The Valley Of Heaven And Hell_Cycling In The Shadow Of Marie Antoinette

by Susie Kelly

  “Thursday 23, at half past eleven they interrupted Mass in order to hurry our departure; partook of déjeuner at Châlons, dined at Epernay, found the Commissioners of the Assembly near Port-à-Binson; arrived at eleven o’clock at Dormans, and supped there; slept three hours in an armchair.’

  Their plight had not affected the King’s appetite.

  Marie-Thérèse wrote:

  ‘We reached Dormans in the evening, and slept at a little inn. The deputies were lodged side by side with us. Our windows looked on the street, which all night long was filled with the populace shouting, and wanting us to go on in the middle of the night; but the deputies no doubt wanted to rest themselves, and so we stayed. My brother was ill all night and almost had delirium, so shocked was he by the dreadful things he had seen on the preceding day.’ [Royal Memoirs of the French Revolution, by the Duchess of Angouleme]

  As we were unable to visit the inn where they had spent the night, was it possible to have a look around the château, I asked. The girl pulled a face again, and said rather apologetically that the château isn’t open to the public. It belongs to the town now, and is just used for municipal offices and for meetings. There is nothing really to see, no furniture left there. But, she brightened up, the memorial was superb and we would find that very interesting, although it wouldn’t be open until 2.30 pm when the voluntary staff arrived. She came out to see my bike, which was surrounded by a group of admirers trying to work out what exactly it did, and exactly how it did so, although none could be persuaded to have a ride.

  The pond snake was elusive. For many minutes of tip-toeing around and peering intently the most we saw was a glimpse of sinuous tail sliding from the bank into the reeds. With four hours to kill before the memorial would open, we bought a picnic lunch and went to sit at one of the rustic tables and benches in the park beneath a clump of towering trees. We shared our food with a few wild birds that hopped around our feet and darted onto the table, snatching up morsels and flying away with them. It was a welcome change to have an opportunity for few hours of inactivity, which we put to good use by reading all about the history of Dormans, its château, and the memorial we were going to visit.

  We learned that Dormans had been a theatre for battles during not only WWI but also the Hundred Years War and the War of Religion. It was during the War of Religion that Henri, Duc of Guise took a bullet in the face at Dormans. He’s one piece in an interesting little historical jigsaw. His father, François, uncle to Mary Queen of Scots, had seven children of whom Henri was the eldest. François was nicknamed ‘Le Balafré,’ meaning ‘Scarface’, as a result of a terrible wound inflicted during battle when a lance pierced his face beneath the left eye, passed through his nose and emerged on the right between his neck and ear. He made an astonishing recovery, only to be assassinated eighteen years later, shot by a Protestant fanatic. On his death his son Henri inherited the title of Duc de Guise. Henri fathered fourteen children, thus doubling his father’s score, and like his father was known as Le Balafré from the injury he sustained in Dormans. And just like his father, Henri also died at the hand of a Huguenot assassin. I love reading these fascinating snippets of history.

  We also read that during the Wars of Religion persecuted Huguenots had taken refuge and hidden out in deep cellars beneath Dormans. As it was illegal for them to be interred in sanctified ground, if they died their bodies had to be buried instead in local gardens. Ever since, gardeners turning over their vegetable patch or digging up their flowerbeds have occasionally unearthed skeletons. I decided not to buy any locally grown fresh fruit or vegetables while we were in Dormans.

  Just as we finished eating, the volunteers arrived to open up the church. Perched pugnaciously on top of a small hill, the Dormans memorial is a chunky, grey stone and rather grim Gothic building. A number of turrets of differing designs and heights climb towards the central spire giving the memorial an asymmetrical appearance. The exterior looked to me a little bizarre, as if assembled by a child who has put the pieces together in the wrong order. However, the arched Romanesque main entrance is softer, more honey-coloured, as if it is saying: ‘Don’t be put off by the foreboding exterior. Come inside and see’.

  The lower chapel and crypt is a place of soft shadows, muted sunlight and vaulted ceilings, in no way sinister but immeasurably sad. On the pale stones of the walls the names of dead soldiers are engraved in blood red. As we stood there reading those names I found that I was crying again. Recently I seemed to be spending a lot of time in tears for one reason or another. Seeing all those hundreds of names of officers and men – four brothers in one case, and a prince – just tore into my heart. The walls seemed built of sighs, and the white stones wept unbearable grief.

  Maréchal Foch was the prime mover behind the building of the memorial, ostensibly as a tribute to the 1.5 million French soldiers whom he sent to their death in the two infamous battles of the Marne – in 1914 and 1918. Every stone bearing the name of a dead soldier signifies that the man’s family made a donation to the construction of the building. Donations from those families lucky enough not to have lost any loved ones are acknowledged by a blank stone. If the family of a dead soldier couldn’t afford to buy a stone, or were all dead themselves, that soldier’s name presumably didn’t appear anywhere in the building. It would have made good sense for those soldiers to be “adopted” by the families who were spared, don’t you think?

  The upper chapel of the building is less sombre, with radiant stained glass windows and symbolic statues and carvings. Four pillars show scenes depicting the historic invasions of France – by the Huns, the Saracens, the English and the Germans. Statues of saints bear the faces of people who were prominent figures in the war and in the construction of the monument – Albert 1st and Elizabeth of Belgium, Maréchal Foch, and the Duchess of l’Estissac, one of the major fundraisers for the monument. This floor is as much a museum as a chapel, with models of soldiers in different uniforms; weapons and assorted items recovered from the battlefields; an exhibition of paintings and some immensely evocative pencil sketches of wartime scenes; diaries, and old photographic postcards showing scenes of all the towns we had recently visited – Epernay, Châlons, Reims and Dormans. More than anything else we had seen, or would see, these postcards illustrated the reality of what the war had done to this part of France.

  Where today the roads lead through beautiful, peaceful vineyards to orderly villages and dignified towns with shops, churches and squares where the inhabitants stand and chat, in 1918 all that had ceased to exist. The postcards showed scenes that were nothing but skeletons of blackened timbers and piles of rubble. In WWI 80% of Dormans was destroyed. Most telling of all was a scene of the river beside which we were currently camped against a background of gentle slopes covered with vines. The postcards showed how this same place had looked in 1918: the river banks were piled high with the dead bodies of men and horses, and overturned gun carriages. Soldiers splashed through the water, clambering over corpses. It was a scene of the most terrible destruction and horror, as far removed from today’s sounds of laughter and birdsong as the sun and moon are distant from each other.

  Dormans, 2006

  Dormans, 1918

  From a balcony on the first floor of the monument we could look out onto the town below, and the hills behind, where the grapes that would make champagne were ripening in the sun.

  The contrast between the two scenes is graphically and poetically illustrated by a German officer, Lieutenant Kurt Hesse of the 5th Grenadier Regiment, who kept a wartime diary. Here is an entry from the end of May 1918:

  ‘Slopes to the right and left are luxuriously covered with woods, orchards and vineyards; there are numerous villages, pastures full of cattle. When on the morning of May 31st I stood with my commander on the heights to the east of Château-Thierry – truly, a paradise lay before me, the sun smiled over it, a brisk wind blew across the valley. Here one breathed a different air; no war – peace.’

  And t
hat was how it looked to us.

  In dramatic contrast, as the German troops were annihilated and forced to retreat by the Americans, his diary entry for July 15th 1918 reads:

  ‘I have never seen so many dead. I have never seen such a frightful spectacle of war.’

  Eighteen-year-old Californian Harry St Clare Wheeler enlisted in the US Navy in 1917. In January of 1919, he wrote to his sweetheart:

  ‘You take a look at the battlefield where there were happy homes once and all you can see is ruined buildings and big shell holes all over the country. Everything is as still as night, not a sound. The smell of the battlefield will make you sick. You see bodies of soldiers that were never buried and some that they do bury have only a thin layer of dirt thrown over them. You see lots of the Yankee boys who have fallen, probably places where they could not be seen easily, and are still laying with their clothes nearly rotted off of them. The Germans they don’t bury very good. They just throw them in a shell hole, probably sprinkle some dirt on the top of them. So you can see how awful a place it is. As far as you can see is nothing but ruined country like this. I hope there is no other war like this.’

  That is what we were looking at in those old black and white postcards, and it brought us the realisation of what an immense undertaking it had been to rebuild all those towns and villages. It must have seemed at the time an almost impossible task to transform this terrible devastation into a place where people could live again.

  Beneath the lower chapel the ossuary holds urns of ashes from deportees of WWII, coffins containing the bones of unidentified soldiers, and the death mask of Maréchal Foch. Outside a symbolic lanterne de la mort stands beside a row of national flags of the French allies; the cloth hung limp and still in the heavy afternoon heat.

  We walked back to our bikes in silence. My mind was confused between the beauty of the interior of the monument and the horror it represented, and I could neither reconcile them nor separate them. It was a strange feeling.

  Cycling back to the campsite, we looked around with different eyes to those with which we had come here. Everywhere we passed, every inch blessed with the sunshine today had witnessed suffering beyond imagination during WWI, and only had time to recover before it had all began again twenty years later. Yet, within a decade the enemies would become allies, political and economic, if not personal, and what had it all achieved? What would all those dead soldiers think? It really made me think of the total futility of war and the pointless sacrifice of all those lives.

  Paul Valery defined war as ‘La guerre, un massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent mais ne se massacrent pas.’ (War, a massacre of people who don’t know each other, for the benefit of people who do know each other but don’t kill each other.)

  It was in a sombre mood that we folded the tent and packed our bikes, and prepared to move on to the next stop, Château-Thierry. As we cycled out of the campsite side by side, Terry asked what I had thought about the monument, and I replied that I thought it was beautiful, tragic and interesting, and a moving tribute to all the people who had died in the two wars.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a memorial to Maréchal Bloody Foch,” he said angrily. “Like all these damned things, the names of the hundreds of thousands who died are lost in long lists, but it is the brandy-sipping, cigar-smoking generals with their big moustaches who, from behind the safety of mahogany desks sent these men to die, whose names remain in our minds, and who are glorified by statues and paintings.” When I thought back, the Maréchal’s arrogant moustached face did feature very prominently throughout the building – glaring from a bust, dignified in a death mask, and his name was all over the place. Hm. Terry, who is generally moderate in his opinions, feels very strongly on this subject, and would, given the opportunity, have the remains of all those medal-draped, swaggering generals who squandered the lives of young men and basked in the glory of their actions dug up and burned.

  There was no cycle path beside the river, so we had to take to the road for a ride dominated by the 39°C temperature and terrible hills. In the small villages we passed there was no sign of life from man or beast. The shutters were closed. No birds sang. There was no traffic. The bars were closed. Everybody and everything, it seemed, was sheltering from the infernal heat. There were no cyclists on the road. Except us. Terry had somehow jammed into the already over-filled panniers a couple of bottles of water to supplement the flasks clipped to our bike frames. Every two or three miles we stopped to drink, an unsatisfying and unpleasant experience because the water was warm, the sort of warmth you could comfortably bathe in. Although it was late afternoon the sun was still high, and the shadows short, and there was no shade anywhere.

  We pedalled on, disturbing the silence with pants and grunts. Sweat ran in salty rivulets down my face, mingling with the eternal tears and stinging my sunburned skin. I had to keep reminding myself that we had set off on this adventure to enjoy ourselves, and my only consolation as I fought for breath and tried to find the energy to push the pedals round once more was that Terry too was wilting under the scorching sun. He was half a mile ahead of me when I saw him dismount and wait for me to catch up. We didn’t have sufficient breath to speak, just took a few mouthfuls of hot water, and swapped bikes for the push to the top of the hills. That was the pattern of our journey; the upside was that hills generally have two directions, and we had some fantastically fast downhill runs. Although it was only twelve miles to Château-Thierry (a name synonymous with the Marne, but in fact geographically located in the Aisne departément of Picardy) it took us over three hours to reach there.

  As for Louis, Marie-Antoinette and their entourage, when they left Dormans and continued on their way back to Paris, the initial antagonism between the two parties in the coach mellowed. The young Dauphin helped to break the ice, and the occupants of the coach began to realize that they were all human beings. The King and Queen were not the arrogant, unapproachable monsters that the Revolutionary representatives had imagined. When the Dauphin announced his need to pass water, it was the King who undressed him and held the silver chamber pot in place. They were a family and their children were just like anybody else’s children. Marie Antoinette, who so loathed the Revolutionary movement and its supporters, found that her fellow passengers were not bloodthirsty monsters but intelligent and educated men, and in fact ‘they were more conversable than the Count of Artois (Louis’ younger brother) and his companions.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Threshold of Hell

  “Thru the night winds wet and dreary,

  Word goes on to Chateau-Thierry,

  Ghostly Phantoms hear the call,

  Gather those who gave their all.”

  Phantoms, by Pvt L. C. McCollum – doughboy and poet

  PREDICTABLY, Château-Thierry’s campsite was as far away as it could possibly be, right on the other side of the town, tucked away behind a McDonalds featuring a giant plastic squirrel in the car park. Previously I had stayed at 128 campsites all over France, but never one where the office was secured with such a robust lock. Nor one where a menacing Rottweiler stood a couple of yards from the door with a look in its eyes that said: ‘Come on punks, make my day’. The office itself, once we had breached its defences, was cool, modern and comfortable with a giant bird’s nest fern occupying all the available space except for where the desk was. There were photographs of Rottweilers on the walls.

  The gardienne was a friendly lady who would happily recharge my bicycle battery if I would deliver it to her later that evening. I asked how she had encouraged her fern to such a vast size and magnificent condition. She shrugged; she thought it was probably the fact that it had so much light, and was happy in its location. She didn’t know it was a fern – she thought it was a banana plant. When we left, she carefully locked the door behind her.

  We found a shady place looking onto the river, and Terry hammered the tent pegs into the concrete-hard ground. The most level pitch
we could find sloped at an angle of 25° no matter which way we looked at it. While he hammered I sat in my habitually useless way, wondering whether the ten-foot high chain-link fence securing the perimeter of the campsite to repel invaders was really necessary. As well as the lopsided pitches and hard tussocks of thick frizzled grass all over the ground, the sanitary block was both utterly primitive and absolutely filthy. We were not surprised to be the only persons at the site. We squatted uncomfortably on our inflatable pillows, wishing there was something else to sit on – a fallen log, a rustic bench, a concrete ledge, anything on which we could relax for an hour. But there was nothing except the rock-hard earth punctuated with stubbly spikes of vegetation.

  Shortly a camping car pulled up just across from where we were sitting. Two minutes after it arrived a big man came over to us carrying a couple of folding canvas chairs.

  “What you two need,” he smiled. “is to sit in a comfy chair. I used to do a lot of cycling myself and I know exactly how you feel.” He opened out the chairs and patted them. “Sit yourselves down.”

  Our new-found angel was a retired policeman, who had worked undercover in the Drug Squad, and he and his wife were touring France for several weeks. Not only did they lend us the chairs, they also gave us an English newspaper, and exchanged paperback books with us. There wasn’t anything more we needed to enjoy ourselves for a couple of hours as we waited for the sun to fade. A shower would have been very welcome, but not in the unsanitary block. Instead we went into McDonalds and washed as thoroughly as it’s possible to wash in a hand basin.

  On the other side of the chain-link fence a succession of teenage girls walked backwards and forwards along the path beside the river, pushing baby buggies, carrying infants on their hips, and smoking. Behind us, from the road outside McDonalds, we could hear motorbikes and cars with ineffective exhausts roaring and farting around the streets.