Back to the Front (27 page)

I
DECIDE TO
leave Verdun as soon as I can. No one ever said that this was a great town, but neither did anyone warn me that
the worst of cocorico was waiting around every corner. A brief visit to the citadel of Verdun, the grandest of Vauban's creations,
leaves me shaking my head at the skewed sense of narrative of those in charge of this attraction. An enormous underground
city that was almost autarchic in its functioning, the citadel could easily house 7,000 men, including generals and their
staffs in the style to which they were accustomed. Instead of being told about the functioning of this marvelous wartime warren,
the spectator is invited to scurry along through dank hallways dripping with groundwater in order to catch up with the recorded
patriotic spiel and martial music coming out of hidden speakers. We pause before a Madame Tussaud-like reconstruction of the
moment in 1920 when the casket containing the Unknown Soldier was chosen for inhumation underneath the Arc de Triomphe. The
commentary describing this unique occasion seems too brief, especially when compared to the painfully detailed part of the
recording that lists the long-deposed monarchs and long-dead statesmen who have bestowed medals and honors on the city of
Verdun for being such an exemplary victim. Clearly, someone is immensely proud of his badges and baubles.

My last stop of the day takes me across the canals near the city center to Verdun's tourist office. I ask at the desk for
a pamphlet listing the visiting hours of the forts and battlefield parks to the north of the city. I am told by a young woman
that all that information can be found in a book on sale in the display case. Yes, but I don't want the book, I just want
the information.

We look at each other. She is pretty. Her male colleague leans over and says it's all in the book, and that's all there is
to it. I look around the office—not a brochure, a leaflet, or even the kind of approximate placemat map that fast-food places
offer in tourist destinations. Nothing. The city of Verdun wants visitors to spend the equivalent of seven dollars to buy
a book that they do not want. Is it just vultures that feed on the dead?

"Thieves!" says my hotelkeeper over dinner later that night to placate me. "The place has always been crawling with them."

He points out the heterogeneous elements in his dining room. An Empire console, a gilt mirror, a swath of red velvet curtain—all
of them scavenged, he explains, when people started drifting back to town in 1919 and 1920. It was a very confused time, he
says with a smile. He's a very large man, sitting serenely behind his cash register.

His grandparents had been among the first to return to Verdun after the war. Many of the rooms are furnished with "found"
objects.

"The Zone Rouge was a place for people to do business. All kinds of business. Even you're doing business—what else is this
book you're going to write?"

I open my mouth to protest, but the sage of Verdun is already laughing at me.

5.
Douaumont to Vaux

Fort Douaumont is in the heart of the battlefields of the right bank. It is the Western Front's hinge of desolation, like
the vale at Passchendaele and the plateau at Craonne. The forests surrounding it give way to great clearings of tortured ground
and landscaped mass graveyards. It is the Frenchman's postcard image of
la guerre de quatorze.

I stand atop the fort on a morning so gray that no distinction can be made between ground and sky. Even the earth and heavens
have deserted the prominence of Douaumont today, preferring to leave the place in some intermediate limbo. Nearby is a neatly
kept graveyard with 15,000 headstones stretching off beyond the mist. Beside that, a lighthouse sticks up into the grayness,
its top lopped off by low-hanging clouds. At the base of the beacon is an ossuary containing the remains of 150,000 soldiers
whose blasted skeletons were found scattered around the vicinity after the war. You can walk around inside the base, peering
through windows at the heaps of bones piled high. Femurs go with femurs, tibias with tibias, skulls with skulls, and so on.
Off in the woods, wild boars dig up unrecovered skeletal parts and make a meal.

I remember the British war buff couple in Albert who told me that this place was impressive. The Douaumont Ossuary impresses
so much as to render numb, which must have been the intent of its builders. The great Art Deco monstrosity looks strange in
the middle of these obscene forests, and the visitor feels strange in the presence of all these collarbones and pelvises.
Unlike the monuments in the city of Verdun, Douaumont goes beyond good or bad taste. For all its immodesty with human remains,
Douaumont is and always will be shame. Not
a
shame, but shame itself. It is the embers of the bonfire—the bonefire—that consumed our grandfathers' world. More than shame,
Douaumont is folly.

Between Douaumont and Thiaumont stands the Trench of the Bayonets. Legend has it that an entire company of the 137th French
Infantry Regiment was buried alive in an explosion that caved in a trench on June 12, 1916. Only their bayonets remained sticking
above ground. While that is a spooky story, many historians think it more likely that the men were hurriedly interred, perhaps
by their opponents, and their bayonets were stuck in the ground to mark the spot. Whatever the truth about the trench, a wealthy
American, George F. Rand, liked the story so much that he paid for a memorial shelter to be erected in order to protect the
bayonets from theft by souvenir hunters. The supposedly immovable bayonets were dug up and replanted in more level ground
to ease construction of the memorial. Yet the tale does not end there. As Jay Winter deconstructs it in his
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning-.
"Immediately after conferring with [French Premier] Clemenceau and confirming the gift, Rand was killed in a plane crash.
The monument therefore had a double meaning: to remember the giver as well as the event he wished to commemorate."

The Trench of the Bayonets and the Douaumont Ossuary are the macabre movie stars of the Western Front. Surrounding the bald
and beaten hillock that Fort Douaumont occupies there stretches an enormous pocked and pitted dump of rusted metal, bleached
bones, and ruined villages, only partly concealed by the forest plantings. Verdun's hinterland, historian Alastair Home remarks
in
The Price of Glory,
his matchless account of the battle, is "the nearest thing to a desert in Europe." It took ten months to tear every trace
of topsoil from a rolling, fertile farmland and wipe away all mark of man the builder and cultivator.

The battle began on February 21, 1916. The offensive, as planned by German commander Erich von Falkenhayn, was designed to
kill as many poilus as possible through the use of heavy artillery. Falkenhayn cynically understood that the French command
would not surrender a symbol as important as Verdun, even if that meant sacrificing an entire generation of Frenchmen. He
guessed correctly that the leaders of the French army were that inept. In setting the trap, the Prussian planner hoped to
break the back of France as a fighting nation. It worked, but it did not win the war. The German forces, spurred on by their
own propaganda and by Crown Prince Wilhelm's ambition to try to take Verdun, eventually lost as many men as the French—which
defeated the whole purpose of the operation. A sorcerer's apprentice, Falkenhayn had let his slaughterhouse get out of control.

After the war the story of the defense of Verdun quickly became overgrown by a thicket of nationalist mumbo jumbo. The Douaumont
charnel house was regularly besieged by torch-bearing concelebrants, seeking some transcendent message in this testament to
high-level profligacy with human lives. What is certain is that the battlefield, for a few awful months in the late spring
and early summer of 1916, became a metaphor of national manhood for both sides. The killing was savage.

In brief, the first half of the battle consisted of several massive German attacks over these hills, and over Hill 304 and
Mort Homme on the left bank of the Meuse. The countryside was bristling with French forts that had been stripped of their
guns to feed the offensives in Champagne and Artois a year earlier. After each successive incursion, which brought them closer
and closer to Verdun, the Germans would pause—always, it seems, at a time when total victory was within grasp. The second
half of the battle was the reverse. The French decided, for reasons too criminal to contemplate, that every inch of surrendered
territory must be retaken, even the forts now made lethal by months of German occupation and refitting.

The stories of Verdun were once well known. The most amazing concerns a certain Sergeant Kunze. In a coup that rivals Alvin
York's for audacity, Kunze and a half-dozen men of a Brandenburger Regiment single-handedly took Fort Douaumont. Through an
incredible series of command blunders, four days into the battle the French still had only a small garrison in this, the most
modern and well-protected of forts in all of Europe. Everyone in the French military hierarchy assumed that someone else had
reinforced the fortress.

Sergeant Kunze decided to go and have a look. Despite orders to stay away from the deadly construction, the sergeant carefully
picked his way through the barbed wire and forests of spikes, only to be blown into the moat by the shock wave from one of
the massive Big Bertha shells that the German artillery had been lobbing on Douaumont. He ordered his men down into the moat
with him and, like German tourists on a Costa del Sol beach, they formed a human pyramid. Kunze scrambled up their backs and
wormed his way into an unoccupied gun casemate. Once inside, he and his men rounded up the shocked French garrison, who had
been firing off the Douaumont's long-range cannons unaware that the enemy was anywhere near the fort.

It was a stunning feat, akin in magnitude to an Iraqi shepherd of today bringing down a Stealth bomber with a rifle. Both
the French and the Germans were agog. A Prussian lieutenant named Brandis, the man who stole the credit for the action by
lying about who got there first, became a national hero. The acutely embarrassed French command decided that their honor could
be salved only by retaking the fort once circumstances permitted. A French staff officer estimated that 100,000 French lives
were lost because of the fall of Douaumont.

When I follow a tour of the fort seventy years after the fighting has stopped, the guide ignores the miraculous German capture
of the fort—one of the strangest incidents of the entire war—to dwell exclusively on the successful, albeit conventional French
attack on it in the fall of 1916. The usual patriotic nonsense spews out of the young fellow's mouth, as if an embrace of
the truth might somehow belittle his country. Perhaps he, and the other custodians of Verdun, do not realize that repeating
old lies makes their nationalism look that much more silly.

I walk away from Douaumont and its graveyards dispiritedly, surprised at the disappointment I feel in hearing bombast and
rationalization at a memorial for such an important battle. What else did I expect? Perhaps the starkly unintelligent Gaul
statue in Verdun is the proper monument for this benighted corner of Europe. Yet the caretakers of this spot do not need to
resort to mystification—individual examples of courage abound and are not diminished by the ultimate worthlessness of the
larger battle. At Souville I pass the place where the French line held and would not let the Crown Prince's men gain one more
inch of ground. Soon the smashed fort at Vaux appears out of the gray curtain of pines and craters. The story here is mind-boggling.
For more than one hundred days the German army was within three hundred yards of the structure, dug into the metal-laden forest
I've just crossed. During that time, 10,000 high-explosive shells fell on the fort
every day.
By June 1 the place was surrounded. Then the attackers got onto its roof, started pumping flames and gas into the vents. A
wall was breached, and gruesome hand-to-hand combat went on for days in a darkened corridor. The French commander, Sylvain-Eugene
Raynal, ordered most of his men to make a break for it. Twenty-nine scampered across no-man's-land in the dead of night. Raynal
sent his last courier pigeon out on June 4, begging for relief. A French attack was launched to break through to Raynal, but
it ended in the customary slaughter of machine-gun and artillery fire. Finally, on June 6, the exhausted Raynal surrendered.
His men came out of the cadaver-strewn Fort Vaux on their hands and knees, licking at the puddles of water on the ground.
The commander followed, walking tall and holding his pet cocker spaniel. Even the Germans treated him as a hero.

A fine mist begins to close in on the forests east of Vaux. The rusty shrapnel on the ground all around me begins to glisten
with the damp. The crack of a branch resounds through the silent wood. Then another crack. And another. I peer through the
dim light, half fearful that some haggard men in uniform will appear out of the mists, marching toward me. What will their
faces look like? Ghastly grinning skulls. I stumble down a slope, see a road, and break into an awkward run over the shell
craters. For the first time since leaving Nieuport, I am spooked. If it is not ghosts in these woods, then it must be something
or someone else. Someone I do not want to meet. What kind of person would want to walk through these forests of death on such
an awful day?

I arrive in the village of Damloup. This time I do not need my hotelkeeper to laugh at myself. I'm the kind of person who
would walk through those woods.

6. Fresnes to St Mihiel

"The people here never go out much. They keep to themselves. You have no idea how bad it is. They're an awful bunch."

I'm sitting in a kitchen, having a coffee with a man in his late sixties. There is a blinding yellow oilcloth on the table.

"I used to go out. Go to dances. But not now. Not with these people. They're my wife's kin."

He invited me inside his home after he saw me rapping at the door of the village cafe. A woman came to the window, wide-eyed,
then shook her head. She wagged her forefinger at me.