The Price of Glory (59 page)

They must have been mad,
ces gens-là.

Then, casting a shell fragment at his flock, he is off. Most of the infertile battlefield on the Right Bank is now shrouded over with a merciful cloak of secondary growth trees and shrubs, dense hawthorn and wild roses. It is almost impenetrable. Where you can find your way inside it, you at once feel rather than see that literally every inch of the ground is pock-marked. Suddenly you may come across apple-trees blossoming in the wilderness, and you know you are on the site of one of the nine vanished villages. At some, like Ornes there are still the vaguely identifiable fragments of tiles and remnants of houses heaped into crude trenches; at others, like Beaumont and Fleury, there is a small shrine or a monument to guide you, otherwise not a brick.

The slopes of the Mort Homme are covered with a forest of young firs, planted in the 1930’s when all other attempts at cultivation had failed. The wind whistles through the trees and the birds sing, and that is all. It is the nearest thing to a desert in Europe. Nobody seems ever to visit it. Even lovers eschew the unchallenged privacy of its glades. The ghosts abound; it is one of the eeriest places in this world. A grown man will not willingly repeat the experience of getting lost in the labyrinth of firecuts that crisscross the deserted plantations.

Everywhere in the spooky jungles the pathetic relics, the non-perishable debris of battle still lie; the helmets, the rusted water bottles, the broken rifles, the huge shell fragments — and, still, the bones. The wild boar of the Meuse are extremely partial to them; and every day the French Army Chaplain at the
Ossuaire
explores the battlefield, looking for the tell-tale sign of diggings. Barely a week goes by without the discovery of some new ‘unknown soldier’, often part of some all too easily reconstructed tragic scene; perhaps half-hidden in a shell-hole the tableau of three skeletons — of two stretcher-bearers and the casualty they were carrying, all killed by the same shell.

Little enough of this is seen by the casual visitor to Verdun, who is funnelled to the
Ossuaire,
to the
‘Tranchée des Baїonnettes’
, and above all to Forts Vaux and Douaumont. On the crumbling outside
wall of Vaux, near a memorial to Raynal’s last pigeon, a cracked and modest little plaque placed there by an anonymous mother may move you:

To my son, since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry.

Inside they will show you Raynal’s office and sell you a copy of his book. At Douaumont, the elderly
Gardiens
— all survivors of the battle — grumpily escort visitors round the tour they have made ten thousand times, accompanied with their own curious version of history that has evolved over the years, with the frequently interjected, melancholic litany of
‘très grandes pertes, très grandes pertes’.
When there are no visitors, they can very likely be found up on the glacis, collecting
escargots
in old German helmets for their supper. Up there, standing on the 155 millimetre turret, like a ghost in modern dress, is a young
poilu
with slung rifle, a
Gitane
suspended from his lip, eyeing disdainfully the old men at their snail hunt. He is supposed to be sentry to the rifle range now carved out of the desert beyond the fort, over which Kunze and Radtke must have crept to enter Douaumont on that fateful day of February 1916.

* * *

A few years ago a colonel in the new German
Luftwaffe
told the author how he had been travelling from Germany to attend a NATO meeting in Paris, and had taken the route through Verdun.

On the hills outside the city, I was held up by roadworks. A bulldozer was at work, cutting a new road, and as its blade entered the earth out tumbled German steel-helmets of the First War. It was a strange sensation. Here I was, a German officer on my way to sit in conference with our French allies…. I could hardly believe that all this had happened only forty-four years ago, even just within my lifetime. It was more like watching archaeologists dig up the very distant past.

The folly, the waste and the stupendous courage of the men who fought at Verdun indeed seem to belong to an age a thousand years removed from our own; the world of Falkenhayn and Nivelle, of the
murderous rivalry between the Gaul and Teuton supermen, to have disappeared in the mists of Ancient History. How much longer will the ghosts of Verdun continue to torment France? When will they be exorcised? Will it be when the last of the old warriors guarding Douaumont and its memories have moved on to their Valhalla? Or will France have to wait until the eery forests on the Mort Homme mature and are hewn down, and farms and happy villages once again populate its dead slopes?

Postscript.
On translation of
The Price of Glory
into French, there followed a long correspondence with ex-Lieutenant Kléber Dupuy (see pp. 299–300), the last French officer to stand in the way of the momentary high tide of the German advance, at Souville on 12 July 1916. Much decorated in the First World War, his subsequent career graphically illustrated the tragic divisions that were to plague France a generation later. After 1940, Kléber Dupuy was again decorated for his role in the Resistance, i.e. fighting
against
his former chief at Verdun, Pétain. But he never lost his respect for Pétain and, in the 1960s, he led the movement for the rehabilitation of the dead
Maréchal;
a measure adamantly opposed by Dupuy’s Second World War chief, de Gaulle. In his last letter to the author, he wrote: ‘My most ardent desire is to accompany the Marshal’s ashes for reburial at Douaumont, and on that day I hope you will accompany me in the cortège,
bras dessus, bras dessous
.’

Alas, ex-Lieutenant Dupuy died a short time afterwards; the lingering passions of the Second World War have still not permitted the reburial of Pétain at Douaumont.

As for Pétain’s adversaries: when the Berlin Wall came down, I was invited to visit the Cecilienhof, once the home of the Prussian Crown Prince, then site of the Potsdam Conference of 1945, and for years closed to the West. We were taken for lunch to a charming small
Schloss
nearby, temporarily used as a restaurant by West Berliners. Hardly encouraging to the appetite, the rooms were filled with glass cases of broken skulls and twisted skeletons. The house was, my hosts explained, still doubling as the East German Centre for Forensic Science. I asked, casually, who had lived there in former times: ‘Oh, some general – he was called Falkenhayn; he died here.’ Disturbing a setting as it was for lunch, the macabre exhibits seemed supremely congruent to the spirit of the man who had launched the most terrible battle in History – and who died plagued by bad dreams.

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