A hundred years ago the war on the Western Front had been
on for a year and a half, with no change in the battle lines since September
1914. Hundreds of thousands of men dead, of course. But static emplacements
marked by long gashes in the farmland of Northern France and Belgium.
The strategy on both sides was in broad strokes
identical: periodically lob a few extra tons of artillery shells at the enemy
and throw a couple of divisions into the expected breach. The results were also
identical no matter who was attacking or defending: massive casualties on both
sides with no discernable gains or losses in territory.
Basically your classic definition of insanity: doing the
same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
In a slight variant on this strategy, on 21 February 1916,
the German army opened fire on the area around Verdun, France, in a campaign
designed by Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn specifically to “bleed
the French army white.” The idea was to create such a meat-grinder around the
town (perceived as too important to national dignity to lose) that France would
keep feeding troops into its defense until there wasn’t anyone left.
What Falkenhayn failed to take into consideration was the
cost to his own army that such an endeavor would entail. Under the battle cry, "Ils ne passeront pas!" ("They shall not pass!"), future Maréchal
Philippe Pétain devised a system for rotating troops into and out of the meat
grinder that maintained the defense, although not without a price. By the time
it all wound down on 18 December, somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000
casualties had been sustained, almost evenly distributed across both sides.
Maybe half of them were killed; quite a butchers bill for a single battle.
(It was also partly with the intention of relieving the
pressure on the French at Verdun that the British conceived the catastrophic Battle of the
Somme in the summer of 1916.)
The town itself was surrounded by a circuit of forts,
including Douaumont and Vaux. The lightly defended Douaumont fell early on to a daring
raid by a small German force, but Vaux held out until it was the focus of an
attack in June. The garrison of the underground structure had suffered months
of heavy artillery bombardment, and were reduced to eating rats and licking
water from the walls. By the time they were captured, many were raving mad, and
their comrades had had to live with them as well as the shelling.
I spent about 40 minutes inside that fort once, when the
hallways were lighted and the surroundings were quiet. I couldn’t get out of
there fast enough.
The woman who ran the place asked me what I thought of it
as I was leaving. I could barely speak, because those guys held out from
February until June, and I could not imagine living in that tomb for that
amount of time, forget about the constant shelling. My comrades would have strangled
me (saving ammo) in less than a week, because I’d have gone insane. I told her
it was oppressive, even in its benign state—quiet and safe. Imagine, she said,
what it was like in the filth and dark and damp, with constant shelling and
vermin swarming over you.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know how anyone can visit
Verdun without sitting on the ground and howling.
The land has taken back a lot of the ugliness that
exploded around Verdun a hundred years ago. Douaumont is ghostly in the morning
mist and the ground softly rises and falls where the artillery shells left a splintered,
shattered moonscape.
You can follow another circuit around Verdun—that of the hamlets
that once existed in the hills surrounding the town, which were destroyed in
the ten months that the war came to town.
I was driving around that circuit around Verdun, following
the signs to the “villages détruites”.
So I parked at the parking lot for one of them, and was walking toward where
the sign pointed to “village détruite”,
and I was getting pissed off because I couldn’t find the flipping village. And
eventually I started stomping back, muttering, “those bloody Frogs, honestly,
etc., etc., etc.” And I decided to cut through the trees to get to the car
park. And the ground’s a little gribbly—you know, not even. And all of a sudden
I realized that I was in the village détruite.
I’d expected to find a couple of walls, a chimney,
something ghostly, maybe; the skeletons of the buildings. But all there was
were some foundations that had long since been claimed back by the grass and brush.
Nothing above ground, no sign of the houses, the boulangerie, the café; all the
elements of French village life.
When they said “détruite”,
that’s precisely what they meant. Utterly destroyed. Nothing at all left.
Razed. Not a single thing there to indicate habitation.
But Verdun never fell. and as for Falkenhayn’s strategy
of bleeding the French Army white…he was one of the first generals I wanted to
bitch-slap when I was in college because even a Valley Girl could tell that he
was kind of missing something with that.
And the insanity would continue.
