Family reunion at Verdun

By TAD BARTIMUS

We stand together, my friend and I, savoring the sweetness of life in a place where grass grows out of bones. We have just discovered, after a quarter of a century of friendship, that our grandfathers fought in the trenches of Verdun -- against one another.

It is a curious sensation to know that we are now connected by history in an adversarial way, that our American and German ancestors tried to kill each other on this French ground 80 years ago. Failing, they went home and lived full lives. Neither of us can remember them talking about their "war to end all wars."

Our genes have been here before, in this very spot, when the air smelled of mustard gas instead of fresh-cut hay and carrier pigeons sent word of victory or defeat.

To survive -- to rejoin their families, die in their own beds -- was a goal that saw them through. Generals and politicians far away from The Front always have grandiose visions of war; our grandfathers understood real sacrifice, knew wars true face and stared it down, wanting nothing so much as to get it over with.

At Verdun, as elsewhere throughout Europe, a generation of young men with families and dreams just like our grandfathers didn't live to see the end. A million and a half Germans, a million and a half Frenchmen, a million soldiers -- from the British Empire and perhaps as many as four million Russians died in World War I. American losses numbered about 100,000. Of all the wars before or since, none has seemed as horrific as the one that condemned its soldiers to almost certain death in the No Man's Land of the Somme, the Marne and Verdun.

The reborn forests, still full of ammunition, are lush on this pretty day. Sleepy vendors of postcards and souvenirs doze in the warm sun near monuments carved in remembrance. My German friend and I, veterans of our own wars, are the only other living souls here. We visit a row of white wooden crosses, peer through the rusting metal slits of a machine gun pillbox, stand silent at the edge of a trench draped in ground cover like a skeleton under a blanket.

Our discovery of a shared link has changed completely the way we look at this hallowed place. Our genes have been here before, in this very spot, when the air smelled of mustard gas instead of fresh-cut hay and carrier pigeons sent word of victory or defeat. We are connected -- to Verdun, to each other -- by the blood of men we thought gone. Here, their spirits live.

Did our grandfathers get foot rot from months of rain and mud? How did they hide in a moonscape littered with barbed wire, mines, tunnels and graves? Did the deafening artillery and screams of the dying haunt them til their own end?

My friends grandfather went home to Germany without his hair. He took up his leather goods trade, then tried to wait out the second world war by tending to his business. At the end, the conquering Red Army forced him to dismantle German railroads to send back to the Soviet Union. Soon afterwards, he died of hard times and old age.

My grandfather went home to America with an embroidered satin pillow from Paris and a weak heart. He became a railroad man in a snappy-brimmed cap who liked to lift me onto his train for short rides in the cab and a fancy oatmeal breakfast in the dining car. Just as I was getting old enough to know the gruff widower who loved watching baseball, I lost him.

At Verdun, I got him back. And I shared him with my German friend, just as he shared his grandfather with me. Perhaps that's what they fought for, after all.

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