23. The glacis of Fort Vaux, 1917 (note the dome of the shattered 75 mm turret).
24. Post-war plaque on Fort Vaux, now destroyed forever by vandals.
25. General (‘The Butcher’) Mangin, after the war.
26. Ex-Lt. Eugen Radtke, with the author, in Paris, 1963; the first time he had travelled further west than the German lines before Verdun.
EPILOGUE
War is less costly than servitude, said Vauvenargues… the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau.—JEAN DUTOURD,The Taxis of the Marne
BEFORE the Second World War was ended, the sinister battlefield at Verdun claimed one more victim. The bomb plot of July 20th, 1944, against Hitler had just failed and General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel — the German Military Governor in Paris and one of the principal plotters — was on his way back to face trial and certain death in Germany. He asked his guard if he could go by way of Verdun, and on approaching the Mort Homme, where he had commanded a battalion in 1916, he stopped the car and got out. A short while later the driver heard a shot, and von Stülpnagel was found floating in a canal of the Meuse. The wretched man had only succeeded in putting out both his eyes; blind and helpless he was strangulated by the Gestapo.
Except perhaps deep in the memories of a few old men, after 1945 the imprint of Verdun in Germany was largely erased; other more recent nightmares such as Stalingrad had replaced its image. France however has still not got the stimulating but toxic drug completely out of its system. Upon the French Army, desperately and pathetically questing after the sources of La Gloire as a panacea to the deadly humiliation of 1940, the influence of this drug became if anything, morally, even more potent. One of Britain’s leading military writers told the author how, shortly after the Second World War ended, he was invited to attend a lengthy seminar in France at the Ecole de Guerre, which was dedicated to discussing the lessons of the recent war. But, he said, to his surprise most of the time was spent in discussing the ‘glories’ of the previous war, ‘with particular reference to Verdun’. In a sense the wheel that began to rotate after 1870 had moved through yet another quadrant; once again the ground was as disastrously fertile (and through application of the same kind of manure) as it had been when de Grandmaison and his catastrophic doctrine of l’attaque à outrance sprouted from it. The years when Britain was bowing to the inevitable have seen successive weak French Governments goaded on by an army desperate for la Gloire — anxious to win a war, any war — to committing themselves irrevocably to military ‘solutions’ in their overseas territories. There was first Syria and Madagascar, then Indo-China and Algeria. Alas, in Indo-China the hidden influences of Verdun overlapped once again into actual strategic considerations. After the first Viet Minh successes in 1951, de Lattre de Tassigny — who in June 1916 had held a position near to the company wiped out in the ‘Tranchée des Baïonnettes’ — ordered the Delta to be surrounded ‘with a belt of concrete’ unmistakably inspired by Verdun’s ring of forts. A few years later, after De Lattre’s death, an isolated and strategically quite indefensible outpost called Dien Bien Phu was chosen as a fortress where the resurrected French Army would stake its honour and fight, if necessary, to the last man. Dien Bien Phu became a fatal symbol. With superlative courage and total abandon it did fight to the last man. Once again, as the Viet Minh swarmed over the hastily constructed bunkers, the cries of ‘on les aura!’ and ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ were heard. A few months later Indo-China was lost to France. In Algeria, the same deadly influences could be detected; you do not have to scratch the surface of one of the ‘Colonels of Algiers’ very hard before the word VERDUN is revealed in some combination or other. Is it also just a coincidence that, at the time of the Algerian cease-fire talks, the O.A.S. should have chosen ‘DE GAULLE NE PASSERA PAS’ as one of their favourite slogans?
The ghosts are not allowed to die. Every officer on both the senior and junior courses at the École de Guerre is still sent to Verdun for a lecture on the battle; although instructors there freely admit that it had absolutely no relevance to modern warfare. The same is true of the Artillery School at Chalons-sur-Marne. Still the torchlight pilgrimages to the Ossuaire continue. The ranks of ‘Ceux de Verdun’ are getting a bit thin now, but already they are reinforced by the anciens combattants of another war who turn to Verdun, rather than to Bir Hakim or Strasbourg, as a touchstone of faith. And yet another generation is being steeped in the tradition. During the Verdun pilgrimages one is struck by the long silent files of children that throng into the little chapel at the Ossuaire to take part in special commemoration services, and in even the smallest villages of France the anniversary of February 21st, 1916, is often celebrated by schoolchildren being marched in procession to the village war memorial.
After 1945, Verdun became again a sleepy garrison town, with one of the vilest climates in France. Early in the morning the bugles calling reveille up in the Citadel still sound thinly over the town, and only an insensitive soul can hear them without a shudder of association. For the tourist who happens to wander into this part of France, the shops of Verdun still display tasteless mementoes of the battle, such as candles moulded in the shape of shells; as indeed, shockingly enough, does a little boutique within the Ossuaire itself. But the less obvious reminders are now unlikely to reveal themselves to the casual eye. As you approach Verdun from Bar-le-Duc, without the wreathed helmets on each kilometre stone it would be hard to believe that this narrow, insignificant secondary road was the Voie Sacrée along which poured the lifeblood of France in such immense draughts; harder still to imagine its deserted stretches jammed with primitive military transports, bumper to bumper, night and day. At Stenay, the dreary little Meuse town where the Crown Prince and Knobelsdorf had their headquarters, you can, if you peer about, still see, uneffaced after nearly fifty years, German signs left behind by the Fifth Army. At Souilly, there is nothing to indicate that this was once Pétain’s HQ in the first stages of the battle. The Mairie is the Mairie once more, but if you enter and ask about le Maréchal an old soldier working in the secretariat with the gold thread of the Médaille Militaire in his buttonhole will delightedly show you the humble office, the worn leather chair.
Closer to Verdun, in the Meuse villages, the signs abound; the viciously heavy barbed wire used on the farms, the wall of the cowsheds made from the thick dugout corrugated iron, the scarecrow using a German helmet. The villages themselves, like those all over France, are still half-empty as the hangover of a war that decimated the peasant population; and (or does one imagine it?) enveloped in a sourness and mournful gloom that is not to be found elsewhere in France, like a blight over the countryside. Still, it is said, there is more danger of infecting a small cut, more tetanus, indigenous to the Verdun area than to any other part of the country. And everywhere, everywhere there are the cemeteries, large and small, French with white crosses, German with black, but all well cared for.
If you sit long enough on one of the forts on the Bois Bourrus, gazing at the superb panorama of the battlefield, perhaps a young shepherd with a torn trilby will come up to you, and divining your thoughts will remark scornfully:
They must have been mad, ces gens-là.
Then, casting a shell fragment at his flock, he is off. Most of the infertile battlefield on the Right Bank is now shrouded over with a merciful cloak of secondary growth trees and shrubs, dense hawthorn and wild roses. It is almost impenetrable. Where you can find your way inside it, you at once feel rather than see that literally every inch of the ground is pock-marked. Suddenly you may come across apple-trees blossoming in the wilderness, and you know you are on the site of one of the nine vanished villages. At some, like Ornes there are still the vaguely identifiable fragments of tiles and remnants of houses heaped into crude trenches; at others, like Beaumont and Fleury, there is a small shrine or a monument to guide you, otherwise not a brick.
The slopes of the Mort Homme are covered with a forest of young firs, planted in the 1930’s when all other attempts at c
ultivation had failed. The wind whistles through the trees and the birds sing, and that is all. It is the nearest thing to a desert in Europe. Nobody seems ever to visit it. Even lovers eschew the unchallenged privacy of its glades. The ghosts abound; it is one of the eeriest places in this world. A grown man will not willingly repeat the experience of getting lost in the labyrinth of firecuts that crisscross the deserted plantations.
Everywhere in the spooky jungles the pathetic relics, the non-perishable debris of battle still lie; the helmets, the rusted water bottles, the broken rifles, the huge shell fragments — and, still, the bones. The wild boar of the Meuse are extremely partial to them; and every day the French Army Chaplain at the Ossuaire explores the battlefield, looking for the tell-tale sign of diggings. Barely a week goes by without the discovery of some new ‘unknown soldier’, often part of some all too easily reconstructed tragic scene; perhaps half-hidden in a shell-hole the tableau of three skeletons — of two stretcher-bearers and the casualty they were carrying, all killed by the same shell.
Little enough of this is seen by the casual visitor to Verdun, who is funnelled to the Ossuaire, to the ‘Tranchée des Baїonnettes’, and above all to Forts Vaux and Douaumont. On the crumbling outside wall of Vaux, near a memorial to Raynal’s last pigeon, a cracked and modest little plaque placed there by an anonymous mother may move you:
To my son, since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry.
Inside they will show you Raynal’s office and sell you a copy of his book. At Douaumont, the elderly Gardiens — all survivors of the battle — grumpily escort visitors round the tour they have made ten thousand times, accompanied with their own curious version of history that has evolved over the years, with the frequently interjected, melancholic litany of ‘très grandes pertes, très grandes pertes’. When there are no visitors, they can very likely be found up on the glacis, collecting escargots in old German helmets for their supper. Up there, standing on the 155 millimetre turret, like a ghost in modern dress, is a young poilu with slung rifle, a Gitane suspended from his lip, eyeing disdainfully the old men at their snail hunt. He is supposed to be sentry to the rifle range now carved out of the desert beyond the fort, over which Kunze and Radtke must have crept to enter Douaumont on that fateful day of February 1916.
* * *
A few years ago a colonel in the new German Luftwaffe told the author how he had been travelling from Germany to attend a NATO meeting in Paris, and had taken the route through Verdun.
On the hills outside the city, I was held up by roadworks. A bulldozer was at work, cutting a new road, and as its blade entered the earth out tumbled German steel-helmets of the First War. It was a strange sensation. Here I was, a German officer on my way to sit in conference with our French allies…. I could hardly believe that all this had happened only forty-four years ago, even just within my lifetime. It was more like watching archaeologists dig up the very distant past.
The folly, the waste and the stupendous courage of the men who fought at Verdun indeed seem to belong to an age a thousand years removed from our own; the world of Falkenhayn and Nivelle, of the murderous rivalry between the Gaul and Teuton supermen, to have disappeared in the mists of Ancient History. How much longer will the ghosts of Verdun continue to torment France? When will they be exorcised? Will it be when the last of the old warriors guarding Douaumont and its memories have moved on to their Valhalla? Or will France have to wait until the eery forests on the Mort Homme mature and are hewn down, and farms and happy villages once again populate its dead slopes?
Postscript. On translation of The Price of Glory into French, there followed a long correspondence with ex-Lieutenant Kléber Dupuy (see pp. 299–300), the last French officer to stand in the way of the momentary high tide of the German advance, at Souville on 12 July 1916. Much decorated in the First World War, his subsequent career graphically illustrated the tragic divisions that were to plague France a generation later. After 1940, Kléber Dupuy was again decorated for his role in the Resistance, i.e. fighting against his former chief at Verdun, Pétain. But he never lost his respect for Pétain and, in the 1960s, he led the movement for the rehabilitation of the dead Maréchal; a measure adamantly opposed by Dupuy’s Second World War chief, de Gaulle. In his last letter to the author, he wrote: ‘My most ardent desire is to accompany the Marshal’s ashes for reburial at Douaumont, and on that day I hope you will accompany me in the cortège, bras dessus, bras dessous.’
Alas, ex-Lieutenant Dupuy died a short time afterwards; the lingering passions of the Second World War have still not permitted the reburial of Pétain at Douaumont.
As for Pétain’s adversaries: when the Berlin Wall came down, I was invited to visit the Cecilienhof, once the home of the Prussian Crown Prince, then site of the Potsdam Conference of 1945, and for years closed to the West. We were taken for lunch to a charming small Schloss nearby, temporarily used as a restaurant by West Berliners. Hardly encouraging to the appetite, the rooms were filled with glass cases of broken skulls and twisted skeletons. The house was, my hosts explained, still doubling as the East German Centre for Forensic Science. I asked, casually, who had lived there in former times: ‘Oh, some general – he was called Falkenhayn; he died here.’ Disturbing a setting as it was for lunch, the macabre exhibits seemed supremely congruent to the spirit of the man who had launched the most terrible battle in History – and who died plagued by bad dreams.
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