A century of ghosts

VERDUN, France -- The small red signs are everywhere, in this haunted woodland. They scream from signposts. They are screwed into the crumbling archways of shattered dugouts, the masonry green with a century of moss and ground cover in some places, their mounded outlines softened now by a carpet of grass.

I am the grass. Let me work: Carl Sandburg's line comes unbidden to me as a I look around this somber place, this murdering landscape in eastern France that remains a graveyard a century on, that remains a killing field from which demolition crews still pull thousands of pounds of unexploded Great War ordinance every year.

Hence the small red signs, which all carry the same warning in French: Defense d'entrer.

In English, "Do not enter."

And so we do not. And we do not pas quitter le sentier balise, or "leave the marked trail." We do as little as possible to disturb the dead still lying beneath our feet, the dead who are as much a part of this scarred landscape as the crumbling dugouts and rusted tangles of barbed wire and deep gouges in the earth -- shellholes and trenchworks still winding through the forests that have grown up all along the old Western Front, as if trying to conceal the monstrous crime that was the Great War itself.

Defense d'entrer.

And yet the world did d'entrer. And if the guns fell silent a century ago today on what we now call Veterans Day but which I still think of as Armistice Day, the greater tragedy of the Great War is that the guns did not remain silent. The Great War, in fact, only paved the way for even more horrific bloodshed. In destroying one world, it opened the entrance to another, bloodier one. It opened the entrance to a second, more ruinous Great War, and to the Cold War, and to wars in southeast Asia and the Middle East -- and to a certain  blue September morning in 2001, when America paid the price for what was in a very real sense set in motion a century ago today.

Historians tell us World War I was the first industrial war, in which human beings perfected to an unimagined degree the means for exterminating one another. Verdun was very much an epicenter for that perfecting, a slaughter pen in which 300,000 Germans and French died in 10 months of relentless and pointless combat.

Their bones now rest in eternal sleep beneath orderly rows of white crosses in the cemetery at Douamont, whose fort, pockmarked with shell holes and rusting barbed wire, was a key objective that changed hands several times in the fighting. More bones lie jumbled in an immense pile in the adjoining ossuary; you can lean over and inspect them through narrow windows near ground level. The windows, and the bones, go on and on and on.

We visited the ossuary, and Verdun, more than a decade ago, when the guns had been silent for almost 90 years. It is an inexpressibly gloomy place, made more so the day we visited by broody gray clouds and a persistent dripping rain. The very air seemed heavy with death and loss, because death and loss are everywhere.

Here lie the remains of one of the nine villages caught between the lines and pounded to dust; literally the only evidence of their existence are tiny shards of masonry and signposts that have been put up to mark where the streets used to run. Here, in the ruins of Douamont, is a walled-up alcove; behind it some 300 Germans killed by a direct hit sleep on forever. And here, enclosed now to preserve it, is a long mound of beige earth.

This is the Trench of Bayonets, in which another direct hit entombed a  host of French soldiers, leaving only their bayoneted rifle barrels poking out of the earth. The bodies, we are told, have long since been removed, and the story may be apocryphal in any event. Yet a row of white crosses still marks the spot.

And it's not like we aren't surrounded by other, lesser marked graves.

Those charged with tracking such things estimate there are still 80,000 to 100,000 unrecovered remains lying beneath the trees and the hillocked grass of the old battlefield. The knowledge of that presses down on you, in this dreary place. We drive around, we get out of the car, we walk carefully among the shellholes and the shattered ruins of old gun turrets. Here and there under the trees are more gun turrets and crumbled pillboxes rearing up out of the forest; here are more red signs, more defense d'entrer.

And after awhile, something dawns on you.

Though there are trees all around you, there is no birdsong.  There is only the dripping of the rain, the heaviness of the air, an implacable silence. And the unmistakable sense that you are surrounded by ghosts -- a century of ghosts -- warning us to heed the signs.

Defense d'entrer, they say.

Too late.