12.
The Road to Verdun.
The following morning I headed north towards the town of Pont-a-Mousson, where I would reconnect with the Western Front.
After the Battle of the Frontiers during 1914, the stabilised front ran just to the north of the town. The best place to see this was in the woods to the north east. Just before I entered the wood, I came across Le Petant French cemetery. The cemeteries increased in size the further north I travelled. I don’t know how many men were buried there but several thousand would be a good guess.
The woods had a very spooky feeling to them as I pushed my bike along a track with old shell craters and sunken trenches stretched into the woods on both sides. There was no birdsong or any other noise except for the gentle rustling of leaves in the breeze. I felt like an intruder in that sanctuary to the dead, so after leaving a single poppy, I left the woods to the west. As I emerged from the trees, the birdsong came back, but in there, nothing!
I then headed north west to the German cemetery at Thiaucourt, which is the resting place for 11,685 German dead. I don’t quite know how to say this without sounding weird, but I had grown to like the German cemeteries. Maybe like isn’t the best word to use, but I felt more at peace whilst visiting them than I did at the French and British cemeteries. Maybe it’s the darker headstones and more subtle memorials which blend in better with the surrounding landscape that made me feel more at ease?
After the German cemetery, I visited the American cemetery which is located at the other side of Thiaucourt. It contains the graves of 4,153 soldiers who were killed during the St Mihiel offensive of September 1918, which was the one and only solely American offensive carried out during the war. The objective was to capture the city of Metz and although this wasn’t realised, due to the Germans increasing their defences and the Americans over stretching their supply lines, it was still considered as a successful advance. Although not for the 4,000 dead Americans in the cemetery!
The American Cemetery is totally different to the German one a mile or so away. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful place of white marble which stands out against the immaculate grass and sculptured gardens and is a fine memorial to the soldiers who are buried there, but it just felt a bit big, bold and brash for my liking, but that’s just me...
After travelling back south towards the front lines in the woods of Mort-Mare, I cooked some pasta in my pot over a small fire whilst surrounded by the remains of bunkers and trenches. The woods here didn’t have the same feeling as the woods earlier, they felt almost welcoming, with the sound of birdsong and the rustling of leaves from small animals. It was like the other woods wanted to remember the horror which took place a century ago. I didn’t know it yet, but I would have another, even spookier encounter within some woods, that very night.
My final destination for that day was supposed to have been the town of St Mihiel, but I had seriously underestimated the time that it would take to visit everywhere that day. Because of that miscalculation, by the time I got to Apremont-le-Foret, which is about six miles from St Mihiel it was almost dark. To get to St Mihiel meant following a road through the forest, but I hadn’t had any lights for my bike since they were stolen in Montenegro and my head torch was broken. I tried anyway, but it was impossible. So I reluctantly pushed my bike along a forest track before setting up camp next to a fallen tree. As I had already eaten, I didn’t bother having a fire. I was tired, so fell asleep almost instantly.
A few hours later, I was awoken by the sound of shouting in the woods. It startled and worried me, so I slowly shuffled backwards until the fallen tree was behind me, whilst listening intently for more shouting. After several minutes it came again. They were German (I think?) and when I returned home, I tried to identify them from my memory. The nearest and probably only words they could have been were “Beschuss Anschlag.” For those who don’t speak German, they translate as “Shell Attack.”
During that night, I thought that it might have been an angry landowner trying to scare poachers away or something, although I never saw a light. But I did wonder why the shouting was German in the middle of a French forest.
There will never be an explanation for what I heard in the woods that night or whether they were made by an angry farmer or something else. Needless to say, I didn’t get anymore sleep that night and I thought that my nerves would eventually be calmed by the arrival of dawn spreading through the forest. I usually love that time of morning; the transition from night to day. But the view that the morning light brought, made me shiver- and not from the cold.
I had made camp on the only flat ground around except for the track. The whole of the forest floor was a mass of collapsed trenches, shattered bunkers and shell holes from which the century old trees grew. Nature had done its best to reclaim what man had destroyed, but it was obviously struggling in some areas, which were still devoid of undergrowth and vegetation even after the passing of nearly a hundred summers. Barbed wire still hung from rusted pickets, placed there by German soldiers all those years ago, (German wire was thicker than British or French.)
It turned out that I had inadvertently camped in the Bois Brule; the ‘Burnt Woods,’ part of the Saint Mihiel Salient battlefield. Does the location explain the shouts in the night? I don’t know. I’ve never been a strong believer in the paranormal, but I can’t find a rational explanation for my experiences either, so who knows? Maybe there is residual energy left in places where bad things have happened which makes you imagine things, although I’m sure that I didn’t dream up those words. It also doesn’t explain the feeling of dread and the cold shiver on my back which I felt hundreds of times throughout my journey.
Even in the full light of day it felt unnerving in those woods, so I didn’t linger. After leaving a poppy on the old parapet of a trench, I found the road again and headed north towards the town of St Mihiel.
Saint-Mihiel was captured by the Germans, during the Battles of the Frontiers, at the start of the war and stayed in their hands until it was taken by the Americans, during September 1918. Whilst passing through, I thought that it looked like a pleasant enough place, although it was a bit shabby in places. A lot of the shops in the centre were also closed and boarded up, which means that it’s probably lost a lot of trade to its larger neighbour Verdun. It’s a shame, but a sign of the times. Just to the north of Saint-Mihiel is the French cemetery La Vaux-Racine which contains the remains of 3,417 French soldiers.
Verdun.
A few miles further north of Saint-Mihiel I came to the battered remains of Fort Troyon, which played a pivotal role during 1914 by stopping the German encirclement of Verdun.
Fort Troyon was constructed in the mid 19th Century as part of a defensive line of forts from Verdun to Nancy. A massive bombardment of the fort began on the 8th September 1914, but the brave French garrison held out for the full 48 hours which was required to enable French reserves to be brought forward. This heroic stand stopped the Germans from crossing the River Meuse and prevented the encirclement of Verdun from the south.
From here, I backtracked for a couple of miles before turning northeast onto a road which led to the village of Vaux-les-Palameix. The battlefield of 1914/1915 lay just beyond the forest to the east of the village and I was happy that the birds were singing as I rode through it on a track lined with the vestiges of the century old war. After a couple of miles the track reached a road which cut through the forest, heading north, towards Verdun. Near to the junction was a cluster of old German gravestones of soldiers who were killed during the Battles for the Frontiers in 1914. It’s amazing that they weren’t destroyed during the heavy fighting which took place in that area later in the war.
I turned onto the road which headed north towards Verdun, following it for about a mile through the forest, before turning onto another road which headed towards the village of Les Eparges. Just to the east of the village is the Eparges ridge, which the Germans occupied during September 1914. Both sides recognised the importance of this ridge. If the French had been able to capture the whole of it, then they would have had an unimpeded view behind the German lines of the Saint-Mihiel salient to the south.
The battle began on the 17th February 1915 with the detonation of four huge mines beneath the German positions on the ridge. (There was supposed to be five, but one didn’t go off, which was slightly worrying whilst there, as I don’t have the best luck in the world!)
The French followed this up with an infantry attack that lasted for three days. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to capture the whole length of the ridge, with the Germans managing to cling onto the eastern end after a large number of reserves were rushed forward to fill the breaches in their line, formed after the mine explosions. Despite numerous attempts, the French were unable to dislodge the Germans until the Saint-Mihiel salient was taken in 1918.
The ridge is now a French memorial park, preserved so that future generations are able to see the struggle which took place on that low ridge. A number of monuments are located along the length of the ridge, but these, as well as the remains of the trenches are totally drowned out by the four massive craters caused by the detonation of the mines.
Afterwards, the ride northeast, through the forest, towards Verdun was nice and uneventful, finally reaching the city and my intended campsite during that magical hour when the summer sun makes everything glow. (I was late!) I decided to stay for two nights at the campsite so that I could visit as many sites as possible without being encumbered by my luggage.
Just after sunrise the following morning saw me on the road which runs north from Verdun towards the places where the great battle took place.
Early on, the Germans recognised that the War would be won or lost on the Western Front, but they didn’t have enough troops to launch a full scale assault of their own. So they therefore decided to ‘bleed the French army to death at Verdun.’ By doing this, they hoped to draw in and slaughter the French reserves. They were right and their March 1916 attack on the fortress town of Verdun meant that the majority of the French army was bogged down in a battle not of their choosing. Unfortunately, it also sucked the German army dry of their reserves and fresh troops.
Whole books have been written about the Battle of Verdun, so I can’t go into any detail here, as I would just get carried away. So I will just say that if the French had lost Verdun, then the outcome of the war would probably have been very different, as it would have opened up the route to Paris.
The Germans came quite close to making a breakthrough in the Verdun area, but the Battle of the Somme further north relieved some pressure on the French, as the Germans had to move their reserves to prevent a breakthrough in the Somme valley.
Verdun itself was deemed to be a city of massive strategic importance in the late 19th Century due to its proximity to the German border. Therefore a ring of forts were built to sustain its defence in the event of an invasion by the Germans. The initial German attack on the 21stFebruary 1916 took the French command by surprise, although they were warned about a likely attack by their own intelligence, which they chose to ignore. The French command believed that the Germans wouldn’t attack Verdun because of its strong ring of defensive fortifications, so they had removed a lot of the defending troops in favour of other, less well defended areas on the Western Front.
Somehow, the heavily outnumbered French soldiers managed to hold off the German attacks for four days, until French reserves were thrown into the battle on the 25th with the orders to halt the German advance at all cost. Fort Douaumont was taken on the same day and things were looking very bleak, but somehow they still managed to hold the Germans back, at a massive cost in French lives.
My first destination the following morning was Fort Souville, which is about two and a half miles from the centre of Verdun. Fort Souville was the objective for the attacking Germans on 12th July 1916. If this had fallen, then Verdun would have been lost. The French knew that, so therefore every available resource was thrown into the fight to repulse the German attack. This worked but once again at a massive cost.
I opted to follow the road past the fort before entering it from the north, the same direction as the attacking Germans. There wasn’t a single bit of ground that was level, just a mass of century old shell holes, whilst nearer to the fort old trenches snaked through the trees and undergrowth.
The fort itself looked interesting with its many observation posts and gun emplacements to explore, but there were quite a few other people visiting there and I just wanted to be alone for some reason.
A little way away from the fort were some well preserved trenches, so I just sat there for a while to gather my thoughts. I’d long ago given up trying to imagine what life must have been like on the battlefields during the war, so instead I listened to the breeze rustling the leaves and the chatter of birdsong, thankful that I could sit there in peace.
Back on the road, I headed northwest for about a mile and a half until I reached my next destination: the French National Cemetery, Douaumont. The large cathedral like monument of the ossuary wasn’t built to make a grand statement by the French after the war, it was a necessary addition in order to give a decent burial to the remains of about 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers who were found on the battlefields in the years afterwards. (Sometimes it was impossible to even identify which nationality they were.)
Whilst in the field to the front of the ossuary are the resting places of 16,142 French soldiers who were ‘fortunate’ to be identified.
After leaving my bike at the car park next to the ossuary, I walked around the cemetery in order to enter it from the bottom gate. On my way there, I stopped at the Jewish memorial wall, which was built in 1938. When you enter the cemetery via the gate your first view isn’t of the graves, but a grassy slope bordered with bushy trees which leads up to a flagpole with a Tricolor fluttering in the wind. Behind this looms the huge tower of the ossuary.
As I stepped through the gates, a gap between the trees brought the gravestones into sight. How do you describe thousands of white concrete crosses that merge into each other in the distance? At all the other cemeteries I visited, I made a conscious effort to walk past every one of them, but not there. I couldn’t, there were just too many. Instead, I sat on the grass at the bottom of the cemetery and just stared at them. Over 16,000 in the graves and 130,000 in the ossuary, how do you comprehend such a number? Plus there are about 100,000 German and French soldiers who were never found, lost to the battlefields.
The total amount of dead from both sides during the Battle of Verdun is somewhere in the region of 300,000. Which is equivalent to the whole population of the City of Coventry, but as the dead were all men between the ages of 18 and about 45, a better modern day comparison would be to take all of the men below the age of 50 out of Leeds, which as the UK’s third largest city has a total population of about 700,000. That’s the only way that I could comprehend such a number...
After composing myself, I walked up the central tree lined avenue towards the ossuary. Just below the steps at the head of the cemetery was a lone grave set in the centre. That is the resting place of General Francois Anselin, who was killed on October 24th 1916 after volunteering to lead the attack to recapture the fortress of Douaumont.
You might have noted my scepticism towards the leaders from the time, but this does not extend to the Generals from both sides. The British saying “Lions led by Donkeys” is nothing but a myth. I don’t know about the French or German Generals, but the British Generals probably spent more time on the front lines than the soldiers under their command, who were rotated out of the trenches every few days, whilst the British Generals visited their men at the front on an almost daily basis. Somewhere in the region of 200 British Brigadier Generals and above were killed during the war.
The atmosphere was noticeably sombre as I stepped through the large entranceway of the ossuary. The lighting lit the interior so that the two wide corridors were shining a dull orange, turning into a deeper red in the large alcoves which lined the walls on both sides. It’s the saddest building I’ve ever visited and I felt my emotions start to get the better of me again, therefore I’m sorry that I can’t offer you any further description of the inside, but I just can’t remember. I do recall one thing, though- there were small windows which let you look directly into the ossuary pits and the thousands of bones which they contained. I’m not sure how I feel about that? On one hand it lets you see the truth, but on the other, shouldn’t they just be left in peace?
Before leaving the cemetery, I paid a visit to the Muslim section at the north eastern end.
Like Britain, the French also made good use of their colonial troops during the war, with many making the ultimate sacrifice. I had seen plenty of French Muslim graves at the cemeteries in Gallipoli and Macedonia, where the cross piece on their barbed wire picket grave markers had been replaced by a crescent. The cemetery at Douaumont was slightly different though, as each of the 592 Muslim gravestones was set at a different angle to the rest of the cemetery; they were facing east, towards Mecca.
Back on the road, I turned onto a smaller road, which headed through the forest, towards Fort Douaumont- one of the most heavily fought over areas of the whole war. The trees and undergrowth on either side of the road had tried to hide the horror which had occurred, but it will be only after many more centuries have passed that they succeed in this task. Trenches and shell craters still scar the landscape in testament to the hell which took place there.
Fort Douaument was captured with relative ease by the Germans on the 25th February 1916. Despite being able to accommodate a garrison of 635 soldiers, the French command decided early on in the war to reduce this to 57 soldiers, whilst also removing most of the forts heavy guns to use in other areas of the front. It is possible to visit and explore the inside of the fortress, but I had neither the time nor inclination to enter its dark and suppressing interior, preferring instead to walk to its summit, which offered a commanding view over the surrounding forest. The ground around the fort had been kept clear of the encroaching trees that now cover most of the battlefield therefore there was nothing to hide the signs of the shattered ground which surrounded the smashed fortress.
After a while, I’d had enough and opted to go for a little walk in the woods to the north. I was hoping to find a little sanctuary of peace so that I could gather my thoughts of the day before writing them down, but there was nowhere. Every scrap of ground held the horrendous memory of the past. Shell holes, which merged into each other forming a kind of tree covered moonscape, interspersed with the remains of old trenches and moss covered detritus (mostly unexploded shells but also water bottles, rusted shovel heads, barbed wire and chunks of shrapnel) littered the floor of the forest.
A lot of the remaining trenches in the Verdun area still have reinforced concrete stakes on both sides of the trench. These were used to hold the revetments in place which kept the sides from collapsing inwards. Over the years, the corrugated metal revetments have rusted away, causing the walls to infill the trenches a bit and leaving the concrete stakes standing proud of the surrounding earth. This gives the trenches an almost skeletal appearance and did nothing to brighten the perceived mood of the forest. They’re like the bones of long dead serpents as they wind their way around the trees.
Whilst I was thinking that I really need to get out of that forest before I went completely mad from the heavy silence which suppressed my thoughts, I came to a clearing which had been kept mostly free of vegetation. This was a section of the original front lines and no-man’s land, which had been kept clear to preserve a snap shot of the battlefield so that future generations could see what it was like before the forest grew after the war. It was no less grim, but the bright sunlight helped to clear away some of the bad atmosphere that had permeated my mind. Although the trenches and shell holes were still present, the long grass managed to soften the landscape. I had therefore found a semblance of the peace which I so badly craved.
Afterwards I walked to the ruins of the village of Douaumont, which was totally destroyed during the fighting, before following a path that led back through the depressing forest to where I’d left my bike at the fort.
The French authorities were correct to preserve the battlefield at Verdun. As well as it being a better memorial than any manmade structure, it is also right that the souls of the dead and disappeared should be free to roam in peace.
Before I started my journey, I wasn’t a believer in the paranormal, but now, well I’m certain there are a lot of things that we will never fully understand about life, or should I say death. I’m usually at my happiest when out in the wilderness; either forests or mountains, but not in those forests around Verdun. Therefore I felt relieved when I reached the small town of Bras-sur-Meuse a few miles to the west. On the way there, I stopped at a slightly strange memorial: Tranchee des Baionnettes (Trench of Bayonets.)
A year after the war ended, several bayonets still attached to their rifles were found sticking out of the earth which covered an old trench. Upon the excavation of the trench in 1920, 47 bodies were found buried beneath the bayonets. Legend says that the men were buried alive under the soil thrown up by an intense artillery barrage, which only left their bayonets uncovered. Although a good story, it probably isn’t true. During the war it was a common practice to bury large groups of the dead in disused sections of trenches, before backfilling the trenches and marking the location with rifles pushed into the earth. Whatever the truth, they built a memorial there anyway, but it’s a strange affair built from concrete. It also had a bad atmosphere, although maybe it was just me, as there were plenty of other people visiting who didn’t seem to have noticed it.
After the depressing mood that I felt at the various Douaumont sites, I needed to burn some energy, so I raced ten miles or so to the west towards the site of Cote 304 (height 304.) This small but significant hill was held by the French for the first half of the war. The French grimly held onto this position despite ferocious German attempts to capture it on the 20th March and the 9th April1916. The summit of the hill eventually fell to the Germans on the 29th June 1916, but they only managed to hold onto it for the next two months before it was recaptured by the French.
Like a lot of the old battlefields around Verdun, nature has reclaimed Cote 304. A century ago that small hill was a living hell for the men who lived, fought and died there. The noise of shelling and machinegun fire had been replaced by the quiet rustling of leaves and the shrill cry of the birds as I left my bike next to the tall memorial stone and stepped slowly into the woods.
After a few paces, I came to the old German trenches that snaked through the woods. It would be an untruth to say that I wanted to be there, as I’d had enough of bloody trenches by then, but I forced myself to put my own feelings to one side, as it wasn’t the fault of the men who had been slaughtered at that location. I left a poppy on the old parapet which looked towards the site of the old French positions at the other side of the summit memorial. As I turned to go, I muttered a couple words in English and one in German that I’d picked up somewhere on my journey. “Sorry lads, traurigkeit.” (A mournful way of saying sorry, I think?)
Throughout my journey, whenever I left a trench, battlefield or memorial, I always had one last look behind me and that trench was no different. I was amazed to see a shaft of sunlight shining through a gap in the trees and lighting up the section of trench where I had left the poppy a few moments before. It only lasted a few seconds, but was one of the most amazing things that I’ve ever seen. It was almost as if that forested hilltop battlefield had been listening to my words....
After descending the northern slopes of Cote 304, I came to the remains of the village of Haucourt which used to lie just to the south of the village of Malancourt. On the right hand side of the road a memorial sits on top of a very smashed up bunker. Upon closer inspection I managed to (mostly) decipher a French plaque dedicated to the memory of the six French companies which were completely destroyed during the defence of Malancourt and Haucourt during the spring of 1916. It also mentioned the US soldiers who were killed recapturing those villages in September 1918.
From Malancourt I headed about five miles east towards the village of Forges-sur-Meuse, before turning north towards the village of Consenvoye and the nearby German cemetery.
Throughout the length of that last section, it was possible to see the vestiges of war marking every last scrap of land and woodland at the side of the road that I had travelled on. Earlier in my journey, I would have visited everywhere that I could have, but I had seen enough by then. For the remainder of my journey, I would visit the cemeteries, memorials and large open sites associated with the war, but I would not seek out the forgotten trenches and battlefields which lay in the depths of the woods and forests.
I made this decision whilst sat