Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

We halted at the famous ravine of Gravelotte, where on August 18, 1870, the terrible struggle took place which decided the fate of Metz. Here, as everywhere else on the 1870 battlefields, all traces of the German monuments to the dead have disappeared. The graves in the cemeteries were untouched, but the eagles had been knocked off the monuments. Unquestionably the presence of these German memorials on land robbed from France presented the French Government with a difficult problem. No doubt many of the “Denkmals” were boastful and vainglorious, after the usual German fashion in these matters. Clearly they had no place on redeemed French soil. I could not feel, however, the situation had been handled very wisely as regards the memorials to the fallen soldiers. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have pulled at the rope which dragged William I. from his plinth. The ignominious overthrow of statues of kings and princes of a ruling house so directly responsible for the miseries of Europe is a symbol of victory over the evil principles for which they stood.

But the soldiers who died doing their duty do not belong to the same category as the men who plotted the war. Many of the monuments blown up were merely records of regiments who fought and fell, and had their historical value. Their destruction has caused great bitterness among the German section in the province, and no end is served by the further creation of bad blood between people who are forced to live together. The 1870 war and its terrible consequences are not to be wiped out by blowing up a few obelisks. The man who dies fighting bravely for his country, however much duped as to the righteousness of the cause for which he gives his life, has a claim to consideration at the hands of a generous foe. The dignified way out of the difficulty would have been for the French to call upon the Germans to remove their monuments. We felt this the more on reaching Mars-la-Tour, the scene of another fierce battle. The frontier fixed after 1870 ran between Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. On the Mars-la-Tour side of the frontier stands a wonderful French monument which commemorates the heroism and tragedy of 1870. A woman symbolising France holds in her arms a dying soldier, whose head she crowns with laurel. But she is in no way concerned with the agony gathered next her heart. Her eyes are fixed, not on the dying man, but grimly, steadily across the frontier. She looks across the hills of her own lost province, and the fixity of her gaze conveys a spiritual challenge to that other statue on the crest above the Mosel—the statue of William I. conquering and insolent. Further, from the hand of the dying man falls a musket. But two babes playing at the woman’s feet catch the musket before it lies in the dust and raise it once more in the air.

This monument, a striking example of its class, is executed with a full measure of French skill and artistic power. But there cannot be the least misunderstanding as to its meaning. Every line breathes revenge and a day of reckoning to come. Mars-la-Tour was occupied by the Germans in the first days of the recent war. It must, I think, be put to the credit of the military authorities that, during the four and a half years that this memorial was in their power, no damage of any kind was done to it.

Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour are both dirty ramshackle villages, with middens out in the street blocking the entrance to the houses. Perhaps the inhabitants of frontier villages are inspired by a justifiable pessimism as to the futility of building decent dwelling-houses. Certainly the standard of life seems unusually low. Shortly after leaving Mars-la-Tour we began to pick up occasional signs of war, signs which, of course, multiplied as we entered the plain of the Woevre, and began to draw near the ridge of hills to the west on the far side of which Verdun lies. One battlefield is painfully like another. The destroyed villages and desolate fields told the same tale of death and suffering which is impressed on the long belt of devastation running across the Continent. Yet to me in future a cowslip field will always bring with it memories of Verdun. The familiar yellow flowers were growing in sheets by the roadside, striving, as it were, pathetically to throw the cover of their freshness and grace across the stricken land.

The interest of Verdun, apart from its heroic defence, lies in the fact that the line of attack being very intensive was relatively small, and owing to the hilly and varied nature of the ground it is possible to visualise more or less accurately the various attacks and counter attacks. We approached Verdun from the south-west, a point from which the damage was relatively small. The whole of the Verdun ridge on which the forts are situated runs north and south, and commands the plain of the Woevre to the east and the valley of the Meuse to the west. All this district was formerly a great forest. On the southern slopes we found the trees practically intact. We turned to the right and, keeping along the top of the ridge, had our first view of the valley of the Meuse, and Verdun with its twin towers lying far below us in the plain.

Verdun, never a considerable city, has nevertheless emerged into fame on more than one occasion in the course of its long history. It gives its name to the one event of capital importance in the evolution of modern Europe. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 may be taken as the starting point of the long struggle between France and Germany. Under this Treaty the united empire of Charlemagne was broken up between his three grandsons. France and Germany parted company, never to meet again during the course of the next thousand years but on terms of fire and sword. Revolutionary France offered its own example of frightfulness at Verdun. The city was taken by the Prussians in 1792. The struggle was not of an embittered character, and some young ladies of the city not only welcomed the conquerors but presented them with sweets. Fraternising with the enemy was not included apparently in the then revolutionary interpretation of fraternity, and three of the girls were sent to the scaffold when the French retook Verdun after Valmy. The little place sustained a siege of three weeks in 1870, and surrendered with the full honours of war after a gallant resistance.

But at Verdun as elsewhere the scale of events has been flung utterly out of focus by the recent struggle, to which history has no parallel. The town itself has suffered cruelly. Every other house is a ruin. But at least it never yielded, never bowed the head to the conqueror. How near, terribly near, the Germans came to complete success, we appreciated better on the spot than anything we had been led to believe by the official communiqués issued at the time. A discreet veil was flung over the German capture of Fort Douaumont. As a matter of fact not only was the fort taken, but the Germans penetrated for a mile and a half further westward beyond that point. One remaining fort alone lay between them and their prey. Heroic though the defence, it is clear that but for the Somme offensive and the diversion of forces it entailed, Verdun itself must have fallen.

Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont are the central points of interest in the defence, but every yard of the district is full of poignant and tragic association. Trees and vegetation had disappeared before we reached Fort Vaux. The ground had become a mere crater field. It was almost impossible to believe that this blasted hillside and neighbouring ravines had once formed part of a beautiful forest. As to Douaumont, little of the fort remains beyond a heap of rubble and rubbish. Imagination stumbles and halts as to what the bombardment must have been which could blast fortress and land alike out of being. Still more impossible is it to gauge the human endurance which could survive any experience so hideous as the fighting which raged round these key points. Just below Douaumont is a trench where a French platoon was overwhelmed and enfiladed by German fire. The ground fell in, burying the men where they stood. The bodies have not been removed, and the tops of the rifles can still be seen sticking out of the ground. The trench is enclosed by barbed wire to keep the tourist at bay, but I hope that this gruesome sight may not be perpetuated for the benefit of the tripper. The tourist invasion of the battlefields is inevitable, but it is intolerable if they bring with them to soil which is sacred anything of the orange peel and ginger-beer bottle atmosphere. Two or three chars-à-bancs filled with visitors were already on the ground, early though the season. However, they were mercifully cowed into silence by the all-pervading desolation.

All the hillsides round Verdun are scarred with the marks of trenches. Every name, every ridge in the district is famous. We looked on a given heap of ruins and remembered with what anxiety and suspense the name of this or that obscure village filled half the world a few years since. There was a tangle of wire in many places, though much clearance of the battlefield has gone on. Here and there the roots of the unconquerable trees had begun to throw up a sort of scrub. Here and there coarse grass and coarser brambles were hiding the shell holes. But on the hillsides about Vaux and Douaumont, Froide Terre, Poivre, and Haudromont, there was no sign of life. The subsoil had been blasted out of existence, and vegetation had not been able up till then to reassert itself.

The area of destruction round Verdun extends for a long distance, and the general impression left by the ruined villages is painful in the extreme. In the area of moving battle the land is not destroyed, but the houses are mostly in ruins. The task of reconstruction is formidable indeed, and there were few signs in April 1920 that it was being grappled with on adequate lines. People were beginning to creep back, it is true, to their ruined homes, but under circumstances which seemed very undesirable. The ruins had been patched up in some places, and the owners were living among them in a state of indescribable and insanitary squalor. There were no signs of a big scheme of reparation, which should have aimed first and foremost at the scrapping of these small dirty centres and starting new villages on fresh sites. The average French village is apt to be a dirty place. The sanitary conditions left by a bombardment are better imagined than described.