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Three hundred days and three hundred nights later, after the twenty six millionth shell, they stopped.
Let us consider statistics:
Casualties: seven hundred and fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty one, of which two hundred and sixty two
thousand three hundred and eighty eight are dead - or could it be eighty nine? - and maybe the missing include the
puny cowards, the unmanly homesick or the plain sick fleeing to estaminets or the syphilitic sanctuary of some
French tart. Not forgetting, naturally, the seven thousand horses killed in seven thousand hours to gain, then lose,
one thousand yards.
Weep for the horses.
Douaumont: a ridge near Verdun, just like many other ridges in the rain-dull plateau of Lorraine - dull with woods,
bracken brown. It seems as if a god has flung a huge wheelbrace which has embedded in the gentle summit. Its
vertical prong spears the sky, three arms thrust out as horizontals: a splayed crucifix with one arm torn away.
Seemingly rammed into the ground, it is another angry act against this weary ridge. You can see the ugly
excrescence for miles, a functional, fierce and brutal monument to stab the sky and crush the hill.
For a monument it is. A chapel, flitting with angels, entered next to a shattered crucifix hung with writhing
corpse. Inside, jagged jewel glass agitprop: there, Mutter und des épouses Offergabe (or is that Offrande des Mères
und Gattin?) - not a mourning tear in sight; or here a heroic male nurse tending tortured gasping human body parts
hanging off a fading spirit, presumably French. Souvenir leaflets show dead poilus, grisly apparitions floating
yards above the ground, a spectacle ceremonially arched with pierced and bleeding poppies: a sepia psychic quest
disguising putrefaction in an apocalyptic, inchoate, mystic mass.
Outside, there are windows to the crypt. Lively children race up to peer through, sucking lollies from the ice cream
van, are awed for a moment, primitively aware of something huge, then run off, bored.
Adults stare into the windows through viewfinders of chunky cameras or even camcorders, framing the best angle, with
cigarettes, their bleached extra phalanges, dangling from edgy fingers. Footballs round as skulls are kicked and
bounced from the chapel walls. Then cool-boxes are opened for a mass picnic, a secular sacrament of bread and wine:
it is French lunchtime for the pilgrims sprawled among the unknown guests signified by gaunt white crosses, Mort
pour la France.
Have some cheese.
The clerestories to the crypt are display cases for skulls. They are all matt grey: God thoughtlessly forgot to mark
which ones were German. Shovelled into heaps are crania, grown to be blasted off, sucked into mud, unearthed by
farmers or foxes, burrowed through by rats and rabbits, rinsed with hoses, casually piled face forwards in a jumble
of nationalities, the most severely shell shattered, bullet battered, to the rear. Next window, tibia; next,
fibula; next, radius, humerus, pelvises, ribs, neatly cleaned and piled, a satanic abattoir, charnel heaps of the
human calcium which was sucked from their mothers, made strong through games, grown tall for lovers, now piled in a
huge jigsaw chamber for one hundred thousand re-named Inconnu or even Unbekannt, stacked femur to femur, axis to
axis, dust to dust.
In the chapel, or through the perpetually burning remembrance flame, you should hear the voice of God. So, take this
skull. Insert warm and loving irises in those blank sockets, take his lips from the image in the locket round his
living lover's neck, awake his nose by bringing close her perfume, swathe the bone with skin for her to stroke; from
his letters, diary, notebooks, find his mind and thus his voice. Surely the voice of God will speak through him, the
sacrifice? The rapt and eager sacrifice?
But how will I know the voice of God? Will he speak French or German, partisan in perpetuity?
Silence. Not a whisper. Clearly the voice of God is not on public view today, among the bones, the skulls, the
candles, flames and angels.
Go outside again to picnic, but tread lightly where the dead are underfoot. You may miss their whispers
otherwise.
Gwyneth Roberts
March 2004
Read Manchester city symphony
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