13.
Meuse-Argonne.
La Voie Sacree was the main supply route for the French, stretching 60km from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun. The battle would have been lost without that single road which carried up to 12,000 trucks a day to keep the French army supplied. Today, the road is maintained as a French national Monument.
As the following day would involve cycling 80+ miles, I was up and off at first light, with my first destination being the start of the Voie Sacree. Every kilometre of the road is marked by a milepost carved out of stone, complete with a bronze French Adrian steel helmet on top. I only saw two of these before I turned off the Voie Sacree to head northwest, back to the front lines which would soon wind their way through the Argonne forest. The fighting in this area began in September 1914 and carried on unabated until 1918. Although the Argonne sector of the front butted up against the Verdun sector, the majority of the Argonne front lines remained static for the duration of the war and were rather quiet compared to other areas of the Western Front. There were some notable exceptions to this rule though and one of these was the Butte de Vauquois.
About 15 miles, as the crow flies, west of Verdun stood the small village of Vauquois, the village sat at the summit of a hill 290m high and commanded a fine view over the surrounding landscape. This view was ultimately to become the villages undoing. The village had stood there since Adam was a lad, but these days literally nothing remains. Huge explosive mines destroyed the entire area; the hill is now two hills surrounded by massive craters and the site that the village once stood upon would now lie about 10m above the summits of both those hills.
After leaving my bike at the car park, I reluctantly followed a path through the woods which led up towards the battlefield. The sunlight softened my mood as it shone through the leaves above but it couldn’t hide the remnants of war. Rolls of rusted barbed wire and pointed metal stakes, which had been arranged next to the path, were illuminated along the way. I was mindful of the previous day and didn’t want a repeat, so I told myself that I would just walk to the memorial and look at everything else from a distance. No exploring the surrounding woods for me that day.
Nothing can prepare you for the sight of the devastation which took place at Vauquois. I just sat on the grass near the memorial and stared at the craters, struggling to comprehend the destruction which lay before me. 519 explosive mines were detonated beneath that hill during the war, these were extra to the ‘normal’ shelling and bombing that took place everywhere on the Western Front. The grass or tree covered moonscapes of the other battlefields looked like nothing compared to the holes which lay before me.
Afterwards, whilst visiting the French cemetery of La Maize, just south of Vauquois, I came to the conclusion that most of the casualties of the Vauquois battlefield must still be buried there, as the 4,368 French soldiers buried in that cemetery didn’t correspond to the likely number of soldiers who died during the three years of mine warfare that took place at Vauquois! Poor lost souls, I wish that they could rest in peace...
A few miles further north I reached the small town of Varennes-en-Argonne. During the majority of the war years, it was located just behind the German lines, which meant that it was almost entirely destroyed by French shelling. It was finally liberated by soldiers from the United States on September 26th 1918. A memorial was built by the Pennsylvanian state government in 1927, in memory of all the American men who gave their lives during the fighting in France.
I found it to be a beautiful and peaceful place compared to the battlefields a few miles away and I started to appreciate why those grand memorials had been built. They enable you to remember the dead without actually having to visit the battlefields and I suppose that this was more important for the people who survived than it is for those who visit the battlefields today. We haven’t seen the horror of what happened in those places. To enable veterans to revisit without actually revisiting ‘hell’ was probably the reason behind them and they do that role remarkably well. At the start of my journey I was sceptical about the cemeteries and memorials on the Western Front that had been cleansed of all signs of the suffering which occurred, but I understand why now.
The Argonne Forest and the road that cut through it were littered with remains of the war. I saw some of these bunkers and trenches from the road, but I decided not to enter the gloom beneath the trees for a closer look. At the time, I blamed the fact that I still had a long way to ride that day, but like I’ve already mentioned, I’d just had enough of it all.
Fortunately I was soon away from the encroaching forest and cycling up a small valley towards the small town of Vienne-le-Chateau. The signs of the war were still everywhere, but the oppressing feeling that I felt in the woods had gone. The grass was green, the sky was blue and the tarmac beneath my tires was smooth. It was a good day for a long bicycle ride!
After stopping for a short rest at La Harazee French cemetery, I carried on through Vienne-le-Chateau, before following a series of minor roads west which eventually took me to my next destination; the small village of Massiges.
On the northern outskirts of the village lies the statue of La Vierge aux Abeilles (The Virgin of the Bees.) During the war, the statue was hit several times by bullets and shrapnel, after which some bees used the hollow interior as a hive, hence the name. At the time, it was located next to the main supply route for the front and countless numbers of French troops prayed to the statue before going up the nearby hill to their deaths.
That hill was La Main des Massiges, (The Hand of Massiges) so called because the low ridges of the hill form the shape of an outstretched hand. The summit of the hill which overlooks the Aisne valley was quickly captured by the Germans, whilst the French occupied some of the ridges. Despite numerous attempts by the French to capture the summit, mostly during 1914-15, they were unable to take the heavily fortified German positions until the early autumn of 1918.
These days, a group of local people have spent the last ten years or so restoring the trenches on one part of the battlefield just to the north of the village. Before I arrived there, I was unsure about my feelings with regards to this, as I saw some dreadful trench restoration attempts throughout my journey. But after seeing their work, I have nothing but praise for their labour of love. It probably helped that it was an absolutely stunning Summers day when I left my bike at the Massiges memorial stone, which lay just to the west of the recreated battlefield. The bright sunshine was making the chalky soil whiter than normal and greatly contributed in dispelling my qualms about visiting that location. The entrance near the memorial is dominated by a huge crater, probably caused by a mine. After the crater, I reached the first of the recreated trenches and my mind was immediately put at ease by a sign placed on the side of the trench. It stated the following:
“Ici a ete retrouve un soldat francais non identifie (Infanterie colonial) Mars 2013.”
Not only were the volunteers recreating the battlefield, they were also giving a decent burial to scores of French and German soldiers who had been lost to the world for the past century. There were lots of those little signs dotted around the site; testament to the good work that they are doing. The trenches themselves were the best recreations that I saw on my journey; their slightly rough and ready appearance is probably what they looked like during the war, instead of the other more pristine examples that I saw in other places along my route.
To the west of Massiges, the land rises up to a height of about 200m. This area contains some of the best preserved trenches on the Western Front but unfortunately it is also one of the largest military training areas in France and therefore public access is restricted. It is also partly used as a dump for gas shells and other chemical munitions that have been found on the Western Front. Because of this, I skirted around this to the south, visiting the French cemetery at Suippes before continuing on my way.
Suippes-Ville War cemetery contains 4,736 French dead, as well as a single British grave of a civilian volunteer ambulance driver called R.D. Gidley who died on 26/04/1917. He was driving for the British Ambulance Committee, which was set up in 1914 in order to help the French move their casualties to the hospitals at the rear. The British Army had enough motorised ambulances thanks to the efforts of the British Red Cross, but as the French had ten times the amount of soldiers fighting during the early part of the war, they were still relying on horse drawn ambulances to ferry a lot of their wounded to the hospitals, which took longer and caused a lot of the wounded to die unnecessarily, when they could have been saved if they had arrived sooner. It was a very worthy cause and one that didn’t go unnoticed by the French Government at the time.
Despite conducting a lot of research, I can’t find any more information about R.D. Gidley, not even a first name or his age at death. He was either a conscientious objector or was either too old or ill to serve with the British forces. Either way, it doesn’t matter, as he did his duty as much as the British soldiers who served throughout the war. He now lies alongside the Frenchmen he tried to save; amongst friends.
About 3 miles further west, I came to a French National Cemetery which is located just outside the village of Jonchery-sur-Suippe. 7,906 Frenchmen are buried here, but as I was walking amongst the graves, I noticed a name that seemed out of place. Annoyingly I didn’t record what it was, but after further research I have found out that there are four Czech volunteers of the French Foreign Legion buried at that cemetery. Approximately 12,000 Czech and Slovak men volunteered to fight with the French Foreign Legion during the war. These volunteers were unhappy about Czechoslovakia being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and decided to do something about it. They were rewarded with this wish when the French Government acknowledged their right to self determination on the 29th June 1918.
A little bit further west, I came to another cemetery that contained soldiers not normally associated with the Western Front, Russians.
In 1915 the French appealed for help from their Russian allies who sent four brigades of 40,000 men to the Western and Macedonian Fronts. These were dubbed ‘The Russian Expeditionary Force’ and fought under the command of the French until the Russian Revolution of 1917. After this, the Russians who wished to carry on fighting the Germans were reorganised into a Russian Legion unit of the French army, whilst the remainder, who were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, were guarded and confined for the rest of the war to avoid the possible spread of rebellion.
The Russian cemetery near the village of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grande contains the graves of the 915 Russian soldiers who were killed on the Champagne battlefields, whilst a Russian Orthodox chapel was built adjacent to the cemetery to commemorate the 6,100 Russians who were killed on the Western Front. The chapel is a magnificent small, white building with a green roof completed with Russian style domes. The inside is just as wonderful and is a fine memorial to the Russian dead.
After here, I visited a Russian memorial that is located in a small village but I can’t remember which village it was, as I forgot to write it down at the time (somewhere to the east of Reims?) It was a recent (2014) memorial statue of a life sized Russian soldier holding a small French girl. The majority of British people might not know much about the Russians on the Western Front, but it would seem that the French haven’t forgotten.