DAY 240 - VERDUN

19 December, 2011

2378 miles–5,101,001 steps

I received an early Christmas present; I was bought a night in the very pleasant and historic Hotel Le Coq Hardi. I paid a ‘heavy’ price for the march down from Damvillers with my rucksack, as I had clearly aggravated the slowly healing shoulder and this resulted in a sleepless night, with relief only coming courtesy of one hot bath and two sleeping tablets.

I was supposed to set off early the next day for Ste-Menehould, but I just couldn’t.  I then got to ask my favourite question when faced with an unexpected problem, “What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” The answer I came up with was to try and understand what had happened here in 1916 and why. One of the great joys of my couple of years embarking on a research degree at Durham, was to be able to be in the library exploring and reading various texts to try and answer a research question. Normally if I have a day off, then it is consumed immediately by responding to the backlog of emails and blogs, but this day I decided to devote it to trying to understand what sequence of events could lead, apparently rationale human beings, to embark on such a systematic bloodbath as was the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

I downloaded two books onto my Kindle: ‘The Price of Glory’ by Alistair Horne and ‘The First World War’ by A J P Taylor and began to read.  ‘The Price of Glory’ was an exhaustive and detailed account of the build up to the battle with numerous human level insights from personal papers of participants, but it didn’t scratch where I itched; I wanted outrage, a polemic against the foolishness and waste of the first industrial war and I didn’t get it, well not by p 148 anyway.  So I switched to A J P Taylor and this helped by almost mocking the ruling elites and the generals who planned outdated tactics of waging cavalry against tanks and infantry against machine guns.

Through my morning of reading I was getting closer to understanding what had happened, but I was nowhere closer to understanding why it had happened.  The most revealing insight came through Horne’s astute observation, that the notebooks of generals on both sides of the Battle of Verdun logged in great detail ammunition supplies, but there were no personal records kept of casualties as a result of deployment of the munitions on the battlefield. It was as if there were three ingredients in the battle, shells, bullets and bodies, but only the first two were valued sufficiently to be counted.

I decided to take a walk, beginning at tourist information where I explained the purpose of my visit and where they were able to recommend a walking tour around the city that took in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, The World Peace Centre, The Victory Monument and The Underground Fortress.

I discovered three new things on that tour:

The first was that the city had been used as a place for holding British prisoners of war following the Napoleonic war between France and Prussia;

The second was that the entire tone and feel of the museum and memorials was on the military victory by the French, rather than on the price that was paid;

That the military brain behind ‘France’s greatest military victory’ was none other than Marshal Pétain, who had a young protégé in the Battle of Verdun by the name of Charles De Gaulle. There was no sign at Verdun of Pétain’s later decision to acquiesce in the face of the invading German forces, as he famously declared “They shall not pass!” and they didn’t, but then again that was never their objective. I may be on very dangerous ground here, but I just wondered whether the reflection on the human cost of the Battle of Verdun caused the 84 year old French military hero in 1940 to ponder whether the ‘price’ France would be required to pay again, was worth the glory.

Whilst Pétain stayed on as a ‘puppet’ Head of State of the French State/ Vichy Regime, following defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, his erstwhile protégé de Gaulle fled to London to command the Free French Forces. Following the end of World War II, Pétain was put on trial by De Gaulle for treason, was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out and instead commuted to life imprisonment by De Gaulle. History is written by the victors and there Pétain’s role in the Battle of Verdun is ‘airbrushed’ Soviet style, and his memory is sealed as a weak collaborator who dishonoured France rather than the military leader who ‘saved’ France at the Battle of Verdun.

In September 1938 Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich having reached a deal with Hitler, which he believed would give us ‘peace in our time’.  He was mobbed by adoring crowds at the airport on his return, who hailed him as our greatest ever prime minister.  The crowds who had gathered in their hundreds of thousands outside Buckingham Palace to hear King George say of Neville Chamberlain, “After the magnificent efforts of the Prime Minister in the cause of peace, it is my fervent hope that a new era of friendship and prosperity may be dawning among the peoples of the world,” quickly forgot they were there. The newspapers whose headlines echoed the royal tribute and national mood of the ‘saviour of the nation’ had that most familiar of journalistic diseases, selective amnesia. Instead we choose only to remember the indefatigable spirit of ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches.” Plus ça change.

We want to believe that our heroes are super human, courageous to the last, incapable of error and smirking in the face of death. When we see leaders fail or events undo their work, we would rather preserve the myth of the super hero than accept the fine line that we all tread every day between victory and villainy, between triumph and defeat, between hero and zero.

In this theme, I concluded my walk with a visit to the World Peace Centre.  Whereas at the war monuments and the underground fortress, there had been many fellow visitors, I was the solitary visitor to the World Peace Centre and the adjacent Notre-Dame Cathedral. As I walked through the peace centre exhibition, I saw a photograph that was to inject a moment of humanity and hope into the carnage cloaked in respectability on the battlefield. The photograph was of Francois Mitterrand, then president of France and Helmut Kohl, then Chancellor of Germany, who met in Verdun to lay a wreath jointly to the fallen on both sides in 1984, to mark seventy years since the beginning of the First World War. As they paused after laying the wreath they held hands in a gesture that was to bring hope and healing to both nations. Mitterrand had served as a minister in the Vichy Regime under Pétain and it seemed somehow appropriate that my camera flash against the glossy photo (see pic) created a ‘moment of creation’ image (after the Sistine Chapel) in which there was encapsulated the hopes of a past being laid to rest and a new beginning being commenced.