Inside the hollow mountain
CHAPTER ONE
Wild Boar gorge
THE MEUSE HILLS descended from left and right to the winding river like a herd of horses stretching their necks to drink in water. They began as outliers of the Argonne, rolling or tabletop hills running from west to east. The land was green. Green and crossed by streams, so that the valleys were full of marshy woodland. Between tall beeches, alder and ash, ducks nested and wild boar rooted about in the blossoming shrubs and briers of the undergrowth. Villages had grown up around the few tracks on the cleared uplands. There were mills by the streams, and the skilled and industrious Lorraine peasants grew fruit and corn, and raised cattle and horses. The land between the Moselle and the Meuse had been fecund and productive for a thousand years. Celts, Romans and Franks had cultivated it, and it was favourably situated beside the green and white lands of Champagne.
The city of Verdun had watched over the crossing where the Meuse forked and formed a natural fortress for 1,500 years. The citadel sat above old churches and monasteries with formal round windows and devout pointed arches. The streets bustled with the kind of life typically found in small French towns that work with the produce of a fertile landscape. Around 15,000 people lived from their handiwork and ingenuity, born of long-standing civilisation. They produced embroidery, sweets and linen goods, smelted metal, and built machines and furniture. They fished in the river, prayed at altars decked with flowers, drank aperitifs and coffee, dressed up for weddings, and let their blonde and dark-haired children play in the streets and courtyards.
The city was surrounded by a ring of several lines of entrenched forts, some modern, some older. The total width was more than 15km, the circumference over 50km. For across from the city, far off to the east and yet threateningly close, rose the colossus of the German Reich, which glorified war. The fortress of Verdun had known German guns and spiked helmets in 1792 and 1870. In 1914, the city was threatened with a third attack. It was averted by the French army’s victory at the Marne, and by the help of the British and the Maid of Orleans, who loved her home village of nearby Domrémy.
On 21 February 1916, after thorough preparation, shells fell howling into the city’s streets, killing residents, splintering children’s skulls and throwing old women down stairs. Fire. Smoke. Uproar. Havoc. Aircraft dropped whistling bombs on the areas the long-range guns couldn’t reach. Over a thousand guns, among them 700 heavy guns including the heaviest available, spat cloudbursts of explosive steel on to the target area: a 30 km wide arc on the right bank the Meuse, the eastern bank, open to the south-west between Consenvoye and the Woevre plain. Then the German divisions burst out of holes and trenches full of icy mud for the attack. It was a surprise attack, and the Germans were counting on that, but the Posen grenadiers and the Thuringian reserves and the men from the Mark, Hesse, Westphalia and Lower Silesia met resistance wherever they went. Resistance from the earth, softened by snow, and from the water-logged shell holes. Resistance from the woods, which became silent clusters of auxiliaries, chained together like ancient warriors by creepers, brambles and briers that never tired. Resistance from entrenched field positions, blockhouses and barbed wire. Resistance from the French infantry, riflemen and gunners. After the first four days, the first week, the world knew that the surprise attack on Verdun had failed. Six army corps, nearly 200,000 Germans, had led the assault, and it had not been enough. The fall of Fort Douaumont made the world sit up and listen and gave the Germans a sense of victory, but victory was not theirs. The Fortress at Verdun was not to be taken by surprise attack.
The Germans refused to capitulate in the face of this outcome. Their troops had performed feats that surpassed the legends of centuries. They’d stormed woods, taken hill ridges, cleared blockhouses and driven the enemy out of the ravines. They’d stood up under the leaden hail of shrapnel and the steel knives of shell splinters, and then, angry and dogged and full of hate and a sense of self-sacrifice, they’d drilled their bayonets into French bodies and hurled their hand grenades. From the Souville ridge beyond Douaumont, their advance troops had glimpsed the roofs of the Verdun suburbs. One more push, the commanders said, and we’ll have them. They said it in March, in April, in May and June and until the end of July, and then they didn’t say it any more. The troops didn’t know why they hadn’t advanced. They were replaced then redeployed. Hordes and hordes of men were lost and replenished with ever younger men. It wasn’t their fault that the fortress at Verdun held. They left their shattered lines at the ordained time. When ordered to do so, the sweating gunners, half deafened by their own detonations, fired. When ordered to do so, the infantry threw themselves at the French shell holes and trenches in the way they’d been taught and captured them. They raged amongst French flesh and blood, and gave of their own flesh and blood, their sweat and nerves, brains, courage and presence of mind. They’d all been told that they were defending their homeland and they believed it. They’d also been told that the French were exhausted and they’d believed that – just one last effort, one more push. They made that effort; they pushed forward once again. Orderlies fell bringing rations, lorry drivers were killed in their cabs, and the gunners worked under counter-fire. New troops were brought in to take up the charge: Bavarian divisions, Prussian guards, infantry from Württemberg, regiments from Baden and Upper Silesia. Then they finally realised that it wasn’t working. Who had made mistakes? Who was to blame? More and more missiles had been hurled, and more and more men had been torn to pieces, killed, mutilated, taken prisoner or were missing. The defence of Verdun cost the French army a quarter of a million men, including nearly 7,000 officers. The Germans lost even more. The pretty villages were turned first to ruins, then piles of rubble and finally brickworks; the woods went from having gaps and tangles to being a battlefield full of white stumps, then a wasteland. And this wasteland stretched from Flabas and Moirey to beyond the village of Souville, over hills and through gorges on both banks of the Meuse. It was a white-flecked lunar landscape across its length and breadth, the colour of the dessert, full of round holes. But protected by its heavily damaged fort, the city of Verdun stood. There were attacks and counter-attacks, and the war rumbled on around it.
During August, ASC Private Bertin had come to feel quite at home in these ravaged spots that were still called Fosses wood, Chaume wood and Wavrille wood on the map. He had changed a lot since the beginning of July. He often looked unshaven, even bristly. His whole face was now deeply tanned and tighter. His mouth no longer fell open so easily, and behind his glasses his eyes had taken on a thoughtful, more mature look, for in the past two months he’d been plunged, much against his will, into a stampede of events. It bothered him, and the many thoughts he’d had about Kroysing’s disappearance had altered him, as had the sight of the never-ending fields of felled trees, which he’d become so used to that his feet instinctively avoided the countless steel splinters. This best of worlds here revealed a flaw in the system, and the glorified necessities of existence on earth came to seem rather odd. He’d come under fire on various occasions and had run away from shells and shrapnel, and into them as well. He relied on luck. But now it had somehow been ordained that he should have an encounter with something much different – and much hairier – before he realised what was what in the world.
One day, in the middle of Fosses wood he heard his name being called from the far end of a valley. He was kneeling at the time, screwing a couple of rails on to a railway track that would allow ammunition to be transported to the 15cm siege guns. Startled, he shouted: ‘Over here!’