Bleeding white

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.