My pilgrimage to Verdun, France... 32 years in the making.
1992
I still remember the high school class that changed my life: Modern European History. Beginning with Louis XIV’s France and ending with the Berlin Wall’s fall, the course covered three centuries of history, including the First World War – a war I knew nothing about.
One morning, my teacher, a Dutch immigrant who lived under Nazi occupation, rolled in a TV and hit play on a World War I documentary. An hour later, my life would never be the same. Because after that, I started to read about history on my own, voluntarily and enthusiastically.
That Christmas, I asked my dad for a book on the First World War. Thirty-two years later, I still have that book. It was the second book in my personal library (Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding being the first, of course.) Inside my first book on history, my dad (a Vietnam Vet) wrote this inscription.
As I watched the documentary that morning in high school, I still recall a section of it called “The Stalemate.” I saw black and white images of flooded trenches, gas masked soldiers, and a hellscape called “No Man’s Land” between enemy trenches where splintered trees, craters, and corpses littered the battlefield. “A generation lost,” said the narrator.
For two years, the colossal armies of Europe collided on the Western Front, where millions died and neither side gained any ground or advantage over the other. By 1916, Europeans thought the stalemate would never end, a continued death toll until no young men were left to fight.
Verdun, Verdun, Verdun
To convey the horrors of the First World War, the documentary focused on one battle that typified the attrition and stalemate: the Battle of Verdun (which I wrote about here last year).
For ten months, German and French armies smashed each other to bits around Verdun, an ancient Gallic town along the left bank of the Meuse River, 150 miles east of Paris. Hundreds of divisions, millions of men, and 60 million shells pounded like hammers on anvils across a tight eight-mile crescent-moon shaped front, forever cracking scars into the hilly landscape. All that remained, an observing French pilot wrote, was “a strip of murdered nature… [that] belonged to another world. Every sign of humanity,” he continued, “has been swept away.”
60 million shells in ten months across an eight-mile front. This amounts to an average of twelve shells per square meter. If you live on one acre of land, imagine 161 shells falling on your property every day for 300 days in a row. After the first day, your house would be gone, but you still have 299 days to go – all like the day before. After 300 days, almost 50,000 shells will have fallen on your single acre. In February 1916, nine villages occupied the Verdun sector. A month later, they were gone forever and remain gone to this day. They died for France.
“Verdun was an open cemetery,” wrote historian Alistair Horne who interviewed many veterans of the battle. Due to the endless shelling, “it was safer to wrap the dead up in a canvas and simply roll them over the trench’s parapet into the largest shell-hole in the vicinity,” he wrote. After even more shelling these craters turned into gullies and then into ravines. Each became known as “La Ravine de la Mort.”
As 1200 German artillery canons continued to pound the front, corpses in the ravines were quartered and then re-quartered. After it rained, corpses and dismembered limbs would float to the tops of these craters, gullies, and ravines. After a rain, No Man’s Land became a horror show, with puddles of floating dead. For the men at Verdun, it wasn’t war, it was the end of the world. “I arrived there with 175 men,” a French officer wrote to his mother about holding a Verdun hill for two days. “I returned with 34, several half-mad… [and] not replying anymore when I spoke to them.”
As a sophomore in high school, I stared wide-eyed at that television. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. I’d never heard the word, “Verdun,” in my life. Since then, I’ve never forgotten it. For the next 32 years, “Verdun, Verdun, Verdun” has always been on my mind. The mud, the shells, the forts, and above all, the men. The grunts of France and Germany who fought in that battle, oh my god, those men. Those incredible men “whose stupendous courage,” Horne writes, “seem to belong to an age a thousand years removed from our own.”
Yet their spirits remain. Upon visiting the battlefield, Horne writes, there are “ghosts abound; it is one of the eeriest places in this world.”
As a young man, I vowed to one day visit Verdun, to be with the ghosts. Last week, I finally did.
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As my wife stayed in Paris, I took the day train east to the tiny Meuse station, where my guide Gwendal picked me up. After a thirty-minute drive north on the famous “Sacred Way,” we arrived at Verdun.
Crossing the Meuse River east, we entered the famous battlefield and went back in time. For the next eight hours, we walked the solemn ground, explored the forts, and everywhere I looked, I saw craters from the 60 million shells that shook the earth on this small patch of France, where more blood was spilled per acre than any battle in history.
So here I was, 108 years later. Once a wide-eyed teenager and now a middle-aged man born 58 years after the final shell fell at Verdun. Despite my distance in time and space, it was like returning home. 1916, I had arrived.
Besides our eight hours on deck, my guide, Gwendal, and I couldn’t visit the entire battlefield. First, because there is unexploded ordinance everywhere. Second, because the French people consider the entire battlefield a giant graveyard. To this day, skeletons lie just beneath the dirt, where hopefully, they’ll rest forever. There are other skeletons… those buried in military cemeteries all across France. And then there are skeletons that lie in one remaining place.
Beneath the Douaumont Ossuary, the Verdun war memorial built in 1932, rests some of the unidentified bones of Verdun. As I peered through the glass portals beneath the entire memorial, I gasped as I saw piles of the dead. (See the photo I took below.)
It’s worth noting that the French do not shy away from showing you death. They want you to see and feel the cost of war.
Inside the Ossuary, there’s a stone hall that stretches two hundred meters long, where pictures are not permitted. Stepping inside, the hall was empty -- it was just my guide and me. We walked the hall’s length in silence, hearing only our footsteps on the marble floor. As I stepped softly, I passed thousands of plaques (each dedicated to a soldier missing in action). Then I passed sixty tombs (each occupied by a soldier killed in one of the battlefield’s sixty sectors). I didn’t say a word. I just thought of those men.
Finally, we reached the end of the giant tomb. There, I lit a candle at a small altar and said a prayer for the men of Verdun – those men I thought about late at night flipping through the book my father gave me thirty-two years ago. Oh, those men… those shell-shocked men, who even if they survived, suffered lasting wounds until their final breath.
To the men of Verdun... You are all gone now. All that’s left behind are your bones, your monuments, and too many craters to count. But you live on in my heart.
And so, at that altar, I took a deep breath and started to weep.
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Why? Why did I make this pilgrimage? Why did I respond with tears? Why am I drawn to a battle fought long before my birth, by men who are not even my countrymen? I visited the American cemetery in Normandy a week later, where hundreds of Americans were making their own pilgrimages. It’s a solemn place for sure, but for me, it’s not Verdun. So, what is it about Verdun? Why does it stick with me?
I have many questions. My answers are only feelings -- intuitions, resonations, and inclinations that draw me to this place, that time, and these men.
Why am I this way? Why am I attracted to and repulsed by war? Why am I drawn to the most horrific of battles?
I wish I could explain it to you and to myself. I can’t. But, since this is an essay, I’ll try.
I think it’s because Verdun gives me the most awe, in other words, the most wonder. The resilience of the men who fought in what Horne calls, “the grimmest battle… in world history,” takes my breath away. I’m in awe of their vigor, their fellowship, their love for life, and their love for France (and Germany).
I’m in awe of their willingness to endure. Despite “the thirst, the hunger, the stench, the misery, the fear,” these incredible men – these Gallic (and Teutonic) barbarians -- stood their ground and echoed General Petain’s promise: “On ne passe pas.” (They shall not pass.)
The French soldiers, the Poilu, defending Verdun never gave up. Sleeping in mud, shivering in rain, and gritting their teeth against every exploding shell, they kept their heads down, stayed in the fight, and saved France.
As they stood in their trenches at dusk, their rifles pointed towards the fading German lines, they must have thought, “Will I see tomorrow?”
Including their German brethren, three hundred thousand of those men would not see tomorrow. So tomorrow, and hopefully all the tomorrows of my future, I will think of them.
Verdun, Verdun, Verdun, until the day I die, Verdun.