The remains of Fort Douaumont

I thought my next post would begin to cover my two week trek through Poland back in October, but the reverberations that kept me up last night unearthed a different memory. My fan and cell phone noise maker together couldn’t drown out the noise of artillery and larger ordinances echoing through the night into my hazy morning fog. Their expulsion from the barrels thumps in my chest from miles away. I stared up at the ceiling a little grumpy, but secure in the knowledge that the sounds of war were safely contained in the training area nearby. But what if they weren’t? I considered the alternate reality where those guns signified actual conflict, a disregard for the lives of so called “collaterals.”

In a field about 360 miles west of me lay deceptively peaceful hills covered in green. Before arriving at Fort Douaumont, the winding road leads past forests with markers of commemoration evident in various, seemingly random, places. I pulled my car over and began walking one of the paths near a marker. While the walking path was level, the ground all around me was pockmarked with small craters in every direction. My chest felt heavy as I began to grasp the scene around me from just over 100 years ago. Baker, schoolhouse, farmhouse, church, apothecary – signs on craters commemorating what once stood on the ground in front of me, now nothing but piles of broken stones. I was walking through one of the more than 9 towns that simply vanished during the almost 10 months of horrific fighting in Verdun. This town, Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury in front of Douaumont), and so many others like it were not just destroyed but made completely uninhabitable, as is much of the land around the hill still. The tranquility of the warm spring day was at odds with the leftover horror I witnessed while hearing echoes of guns and screams in my mind. I kept moving through the lush forest, occasionally startled by the emergence of trenches, or hidden forts rising from rocks and earth. The warning signs in French urge visitors to stay on marked trails; live ordinances are too common an occurrence still for the untrained to wander. The city of Metz, between Verdun and the German border, has a team of trained munition experts dedicated to disposing of the 40 tons of ammunition unearthed each year. Farmers find the bombs when they till their fields calling in the “iron harvest.” Those munitions are often still live and filled with arsenic and poisonous gases. 100 years on from a scene of mayhem and destruction the legacy lives in decayed weapons of war still capable of doom.

Clearing my head of trenches and lost towns, I drove to the top of the hill and the Fort over which the Germans and the French sacrificed so much youth and innocence. War had waged throughout Europe since mid-1914. German General Erich von Falkenhayn believed France represented Germany’s main foe and that the only way to defeat them thoroughly was to “bleed France to death.” He chose Verdun, and Fort Douaumont as the point upon which he would enact his assault. For the French, Verdun represented a century’s long battle with the Germans for territory. They built the Fort in the 1890’s to defend against the German border only 30 miles away and as a last fortification against a straight march to Paris. Despite the fortifications, Douaumont fell, without a fight, to fewer than 100 German soldiers. It was only the beginning of a long and vicious battle that captures the seemingly pointless nature of WWI trench warfare. 10 months of battle for the same exact stretch of land back and forth at the cost of more than 300,000 lives. Churchill later described the Fort, and Verdun, as “the anvil upon which French military manhood was to be hammered to death by German cannon.” The two sides fired over 50 million shells at each other in roughly 300 days. The ground itself displays the blows of those hammers still.

In reality, the Fort is simply the center or focal point of the battlefield we call Verdun. The entire region along the banks of the river Meuse became a wasteland in a war that still confuses historians. Stupid, pointless, wasteful, barbaric, and meaningless are words used to describe the years spent battling for yards of ground. What isn’t meaningless are the lives spent for those battles. Nearby the Douaumont Ossuary houses the bones of over 130,000 unknown soldiers, French and German, who died for land both nations saw as essential to their victory.

I walked through the Fort, and then the Ossuary, surrounded by the signs of decay, rot, and loss. Even in the midst of those haunted visions, birds nested, trees bowed to the wind, and a solitary jet flew circles in the clouds above. Life continues even on this hill overlooking the unmarked graves of men, beasts, and visions of dominance. The jet overhead, and the guns outside my apartment ostensibly posture themselves to defend from another war of nationalism, pride, and miscommunication. The guns here are silent today, as were the ones around the hills of Verdun. In the silence of that spring day in France, I thought I could hear the voices of the men, terrified and dying in the trenches before me. The sounds of children’s voices echo here too, emanating from the crater that once was their schoolhouse in Fleury. They are the sounds of unimaginable loss.

Back in my apartment, I hear the guns that reminded me of Verdun and I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness and disappointment. Their rumble is proof that the monuments, memoirs, and commemorations have failed to live up to their purpose: never forget. In hindsight, historians and combatants alike agree that war is not the answer. I wonder when we will learn our own lesson?