An Important Guide to French Battlefields

By Denis Horgan | Apr 28, 2010

Rattling around northern France on various trips, as much as I would enjoy the great culture and astonishing natural beauty I was drawn, too, to the many battlefields there, to me haunted places, sites of such horrid valor and mad history. Normandy. The Somme. Verdun. Caen. Amiens. It is a truly humbling experience.

I wish I'd had Robert Mueller's book with me so that I could have done it better.

Mueller's "Fields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium" is an important, essential companion to anyone's attempt to understand and honor the vast array of human suffering, courage and sacrifice to be found in the region's hundreds of memorials, monuments and cemeteries. It is a small sample of Europe's endless warring, a slight swath arcing across just one part of one nation and a bit of another — yet marked with so much war. For so many, many centuries the region, like all of Europe, has seen battle after battle, death after death, in an unending symphony of slaughter. "Fields of War" helps enormously to understand what happened and what a visitor can encounter to appreciate it.

This excellent book charts battlefields from the Hundred Years War through the Second World War and so much in between. With maps, photographs, charts and concise explanations it guides a visitor through the blood-drenched landscape where heroism was demanded in impossible causes, sacrifice compelled for no knowable reason, where the land's ground-down communities bled for the lords' and masters' insanities.

Where nature reclaims the serenity of the fields of northern France and Belgium, this guide delivers us the schemes of war, how a hillock there or a trench here changed history — for a brief moment. It walks us through scenes where so many of our near ancestors bled and helps us understand what it took to get from one place to another at such huge cost. It is a practical book delivering history in cool, helpful abundance.

In Mueller's hands, we can almost understand what soldiers by the tens of millions saw as they looked out from their trenches, across their crossbows or through their tank slits. He directs us to the most effective museums, monuments, vantage points. He sends us through quiet lanes when the tourism maps might channel us along more beaten paths. His maps bring clarity to rolling landscapes once, somehow, full of the rage and pain of battle.

He does it calmly and with the purpose to be helpful to the visitor trying to make sense of senseless things. This is a true gift. I have stood, dumb, at the cliffs of Normandy and never quite mastered who landed where. I have walked where trenches once were and never quite got the handle on what took place when armies poured forward at that very spot to their doom. I have reflected in the quiet of cemeteries marking so many battles and it was so important to me that I did so, but am sure I missed some other one, equally important, equally dizzy-making. When I return, if I am fortunate enough to do so, this book will show me ways I might not find on my own.

Fifty battlegrounds within 240 miles of Paris, reflecting more than 500 years of war and tens of millions of lives lost. It is nearly too much to contain in even this substantial effort. As he must to retain his own sanity, the author professionally avoids the emotion or judgment that I feel freer to render upon so many kings, kaisers, emperors, presidents and ministers, so many bad generals and sinister politicians. Instead, he lets events tell their own story.

It is a hard story indeed.

Just from his helpful capsules, Mueller reminds us:

"The Germans advanced 3 km." Casualties at the Second battle of Ypres? British, 59,000. French, approximately 10,000. Belgian, approximately 1,500. German, 35, 000. For three kilometers.

"An extended stalemate," at the Argonne. Casualties? French, 107,438. German, half that.

"An awful bloodbath without decisive victory." Verdun's losses? French, 377,000-542,000 total casualties; 166,000 killed. German, 366,000-434,000 total casualties; 150,000 killed.

"The Allies captured 130 square kilometers, but nothing strategically important. For "nothing strategically important" on the Somme, British casualties were 419,654, French were 194,451. And of the Germans, "The initial estimate after the battle was 600,000 but the number has declined with further analysis." Ah, maybe it was only 500,000 or merely 350,000.

And so it goes on in battle after battle before and after, with casualties mounting here and there, one by bloody one. For centuries. In a place smaller than a corner of one of our larger states.

There are foolish people on both sides of the Atlantic who make so much of the grand culture and ripened sophistication of the Continent, diminishing our admittedly flawed American efforts as immature and impulsive and callow in comparison. That is so terribly wrong. We have done bad things but we are as small children compared to the unendingly monstrous things done there.

For every bottle of delicate wine there is a barrel of blood spilled to amuse European leadership; for every towering cathedral, there are dozens and dozens of cemeteries filled to overflowing with the corpses of those who died in the name of king and church, over footnotes to forgotten treaties, at the whim of the lords. For every etude, novel or painting there are ten thousand shrieks of pain, ten million deaths and scores of millions more of orphans created, hopes and dreams dashed. So that the leaders of Europe — from the Balkans to the Baltic, from Spain to Russia, from north to south, east to west — can have their damn wars.

That is not Robert Mueller's message. His is maybe more important: To understand these things we need to know more, we need to be guided. "Fields of War" does that so well.

"Fields of war: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium" by Robert Mueller. 467 pp, including 48 pages of photographs and 65 maps. $29.95. Available at frenchbattlefields.com or French Battlefields, PO Box 4808, Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-4808 or at Amazon.com.

From: http://ctwatchdog.com/2010/04/28/an-important-guide-to-french-battlefields