In Europe

nurse, overheard in a hospital ward. A sergeant told of a fantastic captain he had had, an officer who always got his boys out of a tight spot. He was killed at the Somme, and they had mourned him like a brother. ‘But a while back, just before the Krauts came into Albert, we were in a bit of a fix and I was doing all I could to get us out of it, and suddenly I see him, with his clear eyes and his old grin, bringing up the rear. So, Will, he says, that was a close shave. And I go to answer him, and suddenly he's gone.’ Then someone else in the ward began to talk about a couple of stretcher-bearers, a top crew. ‘One day one of those coal bins comes whistling down and they're gone. But last week a few of our boys saw them again, carrying a couple of wounded fellows down the trench. And in the train I met a boy who swears they carried him out of it.’
    Robert Graves mentions a similar experience. During a banquet held for his company, he wrote, he saw at the window one of his soldiers, a fellow by the name of Challonner. ‘There was no mistaking him or the cap badge he was wearing. I jumped up and looked out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag end smoking on the pavement.’ Challoner had been killed a month earlier.
    Vera Brittain tended not to put much stock in it, but her men were adamant. ‘That's right, Sister, they're dead. But they were our mates when they were killed at the Somme in ‘16, and it's a fact: they still fight alongside us.’
    The next day I ride through gentle, rolling countryside, the weekend-house country of Paris, green and modest. In the fields ploughed red I can still see the vague, whitish traces of trenches. This is a region of gradualness. The towns and villages display no grand movements, they contain no huge monuments, no shocking modernities.
    In the little roadside restaurants everyone is served the menu of the day, no option: soup, chicken, cheese, pudding, coffee. The men know each other well, they shake hands after their meal and then climb back into their trucks or vans. I find a hotel with a grandma knitting and a chambermaid with big eyes. Later, in the corridor, I see her again with a mobile phone, and all she says into it is ‘
Je t'aime … oui, je t'aime … merci … mais je t'aime …
’
    Verdun is a peaceful town, and contains the most horrible war memorial I have ever seen. It is a tower, atop which a knight glowers threat-eningly across the rooftops. If I were a three-year-old citizen of Verdun, I would be afraid to close my eyes at night. At the knight's feet lies a museum, marked by the usual pride and pomp, the same drive for glory that almost destroyed the French Army. The Battle of Verdun began on 21 February, 1916 and lasted ten months. It accounted for 260,000 lives, almost one a minute. In the long run no one got much further because of it, but that did not bother German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn. What he wanted, above all, was bodies. He knew that the fortifications of Verdun had long been the gateway to France, that the city had always had a special symbolic significance for the French, and he wanted them literally to ‘bleed to death’ here. The German code name for the attack on Verdun was ‘Gericht’, the place of execution.
    Falkenhayn understood the mentality of the French generals very well. They threw everyone and everything they had into the fray, thinking only of glorious attacks, and were barely concerned with the lives of their troops. That is reflected in what remains of the French trenches: shallow and makeshift, in contrast to the German concrete. Verdun was a trap for the French Army, with pride and glory as its bait.
    The only supply line, the legendary Voie Sacrée, remained intact, but that too was part of the German plan: to bleed to death, one needs an artery. The French foot soldiers called Verdun ‘the big sausage machine’, and as they came marching up they could see from afar the stinking hell of rumbling and flame, a gaping maw signifying the end of everything. For the German soldier, in fact, it was hardly different: 330,000 of them would be killed or wounded, compared to 360,000 Frenchmen. Verdun was much more traumatic for the average Frenchman, however, because the French Army worked by rotation. Most French soldiers, therefore, had a chance to become personally acquainted with ‘the big sausage machine’, even if only for a while, with all the accompanying physical and psychological