LORRAINE

June 24:  We actually slept past 7 a.m. this morning. Our room is so quiet and it was so cool outside. I had awakened sometime in the middle of the night and had gazed outside to see the night sky, but unfortunately, it is near the summer solstice and we are so far north, that the sky wasn't completely dark even at 3 a.m. I'll bet the night sky here is spectacular in the winter.

View from our window in the morning

Breakfast was lovely--croissants, breads, French butter, an assortment of local confitures--including mirabelle, local honey, yogurt, coffee and orange juice. I was disappointed to learn that the mirabelle plums won't be in season until August, because the mirabelle jam was so delicious.

Douaumont Ossuary

View from the ossuary tower

After breakfast, we set off towards Verdun to see some World War I battlefields.We had a rough idea of where to go, and luckily found a small sign leading to the Douaumont Ossuary. This monument holds the unidentified bones of some of the 300,000 soldiers killed during the Battle of Verdun. All nationalities are interred together. We watched a film about the battle, then we climbed to the top of the tower to look out over the cemetery where the identified bodies were buried. War is always tragic, but what makes the deaths of these 300,000 so horrific is that the French and Germans would gain and then lose a few yards and a few hundred men every few days. It was a battle of attrition, and what was being used up was their sons, their brothers, their husbands. This went on for 300 days during 1916. An entire generation of British, French and German men were gone forever.

Fleury, France, a disappeared village

A monument to Fleury, France and the people who lived there.

The backroads of this area of France are forested and beautiful, but pockmarked with artillery craters and "disappeared" villages--Les Village Detruits. There is still live ordnance in the ground. Nine villages in this area of France were wiped from the face of the earth during the Great War. Today, the villages are memorialized with markers identifying the family who lived or farmed there, with perhaps a small chapel in what was once the center of town and dirt paths marking the roads. These villages are still marked on maps, even though they're deserted. The forest is eerily quiet, but 100 years ago this was the site of unending artillery barrages. What is unbelievable, is that a century later, you can still see the pits that the artillery shells made, and you can also see the trenches where the men took shelter.

Artillery craters

Remnant of trench

German bunker

I tried to imagine what my grandfather Claude Carson Smith had endured as a wagoner with the 114th Field Artillery. During the late summer and fall of 1918, when he was very near this region, it was cold and rainy, the roads were muddy, and he was in charge of a wagon and the horses to pull it. The roads were (and still are) totally inadequate for hundreds of thousands of troops, and there were 24-hour traffic jams. Sometimes the exhausted horses dropped dead from exertion. After four years of war, the Americans were using animals that were unsuitable for the job of pulling large, loaded wagons. If the wagon needed to negotiate a hill, the soldiers had to unhitch horses from another wagon to augment their team. Claude and the other members of the Supply Company delivered munitions and supplies to the trenches, and I imagine, removed the wounded and dead. Soldiers described the conditions as comparable to Hell. Perhaps this explains why Claude never talked of it to my parents. Claude was a farm boy from the mountains of Tennessee who embodied the World War I song, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?" After he saw Paree, he never plowed again.

Countryside near the American cemetery

After exploring the country around Verdun, we ate a bland rendition of cassoulet at a village restaurant and then drove to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery which was in a remote and beautiful location. I have never been to a more peaceful place. It was beautiful and quiet except for the extraordinary chirping of birds. Was that a cuckoo? There was no one at the vast cemetery except a few caretakers and a woman pushing a baby carriage and us. I wanted to find the grave of Leo Peltz, the relative of someone I work with who had died in the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne at age 30. He was interred in Section C, Row 24, Grave 9 in this foreign land, far from his home and family. He died less than a month before the Armistice. There were more than 14,000 more young American men buried with him. And to think that less than a year later, Adolph Hitler was in Munich fomenting events that would lead to another world war. It seems impossible.

Entrance to Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery - Section C

We then drove to the city of Verdun. Today it's a lovely French town with a waterfront and lively town center. During the Great War, it was the cause of more than 300 days of ferocious fighting between the Germans and the French. The French prevailed, but at a terrible cost.

We walked along the main street in Verdun and I ducked into a Monoprix and bought some dried mushrooms and a little French sailor shirt for Luca.

Monument to French soldiers killed while standing in the trench with their bayonets upward

Les tranche des baionnettes