Just before 8am this morning I found out that Lidl sell vodka for under 8 euro a bottle. At 8am this morning I was getting seriously dirty looks from customers and staff at Lidl for buying vodka at that time in the morning. I had no choice: ten minutes later I was in another country.
An hour after that I left Luxembourg and returned (after a week away) to France. I was driving back to the Maas river, except that in France they call it the Meuse. I didn’t intentionally revisit the same river, it just happens to be the backdrop to my next visit.
I said I wasn’t planning to visit many war cemeteries but you can’t disregard this one. There’s always a sadness about the grave of the unknown soldier. Every war cemetery includes gravestones marked (in British ones) ‘Known only unto God’. The one near the Meuse that I saw today has 130,000 unknown soldiers interred within it.
It’ll be a while before people forget the name Verdun.
Not that the battle happened at Verdun. It took place around fortifications built to protect the city, the French having planned ahead in anticipation of German aggression. They got that bit right, maybe less so the use of those fortifications.
So maybe they should have named it after the villages where the battle waged: Douaumont, Fleury, Bezonvaux, Vaux or Ornes. Except they no longer exist.
When none of your village is more than a foot high, the nearby hill has lost 7m in height due to artillery strikes, there’s no vegetation for four miles in any direction and even after they’ve removed the corpses, the bits of corpses, the bone splinters and the other remains there’s just a layer of shell casings, toxic metals and whatever remains of the phosgene gas.. the local authorities declare the village a ‘red zone’ and never rebuild. There is now a chapel at each destroyed village, and the forest grows among the ruins and the pockmarks left by the shells.
I hadn’t realised how little of the battle was trench warfare. It was really a grudge match across hills and forests, with the prebuilt fortifications changing hands or holding out against insane odds. You’re not meant to enter the old forts, and indeed the one I’d intended to visit (that’s open to the public) was closed for some reason. But I found myself alone exploring deep inside a hill at the Ouvrage de Froidterre, needing my torch and getting a better feel for the 19th century fort. Several meters of concrete and earth above me a coach load of Belgian schoolkids were having a picnic lunch, looking down from the retracting turrets (cool!) across the defensive ditch that still contains the stakes for barbwire (not cool).
The battlefield is small, for the number of men and carnage involved. It’s massive if you’re driving across. I went past the first fort four miles from the memorial, then went past and explored one of the dead villages and a few of the fortifications. The entire distance the ground by the road was pitted with shell holes, occasional communications trenches winding through the woods. The battle has shaped the landscape for centuries.
I arrived in a bad mood, probably the rush hour traffic in Luxembourg. I left with no mood at all. A battle on that scale, hours of visible reminders, the inescapable signs of what happened there 102 years ago; it killed all emotion. The reason so many soldiers are ‘unknown’ is that they couldn’t collect the bodies, and the shells kept landing, and even the corpses got destroyed.
Then for the second time in two days, I spent several hours following a river. This time downstream rather than up, and entirely unplanned. Just happens that Verdun and my overnight stop are both on the Meuse. It was quite a nice drive, very picturesque rolling fields and small villages that had old houses.
Needed to fill up when I got here, found out that France doesn’t use black to signify diesel (unlike, e.g., the UK, Holland and Germany). They use yellow and call it Gazole. It took me a while to confirm this was safe to put in my car.
After the battlefield I didn’t feel like touristing so I checked into my hotel and had a nice nap. Decided to test the local grill for dinner, even the French can’t get a basic steak wrong.
They can. ‘Medium well’ I asked for, ‘medium’ the waiter seemed to think that meant. What arrived was well done on the outside (where it wasn’t burnt), medium 2mm in and just entirely uncooked through the rest. I’ve seen abortions come out better done. French fucking cooks can’t.
Today’s warscore:
The French claim victory at Verdun, and I haven’t heard the Germans disagree. Me, I say that when 162000 of your men die in a single battle you’ve won fuck all. No score draw, nobody won anything at Verdun. However: America 1, Germany 0 in the 1918 rematch. They arrived late (as always) but the Americans did deliver – and at great sacrifice themselves.
Today’s drive – almost entirely accurate, for once. Almost.
Tonight’s hotel is a classy establishment and no mistake.
Would be perfect at 25EUR a night, with wifi, TV and three beds, except that the TV doesn’t work (on the one night I need one and only time all trip I’ve tried to turn one on) and the room stinks of tobacco. Reception didn’t open until 5pm (it’s a self-serve check-in before that) so I wandered down and shared my woes with the nice lady there. She told me the TV was user error and that she’d find me another room. Would I mind one with a double bed instead of two singles? Technically it was three singles, they have a bunkbed where the third bed runs perpendicular to the other two, above the pillows. In my new nicer smelling double there’s still that bunk bed, running across the head of the double bed.
Sadly the TV can’t show Canal+ anyway, so watching the football wasn’t an option anyway. BBC radio commentary in the end