next door,” he recalled. “She was a nice lady. Always had treats for the children.”
It was only later that I came to understand that these two statements—M. Picard’s recollection of his childhood during the Nazi occupation, and Denis’s anger over Jean Jaurès’s pacifism—were actually connected. Americans, with our short history, tend to view the past as a series of isolated episodes. But in France, especially in those parts of the country that were savagely fought over twice in a little more than twenty years, many people view the two world wars as just one conflict with a twenty-one-year cease-fire in the middle. Having spent a lot of time in those areas, I share that view; I can easily understand how someone who suffered through the second might harbor strong, even bitter, feelings about the first. But M. Picard just seemed wistful, and a bit sad. It was Denis, born after the second war ended, who spoke of history with such pointed passion. It frankly surprised me; it still does, even as I concede that it shouldn’t. Most of the French people I have met in the process of exploring 14–18 sites Over There seem miraculously resistant to the bitterness they might justifiably feel against the Germans even a century after la Grande Guerre, as if their curiosity about the past has inoculated them against developing strong emotions about it. But not all of them.
I have discussed, at length and on a number of occasions here, the strategic, technological and military accomplishments of the Germans in that first war. Perhaps you have gotten the sense, from all that, that I regard them with respect, even a bit of awe. I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that what they did to France in World War I was as bad as, and in some ways worse than, what they did in World War II. Frankly, in order to regard the Germans of World War I at all, I must compartmentalize them from their Nazi sons. I have stopped and explored just about every German World War I cemetery I have ever passed. I have also passed quite a few German World War II cemeteries; I have never set foot in one, and never will if I can help it. But knowing that they’re out there doesn’t keep me from visiting, and even paying my respects, at the World War I cemeteries. As I said, I compartmentalize.
Then again, I have the luxury of doing so: I am separated from both wars—from, really, just the one long war, with a twenty-one-year cease-fire in the middle—by an ocean and many decades. I did not lose a grandfather or two uncles in either one. The French are not afforded such buffers. They have to live among—and often in—that war’s ruins; have to tiptoe around live shells and barbed wire, plow around craters and bunkers. You might meet a French person who didn’t lose someone in the first war, but I never have. All that France is today, good and bad and neither, it is because of 14–18. Everyone there knows it. The war imprints the French psyche like the shell holes imprint the Butte de Vauquois. In some ways—in a lot of ways—it defines them. So it’s not surprising that someone born after the second war would harbor strong opinions about who was responsible for the first. And if you find some of those opinions unsettling, as is the case with me and Denis’s thoughts on Jean Jaurès, whom I regard with admiration for his ideals and his courage in promoting them even at the cost of his life, the alternative for them is to not talk about it at all unless asked, and perhaps not even then—which is, in my experience, how most French people deal with the Second World War. If they talk and argue so much about the First—if they study it intently, walk its fields, cherish its relics, safeguard its memory—it is in large part, I believe, because there is a sense that it represents the Red Giant of French greatness. “Ninety percent of French men were not afraid to fight,” Denis told me. “It was their duty.” As simple as that. And they fought hard, for four years and three months; never gave up even as they were bled white. It is true that they walked into German machine guns while a band played the “Marsellaise.” But they won. I have every bit as much respect for them as I do the Germans. It’s a strange mental tightrope act, pondering such things.
As I sat in between Denis and M. Picard that day and strained to stay aloft, gazing out vaguely at the midday sun, as if by magic a vision appeared before me of a poilu in a perfect, spotless uniform. For just a moment, I thought him a ghost, or maybe a mirage. But then he turned and walked toward me, and I realized he was the fellow from the pompier ceremony. His red trousers were dazzling, his blue coat as proud and dignified a garment as I had ever seen. His pants were bloused into high black boots; his black belt bore two leather cartridge pouches and a square brass buckle. He had a mustache, of course, bu
t also a trim beard, both mostly gray. Denis and Pierre greeted him, and then Denis introduced him to me. His name is Maurice Ravenel; he’s been dressing up like this and participating in ceremonies for thirty years. “I visit the American cemetery in Romagne all the time,” he made a point of telling me. He had just attended the Memorial Day ceremony there a couple of weeks earlier, as he did every year.
I complimented him on his uniform, both its beauty and its verisimilitude, though, not knowing the French word for verisimilitude, I kind of had to fudge that part. “Merci,” he replied, then hiked up a thumb and pointed it at his backpack. “Thirty kilos,” he said—66 pounds. He held out his Lebel, said “go ahead.” I grasped it in both hands; it wasn’t quite 30 kilos, but it was very heavy. The bayonet was half again as long as the rifle itself, and shaped like a deadly silver toothpick. Scary. M. Ravenel must have seen it on my face, because he smiled just a bit and nodded, as if to say: Yes, that would leave quite a hole. “That’s called a Rosalie,” he said. A Rosalie!
France.
* * *
One morning, Jean-Paul took me to a little village called Baulny, where we ran into a farmer he knows who looks very much like a taller, farmier version of the actor/comedian Jason Sudeikis. If the Argonne is still forest, it’s also still farms; you are much more likely to get stuck on some narrow, winding road behind a tractor than you are a slow-moving car. There are cows everywhere. Curious creatures. Once, outside Gesnes, I spotted the entrance to a German bunker, a large half-pipe of corrugated metal jammed into the earth, that the current owners were apparently using as a shelter for their animals. I stopped my car, grabbed my camera and strode over to the wire fence, but before I could get off a shot a pack of fourteen black-and-white Holsteins trotted over and blocked my view, as interested in studying me as I was in studying the Germans’ handiwork. Eventually, we reached an accommodation.
Back Over There Page 28