In Verdun the Great War had become an industry, for this was a depressed region whose economy had taken another blow from the competition of newly-industrialised nations. Villages were full of abandoned factories and empty shops. Death had filled the gap, at least partly.
A French military cemetery accommodated ranks of Moslem soldiers’ graves, as well as a Canadian bomber crew whose headstones were poignant with the grief of parents, sons, daughters.
A stone sculpture buried in a corner near the cemetery’s entrance carried an especially bitter tableau: a man in working clothes, bloodied and bound, hanging Christ-like from a post carrying the inscription: ‘To the victims in both wars of the barbarian Nazis tortured and shot.’ Underneath were the graves of a local doctor and an unknown Frenchman executed by the Germans in 1944.
The road outside carried busloads of tourists to old trenches, an ossuary containing the bones of 130,000 unknown soldiers, remnants of the Maginot line (there was a statue of its designer striking a pose, despite his creation’s famous failure), the ruins of the fort of Souville which was said to have saved Verdun, although as that town was largely razed it was a Vietnam-like rescue.
The village of Fleury-devant-Douamont survived the invasions of 1792, 1814 and 1870 but met its end on February 21, 1916. Then it was taken and retaken sixteen times, completely destroyed and along with eight others never rebuilt. Now its streets and houses were marked with posts: here the Rue St Nicolas, where there was a wash-house and a farmer’s house, there the Rue Mathelin where lived the baker, the plumber and the wine-grower. The townsfolk never gave up: the collection of shell craters and old stones still had a legal entity and a mayor.
Maurice and Denise from Waikanae first appeared in Verdun.
They’d bought their little black and cream boat from its boat-builder owner in Holland sight unseen. The boat was deserted when we arrived. Its neatness was intimidating. I coiled our ropes defensively and fixed them to the rail. When Denise arrived, she said, ‘Look at the ropes on that boat Maurice, we’ll have to tidy up our act.’
Their boat had suffered from the weed choking the waterways that spring; it clogged their engine cooling water, and the engine overheated. They’d stopped it then ran aground, and had spent hours waiting for a mechanic, who worked far into the night dismantling their engine and replacing its ruined impellor.
Maurice was feeling ill. They’d been to the local hospital, where tests showed his heart to be in good sound condition. The doctor gave him a prescription for some strong heart medication. ‘I think it’s the stress,’ said Maurice. ‘I know what would cure it,’ said Denise who I thought had had enough of canals for a while. ‘A For Sale sign.’
But we were leaving next day, with Carla and Paul, a Dutch couple we’d met on and off along the way with their small white terrier Chica. Carla had wanted to swap books. Sally was about to give her an Anita Brookner when she remembered she’d hidden 500 Euros in it. Sally had stashed a lot of cash around the boat: in crockery, books, pots, a packet containing a bottle of Optrex. She kept a list of hiding places written in a notebook, in code. If she lost her mind, we were broke. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I had it in Virginia Woolf then I moved it to Anita Brookner.’
Was Brookner a safer bet than Woolf? Carla was noncommittal. She gave us one of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mysteries in return.
We were booked into the first lock at 8.30 a.m; the two Frieslanders who’d tied their boat to ours for the night had booked for 9.30. Next morning we set off in company with Carla and Paul — to find the Frieslanders, and another large, expensive Dutch boat waiting at the lock ahead of us.
Paul was outraged. That his countrymen could behave so! ‘It is our time,’ he declared, thumping his watch. ‘No,’ said the other boat, ‘it is ours!’ The Frieslanders remained silent. They were from the far north of Holland and even in the Netherlands extremities were mysterious, like Southland.
We said nothing either, for we were transfixed. The Dutch, so good at peaceful co-existence, were on a collision course. Everyone was angry.
Suddenly Paul rammed his boat into gear. ‘Come on,’ Carla shouted to us. We followed them, bumper to bumper, weaving through the other two boats, dodging bellows. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t speak Dutch,’ although the opposing skipper was outlining his grievances in rather too fluent English.
The manoeuvre was illegal, of course; overtaking in the lock chute was forbidden. We had right on our side, we believed. We were fighting over perhaps twenty minutes only, but the port of St Mihiel where we were going was small; second place meant we’d be doubling up.
Trouble, such as it was — for there was very little of it — usually seemed to involve the larger, richer boats whose crews seldom joined the community of kindred spirits gathering at any stop. They paid for their own space. Naturally they were seen as wankers.
The Kiwi way was not to let ourselves be pushed around. But it was not the Dutch way. When we arrived I said to Paul: ‘You have the killer instinct.’ He looked crestfallen. It was not his style.
The second Dutch boat went by with their noses in the air, but the Frieslanders stayed. They tied up beside Paul and Carla, who invited them over for drinks. Before the afternoon was gone they were exchanging advice and good wishes. The Frieslanders proved to be father and son although Paul said of the son, ‘I don’t think he has things all in a row.’
We watched them exchanging advice and good wishes as the soft light fell around us. Unemployment here was high. Youths were learning to juggle so they could become buskers. I remembered New Zealand in the nineties.
One young man came over to talk as we watched fish plopping in the still river. He was full of eagerness and energy and hope. He warned of a coming thunderstorm, told us of the limestone cliffs around the town and asked wistfully where we were going, and it was only later, when thunder rolled around our heads and lightning lit the white cliffs that I realised that we’d been talking in French but had found a common language.
That evening we went to the church of St Etienne, which housed the best-known work of the sculptor Ligier Richier. Thirteen life-sized marble figures depicted the entombment of Christ but we were there for the Roman centurions, who gambled slyly on the side. I thought I recognised the two of them.
Sally wandered through the market hall, one of the very finest. Stone cornucopia of fruit and vegetables and swathes of flowers sculpted in tiles decorated the ornate exterior. The inside was bare; no market that day.
I cycled through a forest pocked with craters, criss-crossed with old trenches. Evening was closing in. A fox crept onto the road, watched me for a moment then fled into a field of young wheat, leaping through the rows so his head and tail popped out of the green stalks every few seconds then vanished into a copse on the far side.
Clouds gathered. Huge drops of rain began falling. In a moment I was in the midst of another thunderstorm. I saw what seemed to be a stone shelter beside the road and ducked into it. The rain fell quiet as I looked around.
I was in a concrete cavern, its roof strengthened with heavy steel beams, slits in the walls letting in grey light. I took a torch from my bag for comfort; the place was dank, sinister.
A dirty blanket and an empty bottle hinted at its most recent inhabitant and I thought I heard the sound of footsteps running away through a tunnel. Perhaps it was the ghostly sound of boots, for clearly I was in an old German bunker from the first World War.
One steel and concrete-lined room led to another, and another; tunnels led off under the hill, shafts went down into the bowels, stone steps rose to stone-lined trenches so perfect they seemed ready for another war, should anyone care to emulate the wartime generals in stupidity, or to believe their grandiose claims. How the French, in trenches shored up with wood and bundles of branches, fighting with inferior weapons, must have quailed. Instead, town statues depicted them in heroic stances, grimly repelling the invader or saving women and babies.
French troops died
of thirst while the Germans drank running water pumped from springs, and lit their dugouts with electric lights. Their officers furnished their messes with wall-hangings and even a grand piano. Their trenches still commanded the heights, often adorned with elaborate arched entrances and inscriptions.
Down on the River Meuse Herman the German and his wife had donned large blue swimming togs and were splashing around near their barge. The French waterways were often polluted and the river here became an open sewer at busy times like this. A few French townspeople watched curiously as the pair frolicked in the water.
I thought I heard le coq crow.
A lone black kite soared above us searching for prey as we left St Mihiel next morning, Dutch crews holding our stern as we turned about in our own length to double around the sandbank lying beside our mooring.
We were bound for Commercy, where lay a hunting lodge built by Stanislas, the voluptuous gent whose sensual lips adorned many statues in this part of France. Stanislas had been king of Poland, twice. That ended in tears, but he had the good fortune, or good sense, to marry his daughter Maria to Louis XV, and the French king handed over the Duchy of Lorraine in exchange.
Later we caught the bus from Toul to Nancy to walk in the Place Stanislas, where the duke had been at his most elegant, creating a plaza so elliptical it was Parisian.
His hunting lodge proved to be a vast, elegant palace whose grounds once ran through avenues of trees across the river and away into the middle distance. We tried to trace them as we stood on the palace’s first floor surrounded by the work of local artists who’d collected it together for an exhibition but seemed preoccupied with the bizarre.
The interior was a disappointment. The lodge had been burned out by a negligent incendiary bomb dropped by Americans in 1944. It was restored, at least in utilitarian fashion, in the 1950s. On the riverside under its walls lay a huge lavoir, one of the places where women until the sixties and even the seventies beat their washing against stones worn flat and smooth over the centuries, rinsing them in an ingenious series of pools. The lavoirs ran from industrial, no more than a row of worn stones beside a river, to picturesque, housed in heavily-timbered buildings, many of them now restored and preserved. A palace full of courtesans must have generated a lot of dirty washing, especially if they were all as rotund as the fine duke. Against such splendour the village lay modestly.
The next day we set off for Pagny-sur-Meuse. ‘Good luck,’ cried a Dutch traveller. ‘We’ll need it,’ Sally called back, and we did.
We had five locks that day, every one of them devilishly crafty, with bollards nicely out of reach and their operating mechanisms all set a good distance from any likely mooring point, so we had to do what we’d vowed not to do and climb slimy ladders.
The Pagny Post Office said it was open, but lied. Everything else was closed too, for this was Monday; except, fortunately, the boulangerie, where Madame sold us a quiche Lorraine on its home turf, a delicious custard tart, a bottle of limoncello and a fine bottle of lemon juice.
Visitors were so rare that in the evening when I went for a walk on a long, straight road I passed houses whose curtains seemed to twitch. Within ten minutes a police car cruised slowly past, did a U-turn and came back for another look. Not from round here, they concluded, but harmless, even if he was walking. They left me alone. Then we set out for Toul.
Before we reached the town we had to negotiate the 866 metre Foug tunnel, our first long tunnel. That day it was unlit and as dark as, well, an 866 metre tunnel through solid rock.
Sally sat on the foredeck and focussed our powerful spotlight first on one side then the other. It gave me the creeps. Sharp lumps of hewn rock burst from the darkness, ready to hack their initials in the side of the boat. Sally would call, too far this side, or too far that. When her voice rose to a scream I knew she was serious.
The 866 metres crept by metre by metre. The light at the end of the tunnel seemed no closer. Sally shone the beam on the middle of the arched roof above; all I had to do then was keep the silver fern on its little flagstaff at the front of the boat directly under the beam. It worked. We came through without a scratch.
Then we went downhill in the locks for the first time. It was much easier than going up, despite horror stories. People sat around in the evenings nattering about ropes catching and threatening to capsize the boat as the water level in the lock fell.
We all carried sharp knives to cut the ropes if this happened. Mine was a fish-filleting knife I’d found on the boat. Sally’s was a vicious-looking blade like a small machete, sharp as a razor.
‘You must be careful,’ Paul said. ‘Do not stand in the middle of your boat. We know of someone who was standing there when his rope jammed around a bollard on the way down. He grabbed his knife and cut it. The boat fell back into the water, but then it bounced up again, and as it did the cabin top rolled over and crunched him against the side of the lock. He was very badly hurt.’
We entered the first of the staircase of locks running down to Toul as nervously as I remembered once walking into a cave full of wetas. The water fell gently. So did we.
The next one too. We swapped places with Paul and went first, ignoring Mr Benny’s rule. We seemed to be on the brink of a long drop, the valley spreading below us, Toul majestic in the distance. Down the hill we went, lock by lock, as if on broad, easy stairs descending to a magnificent garden.
We tied up in a large marina within sight of the city walls and walked through an ancient gate in the fortifications to the Hôtel de Ville, or town hall, usually the grandest building in any town for French councillors and bureaucrats had something in common with their New Zealand counterparts: they liked living plumply at the ratepayers’ expense.
We were eating white goat’s cheese and black prunes and planning French hot dogs for dinner (saucisse à cuire non fumée de Meuse in a fresh baguette with caramelised onions, tomato paste, French mustard, with Camembert for me and Roquefort for Sally) when Denise appeared.
They had travelled from Verdun to Toul, where Maurice had collapsed on the street. She had hailed a passing motorist, a young Frenchwoman who immediately bundled them both into her car and rushed them to hospital. Maurice was promptly surrounded by specialists. The cardiologist could find nothing wrong with his heart, the haematologist and the other doctors giving him a clean slate also.
The cardiologist looked at the pills Maurice had been prescribed in Verdun. ‘Throw them in the rubbish tin,’ he advised. The French loved drugs, and the Verdun doctor had worked on the principle that if one drug is good, a much stronger one must be better. All of this attention cost Maurice nothing in Verdun, $100 in Toul. Still, they were worried. What was wrong?
They came over for a drink. They’d decided to leave their boat in Toul. Maurice made plans for what would be done to it while they returned to New Zealand until next year. Denise looked thoughtful. She told Sally, always a sympathetic audience in such matters, of her fears, the sleepless nights, her inability to eat breakfast on departure days. The locks. Maurice was dismissive. ‘Nothing has happened. We’ve got through everything.’
True, but I could hear the chords responding deep within Sally. The two women began chorusing like pipe organs.
Sally was grieving over her lily. Its delicate blooms had delighted her for weeks. Now one lay on the cabinet like yesterday’s wedding dress. ‘It’s what they do,’ she said. ‘Slowly disappear.’ But it was more than that. ‘My lily has got me through,’ she said sadly.
Maurice was feeling better, but still was not well. ‘Perhaps I have a virus,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s the water,’ said Denise.
Duncan arrived from the hire boat yard which Maurice had asked to look after his boat. Duncan was English but his accent had a strange tang. ‘I’ve been in France for twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘A lot of people think I’m South African.’
Maurice was cheerful. Duncan would make a few changes to his boat, get rid of its faults, make it better. Denise l
ooked as if she wished Duncan could make Maurice better too, although Duncan had definitely lifted his mood. Next morning Maurice looked better still, despite he and I emptying a bottle of Medoc the night before.
So, they were staying, we were leaving. I was sad to lose them. They were kindred spirits. We talked to each other as people could only do when they knew the nuances of Waimate and Waipu. They gave us an All Black pen as a parting gift. It was nice and fat and easy to hold.
I wished I’d had it yesterday, to give to an éclusier entranced by our silver fern.
‘The French are…’ his hand had flicked like a snake. ‘But the All Blacks are…’; he’d crouched like a weightlifter in a cling and jerk. He’d looked glum, and later I learned that the All Blacks had beaten a lack-lustre French side the night before. I’d tried to cheer him up in a patronising kind of way: ‘But you beat us in a World Cup game once.’
I’d looked up the right word in French. ‘Ecrasés,’ I said. Flattened.
Not for the last time.
Chapter Seven
At seven it had already been light for a couple of hours, and a delicious smell of newly-baked baguettes hung over Richardmenil.
Madame la Boulangère was fresh as her bread. In boulangeries across France Monsieur le Boulanger was kneading and moulding and baking out the back while Madame greeted customers with a smile as wide as a celebrity presenter’s.
For this was a show of strict conventions.
You entered. Madame wished you bonjour. You urged her to have a very good day in return. Madame passed some pleasantries about the weather. You agreed merrily, especially if you had not understood a word. You asked for a baguette, or a croissant ordinaire, or if you were feeling expansive, a croissant au beurre, for in France butter was not to be regarded as the enemy within. It was compulsory, like wine. You counted out the change into a little dish on the counter. Madame then counted it too. ‘Parfait,’ she’d say. ‘Au revoir. Bonne journée, m’sieur.’ ‘Au revoir,’ you’d agree. Not a single step was to be missed under pain of the polite silence that, loud as a fire alarm, told you that you’d made a gaffe,
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 12