Aforetime
This daylog is part of a series of four detailing my recent holiday. The preceding two were accidentally posted with 'don't display' checked, but should nevertheless be read first. Start Thou Here.
Today, we planned to visit
Verdun, site of a terrible battle in
1916-
17. We set off at leisurely pace up the valley of the
Meuse from
our hotel at
Sedan. On the way, we decided to visit a
medieval church at
Avioth, in the hills close to the
Belgian border. On the way there, we
passed through a little town called
Mouzon, not far from where we'd started,
where, as we turned a corner in the winding main street, we discovered a huge
abbey church with a pair of steepled west towers. I did my best to photograph
this, but the height of the spires and the narrowness of the street made it
practically impossible. The inside of the church was equally impressive, with a
baldachino over the
altar which, despite its
classical design, matched the
gothic surroundings very well. Apsidal chapels let on to an
ambulatory
aisle, and there was a
requiem chapel (which we couldn't get access to) on
an upper level, leading off a second ambulatory.
Avioth church was somewhat less well-kept than Mouzon, but fascinating
nonetheless. Avioth is high up in the hills of the eastern
Ardennes, about a
thousand feet above
sea level, and it was cold and wet when we arrived. We
rushed into the church to get out of the weather, and so we didn't really look
at the external architecture until later. Inside, there were a number of
remarkable things to see. The church was originally established as a shrine to
Notre Dame d'Avioth, as represented by the medieval statue of that name, which
sat on a stone
reliquary or
sacrament house to the left of the altar. (There
was also a better
sacrament house on the right-hand side of the
altar, presumably still used to hold the consecrated bread.) According to the
Michelin Green Guide, the statue of Notre Dame d'Avioth is made of lime and
dates from the
middle ages. What I saw didn't appear to fit that description.
I may simply be a lousy judge of
statuary, but I'd guess that the
chipped-looking effigy I was looking at was a 19th-century replica in lacquered
wood. Judgement on this point was not helped by the tasteless modern dress
adorning the statue. My own guess is that the original is housed inside the
left-hand sacrament house. This would require it to be about half the height of
the one displayed, and it would thus be able to sit on the empty stone throne
about a span and a half wide which is fixed to the screen beside the present
statue's seat. Many marble plaques surround the reliquary, thanking
Our Lady
of Avioth for various miracles. A set of
polychrome saints look down from
plinths at the
clerestory level, and traces of wall-painting can be seen in
many places. Just in front of the painted wooden
pulpit stands an
Ecce
Homo in which
Jesus is dressed as he usually is in such depictions -
loincloth and
crown of thorns - but
Pontius Pilate appears clothed as a
high-ranking courtier of the
Holy Roman Empire. This piece is a reminder that
at one time, Avioth and much of the surrounding area were not in
France, but
part of the
Spanish, later
Austrian,
Netherlands.
Another such reminder could be seen at our next port of call, the fortified town
of
Montmédy, just south of Avioth on the way to Verdun, which
was originally defended by the
Spanish. The fortifications were later
reinforced by the great
French engineer
Vauban, and (as in many of the towns
he worked on) there's a little café there called 'le Vauban'. We had
lunch there, and looked into the church. The church and many of the houses in
the fortified section of the town, were not in a good state of repair, but the
church was full of artists, sketching various views of the interior. As there
were still heavy showers at this point, we declined to walk around the
ramparts, but instead pressed on to Verdun at last.
Verdun is in the upper valley of the Meuse, and as our previous two stops had
not been, we found ourselves descending rapidly as we crossed the battlefield
which lies to the north of the town. We passed, but did not investigate, the
sites of several villages obliterated by the fighting of 1916 and never rebuilt.
All around the city there were signs to the graveyards of the
French,
German
and
American soliders who died in over a year of combat. Verdun is in many
ways to the French as the
Somme is to the
British: the major killing-field
of the
First World War. (I know there are still others.) Hundreds of thousands
of men died in a few square miles of now-tranquil countryside. The speed of the
advances made by each army was heartbreakingly slow. In a few minutes, we drove
through territory that had taken the German forces weeks to capture, and French
forces a year to liberate. The town itself was never captured, although the
German army came very close to it in the summer of 1916, and almost cut it off.
The only access was by a road to the south-west that came to be known as the
Voie Sacrée - the
Sacred Way. Whereas British cities ruined during the
Second World War, such as
Coventry, have been mainly rebuilt in a modern
style, Verdun (and other places in France heavily shelled in one or both world wars) has been reconstructed in a style pretty much as it would have been previously.
The exception to this is the
cathedral, which actually
regressed in style. The shelling revealed a
Romanesque crypt and south door, closed up after a great fire in the eighteenth century, when a lot of the present classical ornamentation was put in. The crypt has been rebuilt with central columns whose capitals depict, amongst other things, scenes and objects from the
Great War. Also in the cathedral was a display about the life of
St Theresa of Lisieux, about whom I previously knew virtually nothing. Since the previous day I had been wondering who was depicted in church statues, very popular in the region, showing a brown-robed
nun holding a
cross and a garland of white flowers. The display indicated that it was intended to be this saint, also known as
St Theresa of the Child Jesus. What was strange to me was that although there are perfectly good photographs of her, none of the statues I had seen - including the one at Verdun itself - looked anything like her.
After the cathedral, we briefly visited the archbishop's palace, which now houses a public library and a centre for
world peace. Then we moved on to the underground citadel, home to an exhibition about the defence of the city during the war. As at
Reims the day before, the tour was by means of an electric 'gondola' car. The light and sound shows were spectacular, with an eerie 3-D effect in the (acted) movies depicting characters from the war. The whole place was heartbreaking, and I found myself wondering why anyone fights wars. Outside in the open air again, we noticed a plaque on the wall of the citadel marking the site of the city's
Gestapo office. A little way beyond, a wall was plastered with
Jean-Marie le Pen posters proclaiming 'France for the French!'
Back to the hotel, up the Meuse valley. On the way, we passed a lovely, if slightly delapidated, church in the style more characteristic of the
Rhine valley, and stopped for a panoramic view over the
alluvial plain of the middle valley of the
Meuse. Then we returned to our hotel for the last dinner of the holiday, which, dispiritingly, was the same menu as the previous night.
Henceforth