One hundred years ago, on Feb. 21, 1916, 1,200 German
artillery pieces began firing on French positions around Verdun, the ancient
fortress town on the Meuse River in eastern France.
It was the middle of World War I , and the fighting all
along the Western Front that ran between the Channel and the Alps had settled
into a static confrontation of men, planes and guns — guns, above all. That day
the Germans dropped a million shells onto the forts, forests and ravines around
Verdun, and in the 10 months that followed, 60 million more would fall in the
area. By then the
French had stopped the German advance and even recovered most of the
terrain they had lost, reduced by then to a lunar landscape bereft of vegetable
or animal life. And 300,000 men had died.
What exactly are we commemorating when we gather at the
forts, shell-holes and monuments of the former battlefield? We like our battles
to have a beginning and an end, to mark a moment and leave a meaning that
posterity can grasp and visitors can celebrate — usually, a symbolic or
strategic turning point, when one side loses the initiative and never regains
it, as at Gettysburg or Stalingrad.
We won’t find it at Verdun. The French won a great moral
victory — the last, in fact, that their arms would ever achieve — but it did
not significantly weaken one side more than the other, alter the strategic
picture, or determine the outcome of the war. Verdun declines to boast such
significance. There is little to celebrate, and we wander its hills today only
as pilgrims to a site of immense suffering.
On Sunday an expanded and renovated museum will reopen on
the site of one of the ruined villages; later this year, President François
Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel will inaugurate it officially, and add
their names to the long list of dignitaries who came before them. They will say
what President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl said when theyvisited
in 1984 and clasped hands before the great ossuary that holds the
shattered remains of the dead — that this must never happen again, that this
cannot happen again.
They will speak of Europe. French heads of state here once
spoke of national unity, of patriotism, of resistance, of heroism. Away from
Verdun, authors and survivors wrote of all that and much more. Germans wrote of
noble failure, of brave soldiers betrayed by a cynical or inept high command.
Some spoke of it in cautionary terms, as a military folly to be avoided at all
costs. Never again, wrote one of the architects of the German blitzkrieg of World War II, Heinz Guderian. “I
do not want a second Verdun there,” Hitler said of Stalingrad in November 1942,
as though to condemn in advance the protracted siege warfare that would cost
him his entire Sixth Army.
What, the visitor asks, is the meaning of what happened?
Like all battlefields, Verdun is silent.
Between an older narrative of heroism and a more recent one
of pointless slaughter lies an ocean of ambiguity, mingling grandeur with
absurdity. Through 1916 French and German losses kept climbing in a macabre pas
de deux. Under a sky illuminated by shellfire, in ravines and on hillsides
denuded of natural or man-made cover, huddled in what was left of their
trenches, the French and Germans lived Verdun in the same way. They used the
same words to describe it — “L’Enfer,” “Die Hölle von Verdun” — and spoke too
of entering another world, severed from the one they had left behind, and
pervaded perhaps by an evil presence. Yes, the French stopped the German
offensive on the Meuse. But so what?
To a historian 100 years later, Verdun does yield a meaning,
in a way a darkly ironic one. Neither Erich von
Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff, nor his French
counterpart, Joseph
Joffre, had ever envisaged a climactic, decisive battle at Verdun. They had
attacked and defended with their eyes elsewhere on the front, and had thought
of the fight initially as secondary, as ancillary to their wider strategic
goals. And then it became a primary affair, self-sustaining and endless. They
had aspired to control it. Instead it had controlled them. In that sense Verdun
truly was iconic, the symbolic battle of the Great War of 1914-18.
Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis
University, is the author of “Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.”
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De THE NEW YORK TIMES, 21/02/2016
Fotografía: French troops under shellfire during the Battle
of Verdun. CreditGeneral Photographic Agency/Getty Images
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