The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund

Author:Peter Englund [Englund, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-70138-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

One of the men interjects that the communiqué has carefully refrained from mentioning their own losses, but all of the rest are strangely gratified and repeat time after time—like a comforting mantra—“It’s talking about us.” And these brief notices about their battle perhaps offer one reason for it being fought at all; perhaps this event was intended to become text right from the start; perhaps the company suffered its ten days of martyrdom so that someone would be able to say that Hill 321 (not in itself of any great military importance) was held.

Indeed, from the French point of view, the defence of Verdun is mostly symbolic, so that the generals, the politicians, the journalists and the public can say to one another, “Oh yes, the town has been held, is being held and will be held.” But has anyone properly considered what that little transitive verb tenir, “to hold,” actually stands for? “To hold” means one thing to the top generals, another to the megaphones of the nationalistic press in Paris, yet another to the commanders in the field, and something entirely different to foot soldiers like Arnaud and his thirty surviving men. The cruel and tragic forms the battle has taken are, therefore, not just the sum of the collective forces of destruction among those doing the fighting, they are also the sum of the rhetorical and semantic confusion among those at whose behest the battle is being fought.

But they have now come through one of the very worst and most climactic points of the battle. Over the course of little more than a week, the Germans have mounted some of their most concentrated assaults since February along the whole of the front, achieving significant successes. Among several other places, the important French strong point, Fort de Vaux, has fallen after quite exceptionally severe fighting.oo

Later, Arnaud hears the whistle of the narrow-gauge railway that winds its way between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. He realises that he really has survived:

I had climbed down from the scaffold of suffering and returned to the world of peace and life. I thought I was the same person I had been before spending ten days face to face with death. I was wrong. I had lost my youth.

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