Heart-wringing journey in hell-hole Verdun

ARE YOU into books that leave you gasping; one moment agonising, the next with goosebumps? If that is your bent, then by Nick Dybek, will leave you haunted, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man and similarly tortured by the often unfathomable mystery of human relationships.

The Battle of Verdun during World War I lasted for 303 days. It was the longest and one of the deadliest battles in history. Detailed investigation that emerged in 2000 suggested 714 231 casualties – 377 231 French and 337 000 German, about 70 000 casualties a month. Another estimate has since increased total casualties to 1.3 million.

Conditions were horrific, with waist-deep water in trenches, barbed wire, shell holes, gas attacks and mud, with corpses and pieces of human bodies, horses and mules scattered everywhere, because of the millions of shells fired both ways in an area of only 19km2.

Many thousands of men’s bodies were never recovered or were unidentifiable (no DNA then; fingerprinting was in its infancy). Missing in action, (actually blown to pieces) was regularly the official tale told to relatives. With the trenches seldom more than a few hundred metres apart, the attrition rate was enormous.

The battle was fought from February to December 1916 amid the hills north of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France, when the German Fifth Army attacked the defences of the Fortified Region of Verdun and those of the French Second Army on the right bank of the River Meuse.

The Germans planned to capture the Meuse Heights rapidly, but horrific weather delayed them. In July, the German offensive was reduced to provide artillery and infantry reinforcements for the Somme front. During local operations, the village of Fleury changed hands 16 times between June and August.

The book’s backdrop is set in 1921, with Tom Combs – a young American ambulance driver, who had been orphaned by the war, after he had lived in France with his father – working for the Catholic Church in Verdun.

Combs has the unenviable task of scratching and sifting for the unidentifiable bones of casualties, to be deposited into a ghastly ossuary.

Even before the Armistice in November 1918, mothers, wives, sisters and fathers would arrive, all seeking closure – for a vanished loved one.

Dybek introduces an American woman who arrives in Verdun, anxious for news of her husband. The local priest, Father Perrin, to whom Combs reports and accepts homilies, points Combs in her direction to offer assistance.

Later, in a search for her missing husband in Italy, they encounter Paul, a journalist, formerly an Austrian soldier, who has his own reasons for being interested in “the man in a hospital ward named ‘Ernest Hemingway’.”

Combs knows her husband is assuredly among the bones, but with Sarah Hagen, a relationship is born, based on mutual human hunger, a clutching of straws and a futile expectation of fulfilment. The story then moves on, with other critical scenarios woven in.

There’s the half-crazed American soldier in Italy whom Hagen is certain is her husband.

Cleverly woven into this amazing, heart-wringing journey, Drybek fast-forwards to the 1950s, masterfully pulling no punches as he exposes life’s vicissitudes.

It begins in 1950 in Santa Monica, California, skips to Bar-le-Duc, France, in 1915, then leaps to Verdun and Bologna in Italy in 1921.

Then, as restlessly as is the lovers’ association, the narrative, propelled by a time machine, whips back and forth, until it ends in 1950, where the tale began.

Goosebumps and lump-in-thethroat reading at its very best.