Over the Top in France - August 4

Actually we were in for a long night.  Izzy, plagued by terrible jet lag, cannot get to sleep and so pads tearfully back and forth between our rooms, finally sleeping with me while our Information Specialist is surprised to find Billy Yank in the neighboring bed the next morning. 

I should point out that the visitors at these museums and sites are overwhelmingly male.  Ladies are few; girl-children even fewer.  Everywhere you see groups of middle-aged men, or adult sons and dads poring over maps and consulting lists, even at breakfast.  Even our hotel has a modest but nice little collection of uniforms and medals and shells and posters, and a little statue by the koi pond, of nurses and sandbags.

A spot of rain last night adds a note of muddy authenticity to our visit to the quirky (or creepy, depending on your perspective) Hill 62-Sanctuary Wood Museum.  Here the uniforms are on frankly scary mannequins, and the weapons and photos and helmets are dusty and rusty and all jumbled together willy-nilly.  And it smells funny.  But there are two great things about this museum that make it worth visiting.  First, it has a collection of about eight stereoscopes, each containing a few dozen images that, when viewed through the Minion-like box, present a 3D photograph from the war.  As far as I can tell, these are mostly French and Belgian, and at least the ones I saw were positively grisly.  Lots of bodies, men and animals, in places where dead bodies just shouldn’t be, like in trees or barbed wire.  This is how people used to see the war, in stereoscope.

The other great thing at this museum is the trench system outside.  The same family has owned the property since the war, and they just kept the trenches in the woods intact so what you are walking around in – or, if you are our Information Specialist, following scary underground tunnels much to your mother’s consternation – is an actual trench system.  Miss RC says it is the only extant system in the Salient.  The woods are, as we will find across the front, not only marked with corrugated-tin-lined trenches and makeshift shelters, but also pocked with deep shellholes, that today have standing water in the bottom.  While the copse was originally deemed a sanctuary for straggling British soldiers (hence the name), by 1915 it was contested land.  There are two raggedy stumps covered in memorial crosses and poppies and flags, which are supposedly all that remain of the original trees.  There is a rag-tag aspect to all of this:  piles of discarded trench refuse like wire and stakes and tin and shell casings, all over the place.  Some German gravestones from who knows where lie in a random line.  In the second house are even creepier exhibits, with one-eyed generals and bandaged baby dolls in cribs.  

Yet all around the wood is pastoral farmland.  At the end of the trench system, you are next to field of placid cows.  If you drive a k. up the road, you come to the top of a hill (or what passes for a hill in these parts) with a memorial to the Canadian men who fought to secure this, Hill 62 (because it is 62 meters high).  The views are lovely.  You have to work pretty hard to imagine it otherwise, and yet the woods down the road give a sense of what it was, almost exactly 100 years ago. 

The poppies may have grown in Flanders Fields, but what really grows here now is cows and corn.

Und now comes the big driving portion of our trip.  Fortunately, I have brought a soundtrack of popular music from the day, so at least I am happy humming along to such delights as Over There! and Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser.  One of our albums is actually a collection of restored original tracks so you get to hear scratchy vintage recordings from artists like Al Jolson, Enrico Caruso, and The American Quartet.  I’m mad for it all, the rest of our party, perhaps less so. 

Damn you Google Maps you data succubus. This drive takes forever, you never quite know when you’ve left Belgium and returned to France, and lunch was too much AAAAA andouillettes.  We haul grumpily into Charleville, which Transport Officer Bill tells us is the puppet capital of the world or something.  As usual, he is correct.  Here on Place Winston Churchill you can find a fine WWI monument AND the Institut de la Marionette, which has a marvelous automated clock.  Each hour, a door below the clock opens and a scene is played out with marionettes, from an allegorical tale featuring Charlemagne and some hunters.  (We think; the description of the hourly scenes is challenging our translational skills.)  In the scene we see, the hunters mostly march around.  Still, the clock has a giant head above it that moves constantly, and great golden legs below. It is a kind of giant with a puppet theater in his belly. 

Our trail turns south and we follow the Meuse River for kilometers until we reach . . . VERDUN.  You really can’t spell it without all caps and a tone of disaster in the background (cue the doom music from the In Flanders Fields museum).  An old fortress city, Verdun is famous for holding off the Germans in 1916, albeit at catastrophic loss of life.  “Ils n’ont pas passé” is the phrase, and all the monument iconography is that of a wall or a tower – terribly stern and a bit at odds with the very friendly welcome we received at the teeny Hotel de Montalbain.  “You are the chef of the expedition?” the owners ask me after watching us all during the check-in process. 

There is not much happening in Verdun – a tiny riverfront area with pubs catering to tourists with English menus is about it for nightlife.  But we follow the hotel owners’ recommendations for dinner and eat in a teeny restaurant that is quite nice. 

Information Specialist Peter remarks that you know you are not in Cambridge, Mass anymore when the owner asks if the jeune homme would like some wine, too.  Almost as satisfying as the bottomless Shirley Temples in New Orleans.