Back to the Front (26 page)

Nonetheless people came back, to pick their way through the rubble and putrefaction and to rebuild their lives. German POWS
were put to work cleaning up the place. The Zone Rouge shrank in the 1920s as the Front became overlaid with a palimpsest
of new villages and farms and as time began to level the peaks of suffering. Ypres, Armentieres, Bethune, Lens, Arras, Noyon,
Roye, Soissons, Reims, and other cities arose from their ruination, some more artfully than others, as did many of the lesser
towns. Miraculously, the Front began to breathe again, and the zone went from red to orange to green. The polders of Passchendaele
were drained, the valleys of the Somme replanted. Even at the Chemin des Dames, farmers took to the sloping fields again,
and highway engineers rebuilt the vanished roadway.

In only one place was it found impossible to perform cosmetic surgery on the scar of the Front: the hills north of Verdun.
Here the Zone Rouge would remain red. The villages, or rather the powdery traces of them, were washed away forever in the
spring runoff of 1919. Intrepid farmers lured to the zone for its rock-bottom prices could only do so much with the fields.
Places like Avocourt and Esnes were rebuilt, as frontier towns at the fault line of two centuries. Tractor drivers plowed
as far up the hill as they dared, harvesting hundreds of dead with every new turning of the soil. Explosives went off, maiming
and killing men and their livestock. Classrooms around the area carried posters—some still do, in fact—warning children not
to play with shells that they found in the schoolyard.

In the 1930s, Verdun's Zone Rouge was planted with hundreds of thousands of Austrian pines on both banks of the river Meuse.
Parts of the zone became a firing range for the French army's artillery teams. A few thousand shells every year would hardly
matter to a landscape where millions of tons of metal had fallen. To the contemporary hiker, the presence of pine trees is
the giveaway. What is a slightly scarred but nonetheless pastoral area of mixed farmland suddenly gives way to acre upon acre
of evergreen forest—a highly un-French note of wildness on the landscape. It is this area, the unrecoverable Front, that I
have just entered.

I look ahead of me into the woods. The lower limbs of the pines have perished from the lack of sun. The light that does filter
through is soft and makes the gray and wispy dead branches look like a network of warm cobwebs hanging above the reddish-brown
undulations of the forest floor. Carpeted in pine needles, the floor is scarred with trenches and battered by shell craters.
Within minutes of entering this soundless place, I see rusted rifles, helmets, and shells lying about in abundance. I walk
through the eerie quietness for about a half hour before coming out onto a road and the final slope up to the summit of Hill
304.

It is well marked. A few picnic tables stand unused under the trees—who would want to eat here?—and a signboard explains trilingually
the importance of this hill in the defense of Verdun. It was shelled almost continuously in the spring of 1916 after the German
attacks to the east, on the right bank of the Meuse, failed to advance any closer to the city. There were repeated attempts,
which the French repulsed, to capture the cratered hill. Thousands died. The poilus were told by the commander of the region,
a certain General de Bazelaire, that any able-bodied man found retreating down the slope to Esnes would be taken to the rear
of the lines and executed by a firing squad.

The forestation of the hills north of Verdun, the signboard explains, has been done to expedite the work of nature, which
would have taken three to four centuries to make the area look vaguely terrestial. A nature trail has been cleared through
the woods, which I take to spare myself the bother of consulting the map at every change in contour.

Here, on the path rising slowly to the summit, the landscape becomes truly cataclysmic, as unearthly as anything I have ever
seen. What had been glimpsed in the copses of the Somme is now all around me, as far as the eye can see, a heaving sea of
mortified land. Not one square yard of the forest floor is level—the place is madness come to ground. A few grave markers
and private memorials rise and fall from sight in the shell-scarred bedlam as I continue upward. There is none of the perverse
sense of companionship I felt for the trenches that led me out of the Argonne. It is all too obvious that this forest was
a charnel house. This is the still-bleeding scar of the Great War, that which I had only divined in the cold December twilight
east of Albert. I feel almost nauseated as the full ugliness of what I have been walking these past few weeks comes home to
me. Small wonder that Bartholomew never spoke of the war or of his brother Tommy's death; small wonder that Daniel preferred
a dance in the parade ground to tales of the trenches. The shock wave has been transmitted, even if the memory is now gone.

The monument at the top of the hill is a simple, tall monolith to the "10,000 dead whose blood impregnates this soil." When
the Germans finally took the hill in 1916, the front-line troops asked for their tobacco ration to be doubled, because the
stench was so strong. Small signs, written in three languages, are posted at several points on the clearing's perimeter:

This land has been the cross of the soldier, each patch bears the stamp of its stations. Passerby, the respect of thousands
of dead men demands the utmost silence.

As I copy this down, two combat helicopters come screaming over the treetops of the glade, shattering the "utmost silence."
The air rings after their departure.

Hill 304 descends toward the east and a vale cut by a brook. The hill opposite is Mort Homme, a prewar name that became only
too apt in the spring of 1916. Like 304, the prominence was pounded day and night by artillery. I stand by the stream between
the two hills, away from the nature trail now and glad to be free of the leg-breaking landscape of shell craters, if only
momentarily. My map shows a place to ford the rushing water of the brook. A few moss-covered yards to the north, I find the
bridge and continue my trek to the lower slopes of Mort Homme. I pass through an unkempt field of tall grass, worm my way
under a fence, and sit for a moment under a shade tree. Beside me are two old hand grenades, one of the "pineapple" variety,
the other a German "potato masher," a wooden stick with a can-shaped appendage on its end. Despite my native caution I decide
to pick one up. As I reach for the German grenade, I hear a low hiss, then a viscera-shaking roar. A fighter aircraft has
thundered less than a hundred yards overhead, threading the needle between Hill 304 and Mort Homme and almost causing me to
slough my bowels. I am furious when a second jet catches me unawares a few seconds later. I decide to head for the woods.
I get up and make for the fence that surrounds this paddock-like pasture. In my ill temper, I don't notice until it is almost
too late that an equally upset bull is galumphing over in my direction. There is no time to be squeamish about scraping my
way through a meadow muffin to get under the fence.

After washing myself off in the stream, I tackle the slope of the Mort Homme. The hill is a mirror image of 304, its surface
an obscene sea of shrapnel litter. At the top stands a statue representing a skeleton holding a flowing French flag and standing
on a pedestal inscribed with the words:
Ils n'ont pas passé
(They did not pass). As I am contemplating this remarkable piece of kitsch, a lone German BMW cruises slowly along the summit's
laneways, the tinted window on its passenger side lowering so that a woman's hand can point a camera at some unseen vista.
The window quickly closes again. The car picks up speed and heads back downhill, leaving me alone with the grinning skeleton.
I should be going too.

N
EAR THE HAMLET
of Chattancourt, on the road to Verdun from the Mort Homme, I gratefully stumble across Le Village Gaulois,
a neo-rustic restaurant with a miniature golf course. I order an Asterix-burger and a beer and settle down on the patio to
watch a young guy of about twenty-five putt his way around the course with the seriousness of a PGA professional. The exertions
of the morning and afternoon are forgotten in this mesmerizing moment of triviality. The past falls away, as does any sense
of incongruity, leaving only a callow backpacker with sore feet.

The golfer turns out to be a youthful businessman indulging a hobby. He drives a burgundy Alfa Romeo and gives me a lift into
town. As we reach the River Meuse, the road broadens into a highway. It looks as if we're approaching a major city. I ask
him what there is to do in Verdun.

"I wouldn't go out at night in Verdun," he says. "If I were you, I'd grab a quick dinner somewhere about seven, then rush
back to my hotel. You can get stabbed in the streets of Verdun."

"Is that because of the army base?" I ask with knee-jerk antimilitarism. "It's dangerous because there are so many soldiers
on the loose?"

"No, no, no! There's a constant war between the teens of Verdun and the soldiers. But the soldiers are okay. It's the local
teens who start all the crap. I know—I was one of them once."

"So you like the army?"

"Not at all! The army's filled with dumbos. I did my military service so I can tell you what bullshit it is. The career officers
have got absolutely nothing between their ears."

"So the teens of Verdun are rotten and the soldiers are stupid."

"You got it," he says with a laugh. We zoom through the city's industrial park, which, for reasons unfathomable, is called
Chicago. "You got it," he repeats. "No one ever said this was a great town."

We pass a war memorial. The inscription is almost gleeful in describing Verdun's woes: ". . . besieged, destroyed or damaged
in 450, 485, 984, 1047, 1246, 1338, 1562, 1790, 1870, and 1916-18." Like Canadians who boast with masochistic pride about
month-long blizzards, the Verdunois city fathers seem to take delight in their own misfortunes. I have a sneaking suspicion
that my driver's pessimistic prologue to the city may have been accurate. No one ever said that this was a great town.

4. Verdun

Verdun is an odd, unsightly town, which somehow does not live up to its world-historical significance. It is the place where
France and Germany broke themselves and Europe in a futile exchange of steel, where the fruits of fascism were first seeded,
and, finally, where the two countries agreed to bury the hatchet. When French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand at a military cemetery in the Verdun battlefield in 1984, the symbolism could not have been
better chosen—even down to the doctoring of the resulting photograph to make the Frenchman seem less dwarfed by his German
counterpart. Verdun was the most Pyrrhic victory of this most Pyrrhic of wars.

The garrison town sprawls over a humped-back hill on the right bank of the River Meuse. Of the 2,407 buildings of the town
before the war, 2,305 were completely destroyed. Directly to the north of Verdun, where most of the fighting took place, the
dark bluffs of Belleville loom on the horizon. The pine forests of desolation begin shortly thereafter, on the slopes that
make up the Heights of the Meuse. Other than this touch of the extreme, the city seems devoid of any dignified drama or coherence,
as if the Great War had taken away its life once and for all. At the turn of the first millennium Verdun was known throughout
Europe for the production and resale of eunuchs. A thousand years later it is famous for its mass graves.

To anyone familiar with the First World War it is difficult to stay for very long in this city and not feel one's gorge begin
to rise. Unlike Britain's apologists, who portrayed the war as an inhuman catastrophe visited upon the British by the abstract
forces of history, France's shills made the conflict into a nationalist victory. The impulse is understandable—after all it
is through France, not Britain or Germany or the U.S.A., that the Front meandered for most of its murderous length. In 1914
millions of men came marching over France's frontiers; in 1918 they, or their successors, went walking back home. Seen in
these simple terms, the Great War was a Gallic victory and Verdun, France's finest hour. The postwar urge to
cocorico
(cock-a-doodle-do), the French term for jingoistic patriotism, proved irresistible to the myth- and monument-makers commissioned
to commemorate the dead and whitewash the men responsible for the carnage.

The leaders of the French army, especially, needed what would now be called spin doctors. The notion of Verdun the victorious
was used to erase from the collective memory of the war their record of disastrous decisions and wrongheaded policies:
attaque a outrance,
the Plan XVII, the repeated offensives in Artois, the repeated offensives in Champagne, the Chemin des Dames, the near-rout
of 1918. All of these sanguinary items have been forgotten, the defense of Verdun retained. Were it not for modern Europe's
recent descent into tribalism in the Balkans, Verdun could be viewed as a harmless museum piece. Instead, its triumphalism
seems dangerous. The shops peddling war porn and the brochures singing the praises of the French army spread like a contagion.
Statues of French generals abound near the city ramparts, as a sort of provocation to historical decency. Only the city's
own monument—a poilu Abu Simbel with five ordinary soldiers emerging from a granite wall—puts some proper perspective on exactly
who should be remembered in war memorials.

The main national war monument at Verdun is another matter. It occupies a large terraced lot off the main shopping street
of the city and looks as if it would be out of place no matter where it was set down. A towering plug of stone that represents
the eternally vigilant Frankish warrior ready to defend his Dark Ages turf, the memorial may be the only Merovingian phallic
symbol in Europe. On either side of the structure stand two artillery pieces, their snouts reared up in a pose of aggression.
The thing is one of the tacky wonders of the Front, a schoolyard bully's idea of macho posturing. The stone Frank narrows
his eyes at the unseen Goth, ready to cleave any comers in two: Make my day, Germanicus. It is a depressing sight and a terrible
thing to have in the middle of a town, even a town called Verdun. Graceful little Joan in Reims, the arch at Thiepval, or,
if one must erect towers, the Doric American column at Montfaucon, the Canadian tuning fork at Vimy—everything except the
Flemish nightstick at Dixmude is more tasteful than this awkward attempt at making myth. Giant Merovingians did not stop the
Germans in the hills north of town; poor unfortunate men did, by being placed by the hundreds of thousands in the way of a
curtain of whizzing steel and high-explosive shells.