The Last Days of Fort Vaux, March 9-June 7, 1916

II
THE ROAD
(March 11)

At the foot of the gloomy cathedral, so different from the graceful Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs with its coloured marble, one crosses a passage under half-ruined walls and reaches a terrace which looks out over all the tragedy of Verdun: gutted houses stripped of their outer wall and with their furniture hanging loose like the inwards of slaughtered cattle; crumbled façades, doors opening on the void, slashed and jagged fragments of walls, often topped by tall, useless chimneys. All this, which is now a mere shapeless mass of rubbish, was once the Rue Mazel, the busiest, gayest, and liveliest quarter of Verdun, and of that war-time Verdun which was far more bright, animated, and amusing than the Verdun of peaceful days. The bombardment has brought into prominence the ancient ramparts, dating, no doubt, from the time of the prince-bishops, which girdle the upper city and around which the ruins of the new city now group themselves. A stray dog, the sole living creature that wanders through the deserted streets, utters plaintive barks. Shells fall on Jardin-Fontaine. Right above the city one aeroplane is chasing another. You hear the tick-tack of their machine-guns; the German hastily makes his way back to his own lines....

I am living in a whitewashed cell in a Verdun barracks. Rolled up in a blanket, I am sleeping on a camp-bed, when Major P—— rushes in like a whirlwind and, flashing his little electric lamp, wakes me up with a start. At the outset of the campaign he had offered me a more sumptuous hospitality in the cellars of Berry-au-Bac. The cellars of Berry-au-Bac were replete with carpets, armchairs, mirrors, and art bronzes. We ate from patterned china, and drank from fine glass. Even if the tableware was an odd set, it gave one an impression of wealth and luxury.

We took a boat down the Aisne. At times the bullets accompanied us like a swarm of bees, and the water seemed to prolong their mournful whistle. When we went down, in order to get shelter, into those famous vaulted cellars, decorated like drawing-rooms, whose mirrors double the perspective, we basked in unexpected comfort.

“Do you want to go to Fort Vaux?” the major asks me, point-blank. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. Three officers are needed to-night—one at the fort, the other at Vaux village, the third at Damloup. We start in a quarter of an hour.”

I had expressed a wish to make this pilgrimage. My wish is now to be granted; the order is immediately given.

“It is essential,” he adds, “to start at night, so as to explore the ground in the early morning.”

A quarter of an hour later we get into a motor-car—Captain L—— of the Army Corps Staff and I. On the way we pick up Captain H—— of the Divisional Staff.

We follow the Étain road, then leave the car to scramble up a wooded slope and reach the divisional headquarters. The zone of death begins. The road which we have just left is bordered by an inextricable mass of fragments of waggons, open sacks, dirty harness, rifles, and distended bodies of horses, their legs in the air, their bellies ripped open. In the wood, our route is sometimes obstructed by broken branches, and our feet catch on tree-stumps or stumble in the craters. When the shells plough up the soil in our vicinity, a column of black smoke, like sooty dust, poisons the clear night air.

For the night is perfectly clear. Between the trees the moon sheds a bluish light, a sort of softened day, delicate and modest, as if she refused to let us probe the wounds of the earth.

We now go down into a ravine by a path that winds like a mountain track. The gradient is steep, and it is best to go quickly; the enemy have obtained the range of the place, and it is shelled without respite. A corpse is there, and has to be strode over. Lower down, in front of headquarters, there is another that seems to sleep under its helmet. A pious hand has put the helmet back over the mangled face.

We enter the dug-out. After a passage, where the liaison officers lie sleeping close together, comes a wainscoted room, with a chair and a table and, at the back, an iron bedstead. The chief, General de B——, is poring over his map. He sits up in his chair when he sees us. He is young and cheerful, with clear eyes and an incisive manner of speech. Only one sign of weariness: the hollows under his eyes. How many such leaders I have seen in action! Surmounting physical ordeals and dangers, bearing without a murmur the weight of all the lives entrusted to their charge, when their most loyal aides were succumbing to sleep or anxiety, they quietly bent their brains to the study of a plan of campaign and carefully arranged, without the dangerous counsels of feverish haste, the minutest details of some operation.

The Germans are at the foot of the Fort Vaux and even half-way up. The slopes descend gently at first, in front of the fort, for a space of three or four hundred yards at most, then they rush down abruptly to the Woevre plain. This rapid descent makes a right angle which our artillery cannot touch because of its trajectories. The Germans are established there. It is important that they should be dislodged. What line do they follow below Hardaumont, past the village, and, farther to the east, near Damloup? Before action is taken, this point must be accurately determined. There has been fighting these last few days, and the position remains slightly confused. Our caravan, then, will split up into three: each of us will have his objective—Vaux, the fort, and Damloup—and each his guide.

I recall those confabulations on the mountains before undertaking a climb which offered some difficulty or other, or, in Lovitel’s hut in Dauphiné, those little councils of war on the eve of a chamois hunt: one would take this path, another that couloir; another speaks of a dangerous place, and thinks it best to use a rope. After this, at daybreak, we shake hands and set off, each by his own route, to meet at the appointed place.

We go up the side of the ravine again and come to a wood that grows sparser and sparser. Yes, it is indeed the beginning of a difficult climb. The air is keen, and so bright is the moon that the stars are scarcely visible. As we climb higher the vegetation becomes more scanty; the trees are now stunted—a few hardy larches, with twisted roots, persist in growing; then comes the zone of sickly shrubs; finally there is nothing left but the bare ground. The same order is found here; around me there are a large number of trees, but they are in fragments, the branches broken, the trunks battered, the roots protruding from the riven soil, and soon they are nothing but miserable broomsticks. The summit, where lies the region of ice and desolation, cannot be far off.

Yet the mountain has the unrivalled advantage of silence. We accustom ourselves so quickly to the murmur of the torrents that roll at the bottom., and even that murmur is like the hidden refrain that accompanies a day-dream. Here we are obsessed by that continual, sharp, menacing, formidable whistle which precedes the bursting of a shell. And sometimes we have to stop, to lie down or to plunge into a crater—there are only too many places to choose from—and wait until the storm has passed over. When the curtain fire breaks off for a while, we resume our journey. The ground is riddled like a sieve; at the cross-roads the corpses, men or horses, lie in piles. The light of the moon covers them with a mysterious winding sheet.

We stop at the stone quarry which forms the brigade headquarters. There, too, a chief is still awake, and finishing a plan of operations. Tall, very youthful-looking, with a ringing voice and a hearty manner, he too appears one of those born trainers of men who know how to unite method with dash. What a clearness they all show in their reports and anticipations! What importance they attach to the sparing of lives! What frankness in their tone, what an art of going straight to the point! Here there is no longer any toadying or vanity or desire to please. A sort of moral elevation, the result of their leadership, has come to mark their character. When one is acquainted with the matter in hand, a simple telephone conversation is a model of clear language and logical reasoning.

Thus, from one post to another, the dialogue is prolonged into the night. One seems to visit a series of catacombs where a rite is performed by the dim light of the sanctuary lamp. One goes away with a sense of religious reverence.

“Good luck!” says the colonel to me, as he escorts me out over the threshold. “I am going to rest for a few hours.”

It is two o’clock in the morning.

The worst part of the journey is still to come; fifteen to eighteen hundred yards over a tableland, which by day is here and there vaguely guarded from sight by copses—what copses!—but for the greater part of the time is quite devoid of cover. By moonlight our outlines will scarcely stand out above the road over the ridge; the return journey, if we set out again after sunrise, will be a little more complicated.

We walk in Indian file, the guide, Captain P—— of the Brigade Staff, who wished to accompany me, and myself. The shells fall like hail. The earth which they have churned up has crumbled to such an extent that it looks like a mass of cinders. Fifteen to eighteen hundred yards is much farther than one thinks. One has time to make a rapid mental survey of one’s whole career.

Again it is mountaineering memories that surge up in my brain. This time it is the journey through a gorge, the Neuweisthor, between the valley of Fée and that of Zermatt in the Valais Alps. We had taken an unfamiliar path; we had to follow a ridge, which on either side looked out over a precipice; on the right, we could make out a very uninviting crevasse; on the left, right at the bottom, the little Italian village of Macugagna appeared at such a sheer drop beneath us that we had the feeling that, if we were to stumble, we should certainly roll down to it, two or three thousand feet below. The ridge was so narrow that we could not place one foot alongside of the other, and we did not know where to pitch our ice-axes. To make matters worse, while the guide was a level-headed man, the porter who brought up the rear of our roped party had fuddled himself with drink before starting. We were at the mercy of a false step on the part of this tippler. But his professional honour had passed into his legs. The ridge ends in a sort of stone tower where one may gain a really firm foothold and breathe freely. There, on turning round, I saw my man, streaming with sweat and his eyes starting out of his head; he had worked all the alcohol out of his system and had fully recovered his faculties as guide.

The track that we are now pursuing is not so hard to follow, but in other ways it is beset with terrors. Every moment we have to walk across bodies flung across it. At every ten or twelve yards, soon at every five or six paces, we are compelled to stride over a corpse, or even bunches of corpses, some slashed and torn, others in a running posture as if they had been overtaken while in full activity. The light of the moon softens the horror of their wounds without altogether veiling it. Many of them belong to the scouts who ensure connections, carry orders, show routes to be followed. In this war, where men vie with one another in every kind of heroism, we must pay a special tribute to those soldiers who, while their comrades dig themselves in as best they can under the hurricane of fire, run about in the open in order to make up for signalling difficulties or for the breaking of telephone wires. Thanks to these men, efforts are co-ordinated and an understanding is maintained at all points of the front, so that the chain of unity holds together. If one falls, there is at once another to take his place. The remainder are always ready; they even offer their services before their turn comes. Prepared to go upon the most perilous errands, they form a mobile guard round their chief; they are the projecting rays of his brain, which, through them, directs men’s wills from afar and draws up or corrects the plans of an operation. Those who have fallen there, or at any rate some of them, seem to have assumed in death the attitude of those antique youths who handed on to each other the sacred torch in the race. Is it the moon that helps me to see these broken statues? Shall I once more find such marble visions by daylight? The crude light of day does not do justice to the beauty of death.

The soldier who acts as our guide marches at a good rate. He gives the signal to stop when a shell falls too close to us, or when the cadence of the explosions points to a systematic curtain fire. He does not pick out the places for halting, and makes us come to a standstill suddenly with corpses under our very noses, lucky indeed if our faces are not splashed with fragments of flesh crushed once more by that ghastly pestle.

But why does he stop at this moment? Just now the tempo seems to be slackening. Surely we ought to take advantage of this respite. Ah, there he is, stripping a dead soldier! He half-raises him and takes off one by one the straps which the man wears in banderole. In this way he unfastens four or five water-bottles, each holding four pints. These he unscrews and sniffs at in turn, not without anxiety on account of the shells which might interrupt him at his task. His face lights up: the water is drinkable. The man whom he has stripped so methodically carried a supply of water for replenishment, and water on this dried-up tableland is as precious as in the desert. The place from which it is drawn is at the foot of the hillside: you are not sure of getting there or of coming back. At the fort, so many lips are thirsty for fresh water!

The guide, with his water-bottle straps round his waist, hastily resumes his journey, drawing us after him as a roebuck draws a pack of hounds.

At this pace we pass a caravan of porters loaded with a consignment of grenades. They are marching as fast as their burden allows them, under the rain of steel. The only means of transport here is the human back. Poor little men, whose heart is still the greatest of all military forces! “It is a scientific war,” people have declared. “Victory lies with munitions. It is the munitions that crush and destroy everything.” Well, when the artillery thinks to have destroyed everything, the human will still offers a wall of flesh as a resistance: men have endured everything—fire, hunger, cold, and thirst—and still they rise out of the shattered soil. No war will be found to have given such examples of the superiority of man to the machine.

The countryside looks all scorched and burnt. The lava of a volcano, the shocks of an earthquake, all the cataclysms of nature would not have flayed it more unmercifully. It is a chaos without a name, a circle in Dante’s Inferno. I rack my memory for parallel scenes; perhaps certain Alpine solitudes where the glaciers have withdrawn or the moraines alternate with precipices—solitudes that have never heard the song of a bird or felt the contact of a living creature.

The craters meet and open like the yawning mouths of volcanoes. Broken branches, scattered boulders, detritus of all kinds and shreds of human flesh are mingled. A nameless stench rises from the tortured soil.

In front of us rises a wall covered with earth. There are gashes in it, and through these cracks the stones have fallen into the ditch. On the whole, however, it has borne the avalanche without flinching. Three-quarters of the vaulted door is masked by a mass of concrete dislodged by a 380 or 420 mm. shell. It is like the cave of the Cyclops, which had a rock for its door and which received Ulysses and his companions. Past the open space we scurry along quickly, for it is specially favoured by the enemy’s artillery, as the corpses, more numerous here, bear witness. Even so did the Cyclops kill all strangers.

What is my surprise at finding the interior of the fort undamaged! It must have been built of solid materials to resist such a hammering. The staircase, the passages, the rooms are crammed. A curious sight is the swarm of men under the electric lights: sleepers lying in every conceivable pose, some stretched out anywhere, others curled up so as to occupy the least possible space, all impervious to noises, refusing to wake up, enjoying the delicious relaxation of sleep removed from danger; fatigue parties making their way with difficulty through the crush; guards going on or returning from duty; wounded men with white bandages on their wounds; isolated squads looking for their company. One guesses the cause of this confusion, which will have to be remedied. The fort, on its tableland, plays the part of those mountain refuges where lost caravans come to find shelter from the storm. It is a haven of safety; he who succeeds in crossing the danger-zone can breathe freely under the arched vaults.

Little by little the march past becomes more orderly, and organization is introduced into the mob. The right is reserved for those coming in, the left for those going out. Here is the ambulance, there is the guard-room, there is the orderly-room.

On our arrival our guide is received with enthusiasm. His array of water-bottles earns him an ovation. Thirst is working havoc here. The nearest source of water is in the Fontaines ravine, and that ravine is constantly peppered with shot. Yet men risk their skins to go and get a drink. Water creates such pitiful mirages. In the shapeless furrows which serve them as shelters, the troops, with parched lips, wait for water with feverish impatience; they are reduced sometimes to drinking the tainted water that stagnates in the shell-holes, and to other strange expedients. Who will ever tell of all the horrors endured for Verdun and for that France which is behind Verdun?

A soldier, somewhat elderly, no doubt a Territorial, comes in with rolls of bread on his back. He is near collapsing; he pants, the sweat pours off him in big drops, his face is white as chalk.

“You are alone?” asks the sergeant of the guard. “Where is the rest of the fatigue?”

The man makes a vague gesture. The rest of the fatigue has not followed, will never get here. Still, the rations it was bringing must be looked for. Where will they be found? Far from here? Another gesture of weariness, of indifference, of ignorance—one cannot guess which.

“Well, do explain yourself!”

The soldier lays down his load and stands up straight.

“I’ll go back,” is all he says. And he crosses the threshold again, followed by two men whom the sergeant has told off.

The commandant of the fort made me visit his domain, the casemates of Bourges, the observing stations, of which one is still fit for use, the cupola deprived of its 75-mm. gun. We run across the commander of the 3rd Battalion of Light Infantry, who holds the sector in front of the fort up to the village, and the battalion chaplain, the Abbé C——, who, under his helmet, with his weather-beaten features and his long beard, looks like a crusader rather than a monk. The latter comes from the neighbouring redoubt, a little earthwork where he had set up a dressing station, which he has had to remove.

“Yesterday,” he told me, “our riflemen brought in a prisoner, groaning loudly and constantly repeating in a piteous tone, ‘Vier Kinder! Vier Kinder!’ (Four children!)” For the benefit of those who knew no German, he made gestures illustrating a row of figures of different heights and counted up to four on his fingers. Our men put him in a corner of the redoubt, which is very narrow, while they themselves, for want of room, remained in the doorway, exposed to the bursting shells. The commandant, as he passed by, ordered them to abandon this Quixotic arrangement.

Stroking his beard, he adds philosophically: “After all, whatever comes here comes from the prisoner’s lines. It is only fair that he should be able to appreciate its quality.”

The commandant of the fort leads me out on to the parapets, which are continually being demolished and continually repaired.

“Be careful; in order to get there we have to cross as quickly as possible a zone which is under fire from an enemy machine-gun!”

More treacherous than the whistling of shells, the bullets pass above our heads, but he himself does not hurry in the least. Here are posted, in the hollowed-out earth, finding places as best they can, the look-out men, and in shelters very little safer, our machine-guns.

Dawn begins to appear, eclipsing the light of the moon. Half lying on the parapet, I see a glorious spring sunrise. It awakens the plains of the Woevre, lighting up the rivulets and pools. Here is Vaux village on the right, and Damloup village on the left. Farther on, that large cluster of ruined houses must be Étain. In the rising sun they form a white lace*-work of stone, recalling the cities of the East. And yonder are the frowning hillsides of Hardaumont. Douaumont towers above, Douaumont still swathed in darkness, like an evil spirit.

More efficiently than the enemy, the sunshine climbs the slopes of the fort. It is light and airy, like a bearer of good tidings. Smiling, it shows me, in front, two or three hundred yards beyond the counterscarp, on the sloping turf, several greenish lumps almost dressed in line. They are the bodies of Germans mown down in the onslaughts of March 9. They have fallen in front of the barbed wire. One could count them. Already their numbers are diminished. At night their comrades draw them into their lines by means of hooks or ropes.

The sun has left the rim of the earth and is speedily mounting the horizon. The morning is of an exquisite softness that contrasts strangely with the tragic scene. Behind me is chaos, in front a charnel-heap. Yet up above a lark is singing. His wings flap and his claws quiver, but he does not change his place in the rose-tinted heavens. I watch this sweet songster fluttering overhead, as if it were pecking at the light. A look-out man raises his eyes to catch sight of it. He looks at it tenderly for a moment, then resumes his watching. The passing shells do not disturb it in the slightest.

What is happening down there, among the corpses in green uniforms? One of them has made a movement; he glides through the grass like a snake. The enemy uses his dead as a screen or a blind, and is coming in this way to spy out the land. A look-out man has also observed this uncanny resurrection. He fires. Nothing moves. We must have been mistaken. A long time afterwards, a little below the suspected point, a body jumps up and abruptly disappears at a spot where the gradient is very steep and forms dead ground.

As in the mountains, I sweep the horizon with my gaze and give names to the valleys and hills. Douaumont, on my right, is the loftiest summit (1200 feet); only Souville, at the back, makes any approach to this. It seems like some incubus weighing upon the whole surrounding country. I am separated from it by the wooded slopes of Vaux-Chapître, by the ravine of Le Bazil, whose existence I guess at, and by the rising wood of La Caillette. Above the Woevre, Hardaumont rears its head like a cliff. The Woevre stretches out as far as the eye can see, broken up with undergrowth and villages and streaked with roads. In broad daylight I get a better idea of its bareness, which was veiled by the kindly dawn. Its untilled soil resembles a vast marsh. On the right my eyes rest on the dark blur of Herméville Wood. The outlying spurs of the Meuse Heights hide a portion of it from view.

It is there, towards the village, over against those hillsides, over against Damloup, that the enemy’s onslaught was shattered. And the fort, on its plateau, with its superstructure half crushed, with breaches in its double wall, seems like the formidable hulk of an ironclad which still floats upon the waters, not yet abandoned by its crew. The storm thought to overwhelm it, and it has vanquished the storm.

We stayed very late, in order to see everything, in accordance with our instructions. Nine o’clock in the morning; the sun is already high in the heavens. The sky is clear, the day is a good one for observations, and the Boche balloons are watching us. The crossing of the ridge threatens to be difficult.

As a matter of fact, it is difficult to go out at all. We are at once encircled. Life hangs by a thread. The corpses, now indiscreet, display ghastly wounds. Only a few are intact; it is hard to find the broken statues I saw in the moonlight. And the realization of death, in the revolt of one’s whole being, is invested with a special horror—that of being crushed and pulverized, of being not even a dead man, but a nameless heap, a handful of fleshly dust. Then, too, there is the thought of remaining unburied.

This idea did not come spontaneously. We walked across two corpses: a little soldier, very young, quite beardless, no doubt of the 1915 class, covered with a little earth, two or three shovelfuls which did not suffice to hide him; and, quite near him, a stretcher-bearer, identified by his Red Cross armlet, his head split open, still clasping a spade in his hand. The stretcher-bearer was killed while trying to carry out his pious duty of interment. Here the stricken must be left uncared for. We must let Death bury the dead.

There is a legend which says that the souls of those who have not been laid in consecrated ground wander in space without ever finding rest. But the soil of our invaded country is consecrated ground. May those who have fallen there in defending it rest in peace! For the appeal of the Church, Memento quia pulvis es—“Remember, because thou art dust”—which accompanies the placing of the ashes on the brows of the faithful—could I ever have thought out a more eloquent paraphrase?

A last rationing party meets us. It has not been able to reach its goal during the night. By day it is not usual to go to the fort.

“Are you going as far as the fort?”

“We’ll have a try.”

“Good luck!...”