If you seek the heart and home of the European idea, go to Verdun. The Romans called it the true fort, verum dunum, the forts of forts, which would still stand when all other forts had fallen. It did not stand, of course, for though stone stands and rocks endure, it is the melancholy fate of all fortresses to yield to siege and time, assault and famine. So the stones of the true fort might have remained standing down the centuries; but those within it did not, a dozen times in the course of its history, writes Kevin Myers.
The passing years and the gentle processes of mispronunciation and forgetfulness garbled verum dunum into Virodunum, and later Verdun; and though the origin of the name was forgotten on the tongue, the habitual duty of those ancient stones that formed the fort remained. That true fort's purpose was to stand astride the Meuse, thereby commanding the last great river protecting Gaul, and its capital, against invasion from the east.
Verdun was the epicentre of the worst battle of the Great War which ended 84 years ago yesterday. If you want to understand the collapse of France in the second World War, look to Verdun. If you want to know how the blight of Nazism spread from the fjords of Norway to the Crimea, Verdun provides part of the explanation. If you seek the origin of the European Union, you go no further than Verdun.
Mass execution
Of all the places of mass execution of 1914-18, none compares to the intensity of the slaughter, and its sheer endurance, at Verdun. The compulsions which bind Europe and which have caused the vast bureaucratic institutions sprawling from Brussels to Mons and Strasbourg first took root in the bloodied, steel-lashed acres of the Verdun forts, all within an area barely larger than the Phoenix Park.
Within that area, and beneath it, in huge tunnels whose existence Wilfred Owen seems to have divined in Strange Meeting, and in the skies above it, millions of men fought an unspeakable, three-dimensional war. Like ants they burrowed underground, blindly hacking one another to death in vast, lightless chambers; or swarmed in martial masses over fire-swept plains, being chopped into pieces by flailing shards of steel; and three miles above them, flocks of flimsy aeroplanes, bearing beardless young men without parachutes, clashed almost ceaselessly throughout the daylight hours, with a terrible lingering death the certainty for those who caught fire, as they fluttered slowly downwards to join the abattoir below.
A day of this insanity would have been a scar on European civilisation; but it lasted neither a day nor a month, but some 10 full months, with an intensity that defies all human understanding. The small, rectangular woodland of the Bois des Caures, measuring 500 yards by 1,000, in the course of a single bombardment was hit by 80,000 artillery shells: one-and-a-half shells per square yard. Yet still some men survived it.
Death toll
It is impossible to set a figure for the death toll at Verdun; but it is probably in the region of 400,000 men, with another 800,000 casualties, who left their blood and their limbs, if not quite their lives, on the few hundred acres of the battlefield. The legacy their suffering left is unmistakeable: a Peruvian shepherd, arriving there today, fresh from his Andean hut, all unlettered and unknowing, would instantly sense that evil had once come this way, and had rested its dark wings there, and had soiled the earth with its spell.
It is the vilest place in western Europe. I have been to the Somme and to Flanders on countless occasions, but nothing in either place captures the malevolence of Verdun. The great ossuary at Douaumont alone contains the skeletal remains of 150,000 men, a generation of men, who in the lives of people still living today, loved and were loved, and were in their youth reduced to a jumble of bones. They have now become a calciferous layer, like an army of archaeological mollusc remains, a modest Carrera of humanity.
The ferocity of Verdun destroyed the French army, not just for the duration of that war but for a generation. Moreover, it probably consumed the best of the rising political classes of Germany, with the very direst consequence possible.
After Verdun, the French army became obsessed with defence, with retreating behind stone walls of Maginot, though the history of such stone walls anywhere is that their defenders will sooner or later be smoked, burnt or starved out. France forgot General Ducrot's words about that other earlier fortress, Sedan, doomed to a similar fate. "Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre et nous y serons emmerdé."
French defences
So the capitulation of France in 1940 was in large measure due to events alongside the Meuse less than a quarter of a century before. The will of the French army and its officer corps to fight in a modern war had been shattered at Verdun. The Nazis broke through in 1940 at Sedan, the chamber pot of 1870, and the French defences divided, like the Red Sea before Moses. Within hours, the Germans had taken Verdun in its entirety.
But Verdun did not vanish from history with that swift defeat. For if the EU is a vast political and economic device to restrain 20th-century German appetites for war, as many believe, then the anvil upon which that contrivance was first hammered was Verdun. The least that the European Union can do is to remember and honour the men who unwillingly were that anvil.