Verdun

« Celui qui n’a pas fait Verdun, n’a pas fait la guerre »- Jacques d’Arnoux

                                                                                           62e régiment d’infanterie 

(Any man who didn’t fight at Verdun didn’t fight the war....almost 75% of the French military would serve at Verdun before the War's end)

I want to preface this post with an apology. I have not written in this blog for almost half of a year, and although a great many things worth reporting have happened, I’ve been living in the present at the frequent expense of recording things for the future. Seeing Verdun has changed that. During my senior year, I wrote a 40 page mémoire on the historical and cultural significance of the Battle of Verdun (Feb. 21^st, 1916- December 18^th, 1916), something I was inspired to write in no small part by a book Lee shared with me, The Price of Glory, written by one of England’s premier war historians, Alistair Horne. Two dozen books and essays later, I am still studying it as passionately as I did as a student. This past weekend, I finally made my pilgrimage to the small city on the Meuse River and the shell-scarred battlefield that spans 40 square miles of its eastern bank. I made the trip on the 98^th anniversary of the battle, and the “chapters” below tell the story of my 12 hours hiking (and sometimes running or climbing) from site to site.  This trip was as important to me as any I've ever taken, and I invite you to read on about it here. It's a story I must tell. 

                                        Abri 320 (Fortification 320)

Mud

« Ah! Non, les civils. Vos gueles! » -Roland Dorgelès, writer, journalist, and veteran of the Argonne

(‘Shut the hell up, civilians!’)

                                  Ruins of Fort de Souville, 3km outside of Verdun

I felt the branch give way as I moved to mount the top of the ridge. My stomach dropped, and the rest of me followed, sliding 20 feet down into a waterlogged shell hole. The fall had left my shoes and pant legs caked in mud and my hands filthy. Rapid assessment: Unscathed? No. Blood dripped from a small cut on my little finger. Nausea rushed over me; I imagined bacteria poisoning my blood, an emergency room, a hospital bed, a surgical ward. GILMER, John Marshall, final casualty of Verdun.  The fear was not entirely irrational. “ATTENTION!  Les armes de guerre peuvent tuer toujours!” the signs had read (Be careful! Weapons of war can still kill).  So many thousands of shells fell here that I could very well have cut myself on a tiny piece of metal buried in the mud, perhaps one carrying on it endospores of a hideous strain of Tetanus evolved beyond the scope of the modern vaccine. In that morbid prognostication, however, I felt a perverse pride. If I become a “casualty” will I gain some small fragment of justification, a basic right to speak about the battle?

As I struggled to right myself and cast out thoughts of a French ICU (USI)---I noticed my cut had come from a nearby vine, not from shrapnel---my mind turned to my own past. I had written about la boue (mud) in a short-response question during a course with George Poe, specifically of “des hommes qui sont morts dans la boue, très loin de leurs camarades et de leurs familles et” (men who died in the mud, far from their comrades and families).  In that instant, I imagined one such man.

A little under 98 years ago, a 23-year-old corporal leading a night relief squad through a sinuous communication trench at could have fallen in that exact hole and drowned in putrescent water before his friends could reach him. Weighed down by rifle and kit and with his helmet flooding, he’d have struggled to rise or even call out for help as the mud swallowed him.  Like over 300,000 others, he’d lose his life to the mundane made lethal by mankind: mud, concrete, iron, water, wood (when there were still trees), and smoke. A fetid crater, a bunker roof obliterated by a 400mm shell, a shard of grenade shrapnel, a machine gun bullet, a mouthful of gas-tainted water, an oak splinter, or suffocating lungfuls of smoke inside of a burning fort. All ground men down as the implacable cogs of “industrialized warfare” and left their ruined bodies in cheap caskets or mass graves.  

No, no amount of mud will ever give me the “right” to tell of the Battle of Verdun, and to pretend that rifles, grenades, cannons, gas canisters, and bayonets are the stuff of adventure and glory is to serve the same nameless evil that helped to drive both sides to their Calvaries, the hills and ridges that saw so many brave men killed in the name of national honor. I’ll try instead to tell you about “Ceux de Verdun,” (the men of Verdun), husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, not one of whom came home the same if he came home at all. They were the reason for my pilgrimage to this small city in Lorraine, and if sharing my story can serve their memory in some way and provide a spark of living dignity to deaths devoid of it, then I will gladly risk sinning to do so.

Memory

« À mon fils- Depuis tes yeux sont fermés, les miens n’ont cessé de pleurer» -Inscription on a memorial plaque

(To my son- Since your eyes closed, mine have never stopped crying)

                                 Cemetery in front of the Douaumont Ossuary, 6km outside of Verdun

            

             Verdun is a city of both memory and memorial; the city and its suburbs are home to thousands of plaques, statues, site markers, tombs, bouquets of flowers, as well as the tens of thousands of individual grave sites marked with white crosses, stars of David, and crescent moons of Islam. Almost every single one of these monuments is dedicated to the victims of the 1916 battle, the longest and costliest of the entire war. The men from both sides who died in the area collectively called “The Verdun Fortified Region (RFV)” came from all around the world: from Algiers to Aachen, from Troyes to Tangiers, from Weimar to Washington, from Paris to Berlin. On the French side, some monuments are paid for the by the State to honor the men who “died for France,” others by units or organizations to honor the contributions made by their members, and others still by family members hoping to memorialize their child or husband and mark where he fell. They line the roads, adorn street posts, fill parks, crown ridges, and, in the case of the Douaumont Ossuary, tower over the horizon---the cruciform Ossuaire contains the remains of over 100,000 unidentified German and French soldiers, and the field in front of it contains 15,000 additional marked graves and collective monuments to Jews and Muslims killed at Verdun.

The buildings, crosses, and markers are physically impressive, but what of the men these monuments honor? In France, they are publicly remembered as Poilus (French “GI’s, ‘bearded ones’) with their Adrian helmets, Lebel rifles, and bleu horizon tunics, men who held at all costs, including life and sanity. Reflecting this idealized martial memory, statues often honor them as proud soldiers at attention, glorify them as fearless warriors holding the line defiantly, or mourn them as martyred heroes embraced by angels. 

 To their loved ones, friends, and neighbors, however, they were bakers and bankers, poets and priests, carpenters and chefs, lawyers and librarians, writers and waiters, gamblers and grocers, boys of 16 and men of 65. They did not belong at Verdun, and I will forever wish that at least one statue would show them not as war made them, but as they were: a smiling lover proposing to his future wife, a writer at his desk, a violinist at concert, a cook serving his guests, or a father carrying his daughter on his shoulders. To forget that these men were, overwhelmingly, not soldiers by choice, trade, or nature is to strip them of their identities and to severe their families from their true son, brother, or father.

 I think now of a recipient of the Legion d’Honneur (the highest French military award), Capitaine Georges Tabourot, who, though mortally wounded, defended a tunnel in Fort Vaux. In his final minutes of life, he told his commander and friend, Major Raynal, that his company did “all that could be asked of them” and then asked the doctor to dictate a letter to his wife. Bleeding to death in a sweltering infirmary with no water and the stench of poison gas and death surrounding him, Tabourot told his wife and daughter how much he loved them. I can imagine no act more deserving of a memorial.

«Ma chérie, je suis blessé à mort, j'ai été tué en faisant mon devoir. Soignes bien Maman, je t'aimais bien, je vous embrasse, toi et ma petite fille »-Capitaine Georges Marie Albert Tabourot                                                                                               124e régiment d’infanterie 

(My dear, I am dying and was killed doing my duty. Take good care of mama. I have loved you so much and send my love to you and to my little girl)

Courage

 «Nous tenons toujours…» –Major Sylvain Eugène Raynal, commander of Fort Vaux

(We are still holding)

                                      Fort de Vaux, 6km outside of Verdun

            Still muddy from my fall, I had run 3 miles from Souville to get to Fort Vaux before the museum closed, and as I saw it in a clearing ahead, I felt like a child meeting a superhero. My tendonitis was momentarily forgotten in a rush of endorphins. There it was, the fort that held out for 7 days against overwhelming odds, partially filled with poison gas and with an empty cistern, an Alamo on a greater scale whose final optical message to French lines was an undaunted“Vive la France!” I scouted out the entire fort, its galleries and turrets, but I realized quickly, however, that the weapons’ mounts and surviving pieces of superstructure were of far less interest than the personal accounts left behind by Raynal, Tabourot and many others.

I already knew of some but learned about many others. The tale of a critically injured soldier who volunteered to rebuild a sandbag barricade during a flame-thrower attack or of the young officer, Léon Buffet, who volunteered to run a message from French lines to the surrounded fort on the condition that he not be given a medal for doing so (he would later die from a gunshot wound to the thigh and, in death, was admitted to the Légion d’honneur despite his protests). My time in Vaux set me to thinking about heroism throughout the battle. Although the vast majority of these stories are lost to us, even in well-documented engagements like the Defense of Vaux, we still retain some of the most celebrated: the story Emil Driant, the Chasseur (Ranger) commander who led a successful stalling action against nearly the entire German force during the first days of combat and died carrying one of his wounded men to safety, of Charles De Gaulle, who decades before he would rise to lead France, personally led a (failed) charge to retake Fort Douaumont, and of Lattre de Tassigny who, like De Gaulle, is said to have done his duty without hesitation. These men were not demi-gods, but, as Jean Norton Cru writes, « frêles machine de chair qui avancent sous une pluie de fragments d’acier, qui surmontent le tremblement et la panique» (frail machines of flesh who advanced under a steel rain and overcame trembling and panic).

            Those bakers, carpenters, lawyers, and poets held their positions, often dying to do so, and the now world-famous expression, part of a communiqué from General Nivelle, «Vous ne les laisserez pas passer, mes camarades! » or simply «On ne passe pas! » (They shall not pass!) has become the literal embodiment of the sum total of personal courage that defended Verdun.  The next time you hear someone make a shameless joke about the French military, remember those words and the tens of thousands of men who died proving them true.

Rest

 “Well how do you do, young Willie Mcbride? Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside and rest for a while ‘neath the warm summer sun? I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done. I can see by your gravestone that you were only 19 when you joined the Great Fallen in 1916. Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean; oh Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?”- Eric Bogle, “The Green Fields of France”

                            Thiaumont Fortification Ruins (adjacent to the Ossuary)

            I had already walked, run, or climbed about 12 miles by the time I reached Douaumont and Thiaumont. Two crosses---the only clear proof that the villages ever existed---stand in memory.  The emotional weight and physical fatigue of the past 6 hours hung heavily; I had seen miles of cratered land, the Tricolore unfurled above Fort Vaux, and thousands upon thousands of white crosses. I needed to rest. I refilled my Nalgene in the Ossuary rest area and set out to see the bunkers of Thiaumont across the field. I walked from crater to crater until I reached a mossy mound that once was an armored cupola. It is now a mass of crumbling concrete and steel wires that snake out at all angles; a direct hit from a heavy German gun had destroyed the fortification instantly and killed its defenders. Among those lost there was Raymond de Fontaines, a Dragoon sergeant. His tombstone sits atop the destroyed bunker. I sat down next to him and rested for the first time all day.

            I thought about Raymond, how old he was, where “Fontaines” was located, and what his family was like. Was he a father? An uncle? A brother? Was there a family military tradition ? Did the dragoons pay the best? Did he love horses? What did he look like? Did he die instantly? Would we have gotten along? Everything. I received no further answers from the stone and its inscription.

A French memorial database has since given me some of those answers. He was 27, from south of Dijon, and both an uncle and brother whose father, too, had served in the dragoons. I also learned that his wife was a volunteer nurse at Reims and his father was a senator from Vendée and decorated dragoon, too---and, most importantly, an account of his heroism: 

« Excellent sous-officier, n'a cessé pendant près d'une année de remplir la fonction d'agent de liaison avec un calme complet et un dévouement absolu, assurant son service dans les circonstances et les conditions les plus difficiles - a pris part aux combats du commencement de juin et au courant d'un violent bombardement a été enseveli par l'éboulement du poste de commandement du colonel, près duquel il assurait la liaison ». 

(Excellent NCO, not once during his year of service did he cease to perform his duties with complete calm and absolute devotion, even under the worst possible circumstances and conditions. He took part in the combat at the beginning of June and during the course of a violent bombardment was killed by a cave-in at the command post of the colonel he served as a liaison officer).

I propped my camera on the tombstone to take a single picture of myself at Verdun, a reminder of the peace I found atop PC 118 knowing that Raymond de Fontaines is not forgotten. Nor are the tens of thousands who, like him, fought at Verdun. In a culture and world that so often casts combat as glory and death as a fitting end for a hero, we'd do well to remember Verdun and all that was lost for a few miles of mud and concrete. I will almost certainly be a civilian until the day I die, but I won't shut up when I can use my voice to tell the stories of those who were not; they were fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers, and their memories deserve something more than "glory."  

John

Raymond