A soldier ays a cross for his fallen friend on Armistice Day. Photo: Owen Humphreys / PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reservedThis year marks the anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, which raged from 21 February to 18 December 1916. By the end of this terrible struggle, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the First world war, some 143,000 German and 162,000 French soldiers had been killed. But because British forces were not involved in this battle, this part of the Western Front is less visited by the British than are the more westerly battlefields such as those of the Somme and the Marne. And yet the whole area, throughout the length of the war, saw some of the worst battles of the entire conflict – not least in the hilly, forested area south west of Verdun, known as the Argonne. Such spots can teach us a great deal about the past and draw lessons for the future, but as I discovered, in these raw post-Brexit times, even what they tell us is a matter of controversy.
A blood-drenched landscape
I certainly knew about Verdun, but until we travelled around the Argonne I had no idea just how blood-drenched is this pastoral landscape. Literally one cannot travel more than a few miles without encountering a war cemetery, either French, German or American, along with numerous imposing memorials. So a country holiday turned into more of a battlefield tour – but it was also one which, quite unexpectedly, brought me face to face with another kind of horror, one which I thought I’d left safely behind for a while: the British press.
The Argonne is the site of the largest American military cemetery in Europe, larger than even that at Colleville-sur-Mer, which overlooks Omaha Beach in Normandy and features in the distinctly American 'Saving Private Ryan'. It is at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, and contains the bodies of 14,246 soldiers who died in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Argonne Forest. This was a major part of the final Allied campaign of the war and stretched along the entire Western Front, lasting from 26 September 1918 until the Armistice. It marked the United States’ largest military campaign to date, involving 1.2 million soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force. The battle cost 26,277 American lives, with 95,786 wounded.
