Mood of the Material

The Battle of Verdun

The battle of Verdun began along a front of only thirteen kilometers, when “1,225 German artillery pieces opened up fire on 21 February 1916, the greatest ever concentration in one place” (Kramer, 2007, pp. 216-217). The French, despite taking heavy losses in the early days of the conflict, “responded with unexpected resilience, rushing almost 2,000 artillery guns into battle” (Kramer, 2007, p. 217). The battle would last for ten months and each side would suffer appalling casualties: Roughly 377,000 French (with 160,000 killed) and 337,000 German (with 71,504 killed) (Stevenson, 2004, p. 131). Yet, at the conclusion of the German offensive in July, the maximum advance had been only about eight kilometers. Following the French counterattacks in October and December, both sides had, in effect, reestablished the line that existed prior to the initial barrage.

The exact reasons for German Chief-of-Staff Erich von Falkenhayn’s decision to attack Verdun remain in dispute. Some argue that he had concluded that major offensive breakthroughs were impossible given the campaigns of 1915, and that he would initiate a war of attrition to decimate French units, forcing France to sue for peace. Kramer (2007) maintains that “The intention was not to break through, but to force the French to commit their entire army to defend Verdun. This would ‘bleed the French dry.’ His cynical calculation was that the French would lose at least three men for each German casualty” (p. 217). To accomplish that goal Falkenhayn needed to attack a site to which the French would commit a total military effort. Stevenson (2004) argues that:

Verdun suited his purpose because of its historic associations and emotive resonance: a major French fortress since the time of Louis XIV, its fall to the Prussians in 1792 had triggered the first republican revolution in Paris. It had been besieged in 1870 [during the Franco-Prussian War], and formed the pivot for [French General] Joffre’s 1914 retreat. It also had a suitable topography. Fortresses ringed Verdun on the wooded heights east and west of the river Meuse. If the Germans took the heights they could bombard freely both the town and its defenders, who would have to attack uphill to dislodge them. (p. 132)

Others, however, remain skeptical about whether Falkenhayn had arrived at his decision before the attack of February 21 or had offered it later as a justification for the decisions made. Prost (1992) summarizes the counter position as follows: “The problem with this thesis [that the attack on Verdun was to bleed the French Army through a war of attrition] is that it was formulated after the battle. It assumes that Verdun already occupied a central place in French national memory before 1916. It is not obvious that this was so” (p. 378).

Regardless of German motivations, French military commanders apparently had not considered Verdun a vital element in the defense of their homeland. In the months prior to the battle, they had essentially stripped the artillery from the ring of forts surrounding Verdun for use in the Somme, convinced that they could more effectively defend any move toward Paris from a defensive line further to the west. In contrast to the military, however, political leaders were convinced of the importance of Verdun’s defense. Prime Minister Aristide Briand, “believing national morale and his government’s survival were at stake, descended on Chantilly [Joffre’s headquarters] in the middle of the night to rouse Joffre and insist that the city must be held” (Stevenson, 2004, p. 133). And when General Pétain informed President Poincaré that “he would not hesitate to abandon Verdun if it seemed necessary to do so,” Poincaré responded as follows: “Don’t even think about it, General . . . . It would be a parliamentary disaster” (as quoted by Prost, 1992, p. 379).

When Pétain assumed command of the defenses of Verdun, he immediately took measures to strengthen the fragile and somewhat lengthy lines of supply along a narrow-gauge rail line and a country road that ran from Verdun to Bar-le-Duc some seventy-five kilometers to the south. The road, renamed the Voie Sacrée (sacred way), was essential to the defense of Verdun. The resupply efforts were so extensive that “lorries passed night and day in both directions every fourteen seconds” (Stevenson, 2004, p. 133). For the Germans, the farthest advance occurred in June after capturing the (by-then destroyed) village of Fleury and reaching Fort Souville, from which it is alleged that they could see the spires of Verdun itself. After repelling the Germans from the fort, French General Robert Nivelle, who had replaced Pétain as commander of the Verdun sector in May, issued a General Order of the day, to which he attached the phrase that would motivate French resistance to the German offensive: Ils ne passeront pas! (They shall not pass!) (Simkins, Jukes & Hickey, 2003, p. 77).

Despite the heavy use of both German and French infantry, the battle was “above all a struggle between artilleries, the infantry being reduced to occupying terrain that was pounded with unprecedented intensity” (Stevenson, 2004, p. 131). Estimates are that the Germans fired two million shells in the opening barrage and that both sides fired more than twenty-three million shells during the course of the battle—approximately one hundred per minute for the battle’s duration (Stevenson, 2004, p. 85). The result, as described by an account published in 1922, was such that, “Nowhere in France is there now to be seen a more vivid combination of rugged country dotted with the remains of forts and artillery emplacements, of soil torn by trenches, shell holes, and mine craters, and of forests shattered by shellfire, and towns and villages in ruins. From whatever quarter one approaches Verdun, the ravages of war stand out on every hand” (MacDonald, 1922, p. 6, as cited by Clout, 1996, p. 37).

Prost (1992) has argued that the precariousness of the French position during the early days of the battle was critical to the formation of French public memory. He claims that, “the very first days of the German offensive were undoubtedly the moment when Verdun became more than just a military objective, indeed a national symbol. The force of the enemy onslaught, the French retreat, the disorganization of the front, and the fear that it would collapse lent dramatic intensity to the weeks from February 21 to March 9” (p. 379). That impression was reinforced by national press coverage, he argues, “L’Illustration devoted an extraordinary amount of space to it, publishing countless drawings and photos of remarkable documentary value . . . . The weekly magazine portrayed the entire nation as united behind the soldiers of Verdun” (p. 380).

The circulation by the press of the destruction wrought by both French and German artillery was significant to the formation of Verdun’s symbolic significance. As Prost (1992) points out, “In the national imagination Verdun was noted above all for the most monstrous shelling of any war—monstrous in both intensity and duration (six months) . . . . This heavy shelling is what made the site look like a piece of lunar landscape: Verdun was equated in people’s minds with shell craters” (p. 396). Another factor contributed to the symbolic centrality of Verdun. In order to reduce the effects on soldiers of the incessant and brutal shelling, Pétain adopted a “system of replacements in which units were rapidly circulated through the front line, benefiting from periods in the rear. As a result of such circulation, much of the French infantry served for a period in Verdun” (Black, 2011, p. 93). By the battle’s conclusion, more than seventy of the ninety-six French divisions allocated to the Western Front were rotated through Verdun. “If,” as Prost (1992) suggests, “Verdun is not just one battle among others but the battle that sums up the whole of World War I, it is because nearly the entire French army took part in it” (p. 382). No less a figure than former French president Jacques Chirac concurs: [D]uring the endless year of 1916, all of France was at Verdun, and Verdun had become all of France” (as quoted by Fragnon, 2009, p. 152).

Verdun clearly occupies a unique place in the French national imaginary. During Poincaré’s final visit to the city, he declared, “The name Verdun, which German dreams turned into a symbol . . . now represents . . . all that is purest, best, and most beautiful in the soul of France. It has become synonymous with patriotism, bravery, and generosity” (as quoted by Prost, p. 381). And, as Nora (1992) observed much more recently, Verdun is “the symbol of the nation’s heaviest sacrifice for the ‘salvation of the fatherland’ and most powerful image of French national unity” (p. ix).

Prost (1992) remarks pointedly that “there is not a city in France without a Rue de Verdun” (p. 384). Still the sites of the battle itself would become the principal focus of public remembrance, and the questions that he says arose after the war were as follows: “how would they be commemorated, and what enduring significance would be bestowed upon them as a result?” (p. 384). It is to those sites, and particularly to the destroyed village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, that we turn in seeking at least one answer to these questions. For it was at Fleury that Nivelle’s proclamation of French steadfastness—which was transformed, after the withdrawal of German forces to proclaim Ils n’ont pas passé! (“They did not pass!”)—was fulfilled.

The Verdun Battlefield

The Verdun battlefield, within which Fleury is located, would be transformed into the most important French commemorative space of the First World War. Certainly there were and are many important French World War I memory sites elsewhere in France—the monuments aux morts in nearly every French city, town, and village; history museums; military cemeteries; the four national ossuaires; preserved or recreated trenches in numerous locations; and so forth. But for the French, the ten-month battle for Verdun is the central metonym of the war, and the Verdun battlefield memory circuit is its material embodiment.

The town of Verdun itself hosts several World War I memory sites, including a major monument aux morts, far larger and more grand than those of most towns of its size. Nearby is the Monument à la Victoire à Verdun, one of very few First World War monuments in Europe—built by any nation—that names itself a “victory” monument. In Verdun also is the preserved Citadelle Souterraine, which served as a logistics base for the Battle of Verdun and later was the ceremonial site where the French Unknown Soldier was chosen to represent all French unknowns in a grave beneath the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. Three large military cemeteries—Glorieux, Bévaux, and Faubourg Pavé—are also located in the town. There is still evidence in the town of wartime structural damage. Such damage is also visible on off roads along the Voie Sacrée southwest of town, and even more prominently in the area referenced as the Verdun battlefield.

Portions of the Verdun battlefield, located on both sides of the Meuse River, in a large crescent-shaped area north of the town, are well marked for tourists. Along its memory circuits are numerous preservation and commemorative sites, including remains of French forts, preserved casements and trenches, a memorial museum, scattered isolated graves, numerous small memorials, and one very large one—the Douaumont Ossuaire and cemetery, one of four such sites designated as national memorials. The Ossuaire surely is Verdun’s most recognizable landmark, well known not only for its unique and bizarre design profile, but also because one can gaze through the lower windows of the structure to see the skeletal remains of some of the more than 130,000 French and German soldiers buried in its mass grave. It was also the setting for one of the European Union’s most prominent iconic photographs—of French President François Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl hand in hand, in 1984, in a gesture of commemoration and reconciliation.

The Verdun battlefield also is the scene of nine destroyed villages, mentioned earlier, that have been embraced as national symbols of the First World War. Most of the nine villages were, like Verdun, extremely old, some of them dating back to the first century, CE (Floquet, 2000-2012, n.p.). After the war, Beaumont en Verdunois, Bezonvaux, Cumières-le-Mort-Homme, Douaumont, Haumont-près-Samogneux, Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre, Orne, and Vaux-devant-Damloup—along with Fleury-devant-Douaumont—were named as villages détruits in 1919. The villages are retained on French maps offering sufficient detail to include small communities, and each village was decorated with the Order of the Army and the Croix de Guerre (Office de Tourisme du Pays Verdunois, 2010-2012b; The destroyed villages of Verdun, 2012). They were ceremonially classified as Mort pour la France—the same designation inscribed on soldiers’ cemetery headstones and the content of the ritual chant on commemorative holidays when the names of the dead are recited. Each of the nine destroyed villages has a mayor, appointed by the prefect of the Department of the Meuse or a communal council. Each of them hosts, in a cleared portion of the village, a small votive chapel (constructed, if possible, on the site of its original church) and the village’s monument aux morts. They all hold annual commemoration ceremonies at these monuments, especially elaborate fêtes in important anniversary years. ³

Traces of many destroyed villages along the Western Front, not just these nine, still are quite visible in the landscape. The nine destroyed villages of Verdun, along with many more in other parts of northern France, were declared after the war by the French government to be uninhabitable, part of the Zone Rouge or Red Zone, so contaminated by decayed bodies, poison gas, and unexploded ordinance that they were deemed unrecoverable. The large majority of damaged or even destroyed villages in France were rebuilt in situ (Clout, 1996, p. 1). In locations that reconstruction on site proved impossible because of Zone Rouge designation, villages were often reconstructed in other locations during the interwar period, typically within a few kilometers of their original sites (Clout, 1996, p. 287). Others were “incorporated” into other villages to form hyphenated communes, for example Sommepy-Tahure, in Marne. But the nine decimated villages near Verdun remain—with one exception—unreconstructed and uninhabited, exemplars of northern France’s version of ghost towns. ⁴ Like many areas in the Verdun battlefield, it is not unusual to observe a sign in or near one of the village sites, warning visitors to stay on paths and to avoid approaching old weapons—and for good reason (Figure 1). Démineurs—literally de-miners—have been working for decades, attempting to clear the land of grenades and unexploded shells, many of which contain poison gas. As Olley (2009) points out, “The French Interior Ministry estimates that at least 12 million unexploded shells reside in the hills and forests that rise above Verdun” (n.p.).

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Figure 1.

Warning sign for Zone Rouge (Photo by authors)

All of the nine destroyed villages of Verdun are worthy of visitation and study. But we focus our attention on Fleury for two reasons. First, because of its location, nearest to Verdun of any of the nine villages and close to many other major memory sites, it is on almost every “circuit of memory,” whether those recommended by the tourist offices of the town of Verdun, the Department of the Meuse, or the nation. It is, by far, the most visited of the nine destroyed villages for those reasons (Office de Tourisme du Pays Verdunois, 2010-2012a). Second, Fleury is “marked” as a memory site more than the other villages, and in a variety of ways that we address here. It, perhaps, even more than the others, offers one answer to the question of how it is possible to represent war without sanitizing or justifying it.

Fleury-devant-Douaumont: Mood, Anonymity, and Selective Silence

Apparently, very little was left of Fleury after the early autumn of 1916. A 1919 Michelin guide, reprinted as Verdun and the Battles for its Possession, includes three photos of Fleury from 1916, one in June, one in July, and one in October. ⁵ The village appears battered in the first two photographs, but it had been completely leveled by the time of the third. Period descriptions of the destruction, whether in books, newspapers, or museums, almost always referred to this area of the battle field as a “moonscape.” Since Fleury was the closest terrain to Verdun that the Germans occupied, it was the scene of a number of pitched battles, and the area of the village changed hands sixteen times. All that is left now from Fleury’s structures are some foundation stones collected in the plinth of a monument erected by the Touring Club de France. This monument, probably erected in the interwar period, ⁶ carries the following inscription: “Here stood Fleury-devant-Douaumont, destroyed in 1916,” as well as an inscribed map and an attached stone placard that comments on the composition of the monument’s base from detritus of the village.

As visitors enter the “preservation” area of the village, they may notice first the odd “natural” topography (Figure 2). Of course, it is anything but “natural.” The land here undulates, its profile having been violently remade by artillery shells, creating variously sized rises and cavities. Unlike its “moonscape” character immediately after the war, grass and trees have grown into and around the shell craters, the roots of the trees often abnormally twisted by the irregular terrain. The cratering of the ground has softened a bit, eroded by ninety-plus years of rain, wind, and sun. But it remains a bizarre landscape, even with the restoration of flora. It is a deeply wounded piece of ground, deformed and misshapen by the massive guns that targeted it for months in 1916. It is difficult to mistake how this land profile came about; it is impossibly unsightly—hardly even imaginable as a result of natural processes.

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Figure 2.

Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Photo by authors)

Fleury’s small chapel and its monument aux morts were constructed in 1931; the Chapel is quite visible from the likely entry point to the preservation site (Figure 3). For decades, the gutted landscape, the chapel, and the monument aux morts were all that remained. But in 1972, the Association Nationale du Souvenir de la Bataille de Verdun [National Association of Remembrance of the Battle of Verdun] and the Office National des Forêts [National Forestry Office] cleared, retraced, and marked with signs Fleury’s three main streets and placed small, tri-lingual pedestal markers at the locations of its residences and businesses, creating what amounts to an in situ cadastral map of the village. A walk along its former streets takes the visitor past markers of multiple farms as well as homes of a vintner, a road mender, and a plumber (Figure 4). If one continues along the paths that were once streets, s/he will find markers of the church, a blacksmith shop, a bakery, the town hall, and the school. There are material remains of none of these structures, just the small pedestals with their plaques in French, German, and English, marking the streets, residences, and businesses, each set into a “hill” or “valley” created by an artillery shell.

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Figure 3.

Chapel and Monument aux Morts at Fleury (Photos by authors)

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Figure 4.

Marker (Photo by authors)

This mode of “preservation” is compelling in its understatement. The material mapping of the village, together with the decimated ground, clearly suggests destruction. But it is a destruction that has to be imagined. In Fleury now, there is no sight of shells exploding, no smell of gas or rotting flesh, no sound, except the occasional voice of a visitor, usually speaking in a hushed tone. The horrors of the war—its terrible sights, sounds, smells—are no longer tangibly available. And although they are almost certainly impossible for most of us to imagine, the landscape and the ghostly markers of the razed village obligate the imagination. How fearful must it have been to wake up to the shelling of one’s tiny, defenseless village at 4 a.m.? What must have been the terror and chaos in February, 1916, when the evacuation order came? What must the power of those weapons have been to have wiped out any trace of this village and to have rendered even the topography a ruin? What must this place have looked like as it was blown up, burned, crushed first into rubble and finally reduced to a wasteland? And, pertinently, what must this village have looked like before the shells began to fall in 1916?

This last question points, along with four other material aspects of the site to a second kind of imagining beyond that of the war’s destruction and the tragic devastation of Fleury. Indeed, these features of the site mark out what also can now only be imagined—the social relations and historical trajectories that constituted the village—Fleury before it was destroyed. The first such feature—the visibility of the chapel in this ruined setting—is jarring. So is the second feature, the monument aux morts, which is located on a rise, visible if one follows the “street” into a wooded area. While the mapping pedestals marking residences and businesses bear no likeness to a lived-in, built environment, the chapel and the monument aux morts do. The chapel is small, but it resembles a church. And the monument aux morts is not even a miniature; it is very much like hundreds of monuments in towns and villages throughout France. It names eight soldiers from Fleury who were killed in the war, marking their deaths with a decorated poilu helmet, ⁷ a laurel wreath and the inevitable inscription: MORTS POUR LA FRANCE. These structures stand out in the landscape precisely because they seem so normal, because they are at least like those visitors see in almost every living village or town in France (See Figure 3). They are stark reminders of what is now absent—Fleury as a living village, a home, a place of work and play, where people led ordinary lives.

Third, the specific proximities suggested by the mapping pedestals, reinforce that sensibility. On the rise occupied by the monument aux morts are two pedestals, one marking Fleury’s town hall, the other the school. Across the “street” is the marker of the épicerie—a combined café and grocery (Figure 5). That the markers for the town hall and school are so close together suggests that, as in many small villages, the town hall and school may have been attached structures. The position of the monument aux morts next to the now absent town hall and school also seems familiar. In many towns and villages in France, the monument aux morts is near the town hall, a site considered appropriate for a civic monument (Becker, 1998; Sherman, 1999, p. 236). This small area almost certainly was Fleury’s epicenter, a place of activity and interaction, where kids went to school, women shopped at the grocery, public business was transacted at the town hall, and men gathered in the morning for coffee and conversation at the café. Nearby is the marker for the church, not quite at the town center but close by. Further afield are markers of other businesses, residences, and farms. The parsonage is about halfway between the church and the old cemetery, the latter on the village’s periphery, now enclosed by a wall and marked only with a large cross, clearly postwar amendments. The mapping pedestals suggest the layout of many living villages in France, and this on site “map” summons visitors to imagine the patterns of everyday life performed in the years before the war. A fourth and final “normal” feature of the site reinforces the directive to imagine this place as a living village. Fleury, like the other eight destroyed villages, is marked by village entry and exit signs, just like the ones drivers see on roads and highways, as they enter a living town or village (Figure 6). These signs, like the other familiar features, offer a startling contrast to the mapping pedestals, with the signs declaring that Fleury exists and the mapping pedestals refuting that Fleury exists.

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Figure 5.

Marker (Photos by authors)

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Figure 6.

Exit sign to Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Photo by authors)

The rhetorical workings of Fleury require minimal interpretive elaboration. Still, the two principal interpretive placards located there offer some aid in the types of imaginings incited by the preservation and commemorative installations. These two placards, one in the area where visitors are likely to enter the village, and the other mounted on the front of the chapel, offer similar information, but elaborated differently. Both include narratives of Fleury before, during, and after World War I. The middle section of each seeks to enhance the imagination of the war and specifically of the destructiveness of the Battle of Verdun. The placard nearest the entrance, for example, has this to say:

On 21st February 1916, Fleury-devant-Douaumont was awakened by the shelling that preceded a German attack. It was snowing. The horizon was ablaze. News was scarce and contradictory. The order was given to evacuate the village. The local people crowded into carts and led their livestock down towards Bras sur Meuse and Verdun, passing, as they did so, the reinforcements being sent towards the line of fire. On 24th February the fall of Fort Douaumont brought Fleury-devant-Douaumont to within the sight of the German troops . . . . This was the beginning of Fleury-devant-Douaumont’s final agony which was to last dramatically from June to August 1916 when the last, furious offensives were launched along the Froideterre-Souville front. ⁸

Of course, even such a rendition hardly captures the horrors of the war for the residents or for those reinforcements being sent up to the front. But the chapel placard comes closer, with a quotation from a first-hand observer, identified as Abbé Thellier de Poncheville, from his book, Ten Months in Verdun. The quotation’s force lies in its odd syntax, conveying a sense of horror in its narrative rendered in ungrammatical French and equally ungrammatical translation:

Rows of houses were destroyed by machine guns and fire, the roofs collapsed, the walls perforated and burnt, crumbled in the streets and gardens, with their twisted framework and all their intimate objects desecrated . . . . A strong odor of a charnel-house is released and close by the civilian cemetery’s old dead are obliterated, graves are open, bearing the recent dead in horizon blue or field gray. The fury of combat has dispersed everything; the shells have fallen on these ruins, submerged in soldiers’ blood, crammed with dead bodies gnawed by rats, in advance putrefaction, scrap-iron of war, rusted rifles, broken shovels, barbed-wire.

The interpretive placards at Fleury do more than aid in the imagination of the sights, smells, and sounds of the war and the destruction of the village, however. They also describe the village before the war, informing visitors that Fleury had 422 residents, and enumerating some of their names and occupations, as they were listed in the 1913 telephone directory. The entrance placard depicts life in the village this way:

Until the Great War, Fleury-devant-Douaumont was a peaceful, hard-working community. From time immemorial, work reflected the passing seasons . . . . One day merged into the next with an alternation of sowing and harvesting, tree-felling and grape harvesting. There were years of famine and times of prosperity . . . . Time seemed to have stood still in Fleury-devant-Douaumont but, after 1870, it suddenly took on a new, faster pace. The narrow-gauge Verdun-Douaumont railway passed through Fleury-devant-Douaumont.

This placard, though, invites the visitor not simply to contemplate the past; it takes precisely the turn of imagining the counterfactual, Fleury as if it had not been destroyed:

Fleury-devant-Douaumont has been brought back to life. The Association Nationale du Souvenir de la Bataille de Verdun and the Office National de Forêts have marked out the lines of its streets and the site (sic) of its houses. Visitors can see the erstwhile position of the village fountain where laughter rang out while people fetched the crystal clear water, the farms, the smithy, the school, the church, etc.

Of course, Fleury has not really been brought back to life, but the act of re-marking its streets and structures is attributed with precisely that power. Visitors may be able to see the site of the village fountain, but they cannot really hear the laughter, without accepting the invitation to imagine that and more about the village—as if the war had not happened or at least as if Fleury had not been in its path of destruction.

This is the grammatical “verb complex” of past perfect subjunctive—the as-if-not-having happened. ⁹ We take inspiration here, but depart somewhat, from Zelizer’s (2004, 2010) conceptualization of the subjunctive “voice” in photography, particularly in photographic images that “freeze a particular memorable moment of representation midway through the sequencing of action” (2004, p. 165). ¹⁰ Zelizer’s focus is on images of “about to die” moments, which “mark the moment before death” (p. 165). Such images, by means of their frozen motion, she suggests, compel by “suspending what we know is about to happen” (p. 167). The stopped action thus allows the spectator to project what might be about to happen in the frame. Fleury’s rhetoric works differently, but not simply because of the significant differences between a photograph and a historic preservation site.

If that which Zelizer (2004, 2010) means by “voice” in visual imagery refers to the “relationship developed between the spectator and the image” (p. 162), the relationship here between the visitor and Fleury’s commemorative representations occurs in a decidedly different register. It does so, because the action is not suspended at its midpoint. The action displayed in this site is completed and past. The visitor must acknowledge the completion of the action—the destruction of Fleury. But the “of Fleury” is the activator of the past perfect subjunctive; it is impossible to imagine Fleury being destroyed without imagining what was destroyed—Fleury—before the first shell was fired. It thus is to imagine the everyday life of a prewar village and, crucially, what it might have been in the absence of the terrible destruction that decimated it. A more important distinction may be that the past perfect subjunctive often is linked to “impossible wishes for the past,” as in a translation from the Latin: “Would that our ships had not touched shore” (Palmer, 2001, p. 132). Or to bring the case back to Fleury: If only Fleury had not been destroyed. The power of the past perfect subjunctive is that it accepts, even affirms, the epistemological certainty of past action but desires to introduce contingency into that past. So, instead of the capacity for “hope” that Zelizer (2004, p. 163) notes about the subjunctive in the frozen action of the about-to-die photographs, the past perfect subjunctive offers no such sanguinity. It acknowledges that the war happened and that Fleury was destroyed but dreams of the counterfactual of it not having been so. It wishes for or dreams what cannot be.

Importantly, we should distinguish between what we are deeming the grammatical complex of the past perfect subjunctive and the much-contested notion of counterfactual (or virtual) history. In the sense that both posit a counterfactual and eschew the postfacto determinism, sometimes called “hindsight bias” that is often attributed to history (i.e., it could not have happened otherwise), they are similar (Ferguson, 1999, p. 74; Lebow, 2010, p. 8). What distinguishes them might best be understood as an affective positioning with respect to the past versus a logical questioning of causal sequences had things gone differently in the past. Counterfactual historians sometimes project the outcomes of less positive turns of events than those that actually occurred. That is evident, for example, in Burleigh’s (1999) title “Nazi Europe: What if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?” Counterfactual history invites verification within an epistemic attitude, while the past perfect subjunctive operates within the bouletic—expressing an attitude of desire (Marques, 2009, pp. 190-191, 202). Moreover, while a counterfactual history typically asks what the present would be like if some event had not taken place (Beck, 2012, pp. 137-138), an imagination- or wish- derived subjunctive, at least in the past perfect, propels no such causal chain forward. The rhetoric of Fleury’s subjunctive does not invite us to project an untouched Fleury-devant-Douaumont in the present, but simply invites us to imagine it in the counterfactual past, in the event of its not having been destroyed.

Reinforcing Fleury’s invitations to imagine and its avowed eschewal of the tendencies to idealize or justify war, are two other features that we will consider here only briefly: Anonymity and selective silence. The first of these returns us to the mapping pylons in Fleury’s preservation precinct. There we do not find the names of those who lived or worked in the village, only their occupations (See Figures 4 and 5). Such anonymity is an important rhetorical choice. It is a choice, because it almost certainly would have been possible to place names on at least some of those markers. Some of the residents’ names are listed on Fleury’s entrance placard. Moreover, at another of Verdun’s destroyed villages, names of former residents do appear on markers that resemble in other ways those at Fleury. ¹¹ It is important for it further obligates the imagination: Who were these people? What were they like? Where did those who survived go after being evacuated? We can only imagine, for the fates of so many of the thousands of personnes déplacées in northern France during the war varied considerably. Some were taken in by relatives or relief agencies, while others became itinerants, living where they could in cellars or abandoned abris, foraging or begging for sustenance (Smith & Hill, 1920). The pedestal markers tell us only about livelihoods ruined; it is for us to imagine the lives disrupted or worse.

There is also in Fleury one quite remarkable and clearly selective silence. Here in the space of this small commune is where the Germans n’ont pas passé [did not pass]. Yet those words—or any like them—do not appear here. That, too, is a choice. Ils n’ont pas passé does appear as a marker of courage, if not victory, on markers or monuments in other locations. Indeed, one is not so far away, on Mort Homme hill, near Cumière, the only one of Verdun’s destroyed villages on the west side of the Meuse River. This famous, grisly monument depicts a half-alive (muscled), half-dead (skeletal) soldier holding aloft the French flag. The battle for Mort Homme probably was just as hard fought as that for the terrain of Fleury; such comparison is hardly the point. Instead, the point is about the articulation of the statement in one location and not another in the aftermath. Fleury makes no claim to victory or even to the steadfastness of the soldiers who fought and died there, only to the destruction of lives, livelihoods, and landscape. Together, these elements—the implacable invocation of the past perfect subjunctive, the anonymity in representing those who suffered, and the resounding silence about holding off the German forces here—contribute to a memory of war that surely cannot be understood as idealizing or sanitizing. We do not see (but imagine) the horror of war here. We do not see (but imagine) the placidity of the village before the war. But we do see some of the bleak, desolate wreckage that is the outcome of war, with both our eyes and our imaginations.

Memory, the Verb Complex, and the Mood of the Material

The capacity of a public memory place to sanitize war lies in denying war’s violence and/or camouflaging its consequences. When that occurs—and it does—it may in the worst instances aid in legitimizing the idea of military action as an instrument of the state exercised without negative effect. But it is possible to disrupt that kind of representation, as evidenced by the transformation of Fleury-devant-Douaumont’s ruins into a public site of memory. There, the evidence of war’s violent destructiveness and its outcomes are palpable. True, it displays no violence, but importantly, it shows us some of the tragic consequences of war: the devastation of lives, livelihoods, and a way of life; the landscape left as a toxic ruin, still dangerous almost one hundred years after the war; and of course, the utter absence of inhabitants. Every opportunity, especially the most available rhetorical topos (Ils n’ont pas passé) for marking heroism or even the military resilience of the nation-state is foregone.

Fleury “works” as an emotionally evocative memory place primarily as the result of its activation of the past perfect subjunctive. We are indebted to Barbie Zelizer’s introduction into contemporary memory studies of the importance of the subjunctive mood, and we believe that its further exploration, especially in its interdependent connections to shifts in tense and aspect may offer useful insights about how memory works differ and how they operate rhetorically by means of very basic grammatical registers. Both Zelizer’s (2010) “about to die” photographs and Fleury share in the power of the subjunctive mood; that seems beyond dispute. What is different about them is precisely in the tenses and aspects they deploy. Even the naming of the photographs as representing “about to die” spells out the remainder of their verb complex. Their tense is present, and their aspect is progressive, that is to say, ongoing or unfinished. Fleury shares with the photographs a subjunctive mood but modulated differently with its past tense and perfective (completed) aspect. Why is that important? There are at least two reasons.

First, the basic configuration of the memory logic is different, and it matters in terms of what these two memory representations seem to seek from their viewers or visitors. A “rational” or “logical” reading of most of the photographs Zelizer (2010) examines would leave little room for doubt about the outcome of the actions that they suspend. But as she points out, that is not what the images invite or what the “pictures want” from their viewers, as Mitchell (2005) might put it. The images, as Zelizer notes, invite an “as if” interrogation of what might be the outcome of the action. They allow for a startling arc of response to that interrogation, from a denial to an acceptance of death as the outcome. They allow within their present and progressive configuration for the possibility (if not the epistemological plausibility) of a last minute intervention, a miracle, a defiance of death. They allow, as Zelizer suggests, for hope, as irrational as that response might seem.

The past perfect subjunctive allows for the wish that past actions had been different or that they would not have happened at all, but it does not entertain hope. Fleury presents itself as already destroyed, even if its memory markings incite us to imagine what it would have been like had the event of destruction not taken place. Its designation as both a village détruit and as mort pour la France reinforces the perfective (completed) act. So, oddly, the past perfect subjunctive depends here upon its internal deployment of the past perfect indicative; if it invites us to wish that Fleury had not been destroyed, that invitation depends on the affirmation that Fleury was destroyed. The action is assigned distinctly to the past at Fleury rather than deferred indefinitely as an ongoing present in the about-to-die images. If we are to wish, as Fleury’s memory markings invite us to, that the village had not been destroyed, we must accept as past fact that it was indeed destroyed.

Second, we should attend to the questions Zelizer (2004) raises at the end of her initial exploration of about-to-die photographs. She suggests that “a subjunctive response to the horrors [the photographs] embody persists too, lingering as messages of contingency at a point where contingency may no longer be the optimum response to the events of mass destruction depicted in these images” (p. 180). She continues, “[O]ur . . . embrace of conditionality and hypothesis, is worth pondering for what it suggests about the boundaries of memory. For it may be that memory rests not only upon the boundaries of the familiar but upon the boundaries of the impossible. And when dealing with the memory of tragic events, we need to ask ourselves if that is the best response we can muster” (p. 180). By 2010, Zelizer seems to hold a less ambivalent attitude toward these kinds of memory markers, suggesting at the end of her book that “investing in the ‘as if’ promises to make the ‘as is’ a bit more bearable, and given the volatility and uncertainty of much of today’s world, that might not be such a bad thing” (p. 326).

Perhaps not, but the subjunctive in the present progressive does harbor the danger of denial or even evasion of the real effects of violent acts, as Jones, Zagacki, and Lewis (2007) suggest in their critical analysis of the ubiquitous missing persons posters in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City. They follow Zelizer in noting the posters’ operationalization of the subjunctive, in this case also a present progressive, leaving open the possibility that those missing persons depicted in the posters were still alive. The depictions themselves, as they suggest, reinforced the hope: “The vitality of the subjects, frozen for all to see, belied the persons’ possible status as deceased—they looked too alive to be dead” (p. 114).

As time passed and hope receded, many of the survivors transformed their “missing” posters into “in memory of” posters, shifting the tense and aspect decisively. Some, however, did not, as Jones, et al. acknowledge: “More than nine months after the attack . . . [missing person posters] were still being hung around Ground Zero . . . . This inability to move into the future was echoed 16 days after the attack by Tony Gazzuto, whose wife was still missing. He stated that he ‘would continue to hope no matter how many years go by’” (p. 118). Of course, the posters did not “cause” or even invite this effect. And of course, these were individuals acting out of profound grief. But the grammatical register of the missing persons posters, much like the about-to-die photos do admit of, even sanction, a denial of consequence that follows from violence. We might ask again, as Zelizer did in 2004, whether “that is the best response we can muster” (p. 180). The subjunctive itself is not the problem. The difficulty, if there is one, lies in the interaction of that mood with tense and aspect. The present progressive subjunctive may offer comfort, hope, and a “softening” of a likely outcome. But it also allows us to deny or defer the outcome altogether, allowing within its purview that problematic notion that violence (or war) is without negative consequence.

The past perfect subjunctive complex displayed in Fleury hardly allows for denial or deferral, or for the hope that is available in the present progressive subjunctive. That may be why, in the aftermath of World War I, there were a number of proposals to leave other structures or locales—sometimes those of extraordinary symbolic value—as ruins. For example, “some people in the 1920s wanted the cathedral of Rheims, which was being rebuilt at the time, to remain in its ruined state as a testimony to the barbarity” (Capdevila & Voldman, 2006, p. 171). And Winston Churchill “wanted to keep Ypres [a destroyed medieval town in Belgium] in its wartime state” (Lloyd, 1998, p. 121). Neither of those proposals was carried out, but the rhetorical power of such preservation sites—if we can attach that term to a ruin—appears to have been clear to those who suggested them, and it is explicit in Capdevila and Voldman’s account: Such spaces are “testimony” to the consequences of war.

Coda: Supplements or Interruptions?

Since its marking in the 1970s with the “street” signs and mapping pedestals, the Fleury preservation site has been supplemented in additional ways, creating new rhetorical strata of commemoration, most of it in a bid to internationalize the site. That Fleury was singled out for these augmentations is almost certainly because of its location, near to the Douaumont Ossuaire and other memory sites on the battlefield, making it a handy place to Europeanize World War I memory. In 1979, an icon, Notre Dame of Europe, was added to the chapel’s façade. Her cloak is the flag of the European Union, and she is meant to mark reconciliation among the former foes of Europe. In November of 1998, in commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, representatives of France, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Bosnia planted three trees, marking peace, freedom, and human rights, and posted a plaque explaining the significance of this commemorative planting.

One other augmentation seeks to further internationalize the remembrance, but its attempt is contested. The interpretive placard on the chapel was added in or after 1979, for it mentions the addition of Notre Dame of Europe. As mentioned earlier, this interpretive placard is, in many ways, much like the one at the visitor entrance, but there are some important variations. This one has added an “HOMMAGE TO THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS,” those, prior to the U.S. entry into the war in 1917, who worked with the American Ambulance Hospital, American Red Cross, and American Field Service, or who served in the Lafayette Escadrille flying combat missions. Portions of this placard’s text, though, remind us several times that Fleury is very much a French site, in spite of the several internationalizing augmentations. For instance, the section about the American volunteers opens with the following words: “The Battle of Verdun was a French battle . . . .” And at several junctures, it appropriates the American voluntarism to a reinforcement of French nationalism, for example, in its inscription of the American Sanitary Service’s motto “Mon corps à la terre, mon âme à dieu, mon coeur à la France” [“My body to the earth, my soul to God, my heart to France.”]. An international destination and a site of commemorative supplements this may be, but there is no uncertainty—indeed there is an insistence—that this is French hallowed ground.

This should not necessarily be considered a reactionary or parochial gesture, particularly given its context; the area and indeed the entire Western Front is an international geography of commemoration, with different locations saturated with particular national or imperial associations. For examples, although all located in France, Thiepval is linked irrevocably to the British Empire, Neuve Chapelle is marked as Indian, Vimy Ridge is Canadian, Montfaucon is American, and so forth. ¹² It would seem rather stingy to deny to the host nation what it deems to be its own most important symbolic spaces. Still, the push-back against internationalization is interesting. The question of whether it is the internationalization or the insistent renationalization that amends the site most appropriately seems an open one. Certainly the supplement of Notre Dame de l’Europe might be seen as a gesture that cements the pro-peace posture of the European Union, just as surely as did the appearance of Mitterand and Kohl together at the Douaumont Ossuaire just five years thereafter. And the planting of trees by the international contingent that included Germany could be seen, and certainly was meant to be seen, that way too. ¹³ Still, the reactions that Verdun was a French battle and that this is a French site, reinforced also by a more recent statuary addition, seem to stake a claim that promoting peace may better be done by displaying the effects of war than by installing or planting pledges of peace. The newest statuary installation, in 2009, marks the execution without trial of two French second lieutenants—Henry Herduin and Pierre Millant—in June, 1916. There has been a strong movement in the past decade, particularly during the Sarkozy presidency, to “rehabilitate” the memory of those executed for desertion or mutiny. The movement is strongest in an area west of Verdun, known as the Chemin des Dames, where French soldiers from a number of different units refused to obey orders and were shot in 1917. The rehabilitation of the memory of these soldiers has had a profound impact on French public monumenting of World War I; with the “shame” of mutiny alleviated, French public memory efforts have strengthened, particularly in the Aisne Department (Becker, 2009).

A further, undated, emendation to the Fleury site, near its center, is a large placard identifying various species of trees and other plant life found in Fleury; and a few shrubs along its pathways have species labels attached. In a sense, trying to turn Fleury into an arboretum might at least appear to be a blunder, in its apparent change of subject from site commemoration. However, it seems to be a minor one, in terms of the degree of attention visitors seem to pay to species labels as opposed to the much more compelling commemorative markers. The powerful message that Fleury forwards by its double yield to the imagination can hardly be compromised by what seems to be only a minor distraction. Still, calling attention to the forested area may have more resonance than is immediately obvious. The backdrop of Fleury’s cleared precinct is a heavily forested area, a forcefully ironic sign of natural beauty that camouflages the Red Zone’s poisoned and still very dangerous landscape. Le Forêt Domaniale de Verdun—certainly in this area—is composed of a reforestation effort undertaken after the war to seal off the poisoned territory from any use or traversal, with the only exceptions being cleared sites for commemorative spaces or military installations.

Perhaps the most interesting amendment to the Fleury landscape in recent years is the simplest one. For years Fleury had only a village entry sign, but not an exit sign, the latter added to the site in 2008 (See Figure 6). Like the entry marker, it looks very similar to those one would see when leaving any French town. But in this instance, the diagonal red slash through the name of the village has an extra resonance, for it marks not only a departure from Fleury, but also that Fleury-devant-Douaumont is no more. Perhaps more than any of the supplements that have been added to the site, this one—if taken very literally—is consonant with the 1970s marking that burdens the imagination of war with loss of lives, livelihoods, and even a way of life. Whether this or any of the other post-1970s amendments complement the earlier rhetoric of the site or interrupt it remains an open question, perhaps yet again dependent upon the valence of the desiring imagination.