Letters from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin at Verdun

Transcription

1 23 August 1916:-- Letters from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin at Verdun.... we were sent to the right bank, between Thiaumont and Fleury, and we spent ten days in that hazardous area. I m not allowed of course to describe in any detail the operations I witnessed, but I can at any rate tell you that the time I spent there was at once arduous and quite extraordinary, and during it I lived just like a machine... The setting was that of the worst battlegrounds of Verdun. In front of ravines still more or less clothed in bare woods with trees that are now no more than posts, stretches the area that still has some green growth. Beyond that there s practically no vegetation; it s all churned up rubble, and more often than not clay torn and ploughed up to a depth of two or three metres: a real lunar landscape. It s the part where the trenches end and one hides in shell holes, roughly inter-communicating, and from which all too often, if one wants to make room for oneself, one has to turn out some corpse, Boche or French. Fortunately we had good weather, cool, with hardly any rain; and so we were spared one great trial. On the other hand, shelling, attacks, artillery barrages, happened several times each day. I spent two days in a shell-hole, bracketed for hours at a time by shells falling as close as less than a metre from me. That sort of life, you can imagine, is something of a strain on the nerves.... One such compensation, of course, for the horror of such things is the sight of astonishing displays of mechanical and moral energy. For 48 hours I was occupying a hole perched rather like an eagle s nest on the side of a hill from which I could see, very close to me, the line from Thiaumont to Fleury, 200 metres away. At the moment when the barrage opened up every slope and ravine burst into smoke: it looked like a huge volcano, its sides pierced by countless sulphur springs. Then suddenly a hundred metres from me, I saw the waves of infantry emerging, at a walking pace, as they made their way back to Fleury, curiously unhurried, tossing hand grenades into the shell holes... We have had a good many losses, very painful ones. Many of my best friends in the battalion never returned from up there. In the chaos of churned up clay in which we moved, bullets are treacherous; you never really know whether you are under observation or not. Going up and returning I went through Verdun, a most interesting visit. The towers of the cathedral are intact, but one side of the apse is completely ruined. I have said that my morale remained good. Except at times of intense shelling, when life becomes more animal, absorbed in and completely concentrated on the

2 2 whistlings and explosions, I preserved my appetite for thought. What I regret is not having been sufficiently competent, perhaps, to comfort this or that one of my friends. But until you suddenly learn that they have had a bullet through the head, it seems so unlikely that men who you see hale and hearty in the line, should meet so swift an end, that you feel embarrassed at speaking bluntly about its nearness. I don t know what sort of monument the country will later put up on Froideterre hill to commemorate the great battle....as I looked at this scene of bitter toil, I felt completely overcome by the thought that I had the honour of standing at one of the two or three spots on which, at this very moment the whole life of the universe surges and ebbs places of pain but it is there that a great future (this I believe more and more) is taking shape. 2 November 1916: You ll learn from my postcards that I took part in the last Verdun offensive. My regiment took the village of Douaumont; the colonial troops of my brigade captured the strong-point. You see that we had our share of the glory, and that almost without loss, at least during the attack itself, which in any case was impossible to see at least in the smoke and fog, and the mud in which mudcolored figures were moving. It was only the next morning, at dawn, that I moved into position on the ground we had taken. And I must say that that was not the best moment. I spent a most unpleasant day with my C.O. in a shell-hole just by Thiaumont farm, under a long drawn-out continual bombardment that seemed to want to kill us off piecemeal. Such hours are the other side of the glory of attack. What can I tell you about my impressions? I find it s difficult to focus them and to analyse them. Basically, I note that I experienced a sort of depression and inertia, partly due to the not very active part played by my unit. Fortunately this lack of activity, this lack of go, were gradually put right by the stimulus of having plenty to do. All the same I didn t feel that my spirit was really heroic. From a more speculative, almost dilettante angle, I profoundly enjoyed, in short bursts, the picturesque side of the country and the situation. If you forget that you have a body to drag over the mud like a snail, the Douaumont area is a fascinating sight. Imagine a vast expanse of grim, naked hillsides, wild as a desert, more churned up than a ploughed field. All this we recaptured. I saw again the places where, in August, I huddled in holes I can still distinguish and in which my friends fell. Now one can make one s way over them without fear.... To get

3 3 back to the rear for rations you have... to make your way for three-quarters of a kilometer across this chaos of enormous shell-holes and treacherous patches of mud, following a few makeshift tracks... I light on what was the greatest misery of the battle, the ocean of mud in which one had to find one s way and watch one s step at the risk every moment of getting lost and falling down. A few concrete pill boxes were still standing, at long intervals, marking the painful route. You can t imagine how odd it was to see those shelters lost in the chaos of the battlefield, particularly at night. Just as in the inns along a main road... a whole motley population of wounded, stragglers, somnambulists of all sorts, piled in, in the hope of getting a few moments sleep until some unavoidable duty or the angry voice of an officer made a little room soon to be occupied again by some new shadowy figure, dripping wet and apprehensive, emerging from the black night. It s an odd life and very tough that you lead up there at Froideterre, where, quite apart from the shells (you completely forget these except when they stalk you when you re immobilized with nothing to do) the earth itself presents such a force of inertia to a man s attempts to move, even on his own and with no burden other than his coating of mud, that it often happens... that he simply falls down, exhausted, with tears in his eyes... that s what Verdun is like all the time. All these horrors, I should add, are no more to me than the memory of a dream. I think that you live so much immersed in the immediate effort of the moment that little of them penetrates to your consciousness or memory. And on top of that the lack of proportion between existence on the battlefield and life in peacetime (or at any rate in rest billets) is such that the former, looked back on from the latter, is never anything but a fantasy and a dream. And yet the dead they ll never awake from that dream. My battalion had relatively few casualties. Others, on our flank, were more unlucky. The little White Father who went to see you at the Institute last February, was killed. Pray for him. Now once more I am the only priest in the regiment. 22 December 1916: we took part in the attack of the 15 th. It was our brigade that recaptured Louvement and the adjoining area. The operation had the same features as that of Douaumont: Very few losses during the attack, rather more during the shelling, and great difficulty in bringing up stores and getting the wounded out. On the 24 th October we were moving along a big ridge, but this time we had to

4 make our way along ground cut up by ravines, sometimes deep, and formerly wooded, in whose complete wildness there was much that was picturesque and grand. On the whole I wasn t in any serious danger. During the assault there was a pretty nasty barrage to get through, in a ravine; a great many heavy shells were falling, shaking the ground and sending the pine-trunks flying, while we were slowly advancing, with frequent hold-ups, along a rather poor communication trench. In these circumstances it was pretty heartening to see the flood of prisoners that was beginning to arrive. For the rest of the time, the shelling that I experienced was never sufficiently dense or accurate to cause much anxiety. On the other hand I never saw the war in such a picturesque light. The Boches deep dugouts in front of us had remained intact, so much so that when we went into them it was most entertaining to explore the stores piled up in them: kitbags, arms [i.e. weapons], letters, cigars, wine, beer, tins of food, etc.... Here and there, too, you could see trench mortars in position and guns we were properly in Boche land. On the night of the attack I slept in one of these dugouts I have been telling you about, along with three wounded Germans, who seemed harmless enough. In the morning I had to take charge of a dozen prisoners who had the job of carrying out the wounded. I managed to have some sort of conversation with them. They gave me the impression of being most unwarlike, mostly youngsters, sometimes sorry for themselves. Only the officers, as a class, give themselves airs. There s no doubt that, without their artillery, these types would never hold on. We held out before Verdun with no entrenchment but shell holes, while they get themselves picked up by hundreds in dugouts that afford protection from any shelling! -- I told you that in places the ground was very difficult. Particularly at the beginning, when we didn t yet know the best way through, we experienced again the misery of being bogged down, and of having to carry the wounded through treacherous clay. When on top of this the frost came there was an epidemic of frost-bitten feet. I came out with just a touch of a cold and a slight pain in one foot. It didn t amount to anything Trying to analyse myself, found that once again when one enters the battle zone one experiences a sort of transposition in the way one looks at things and judges them, which makes one accept it as natural (I don t say pleasant) to see men die and be exposed to death. One becomes a war monad, a depersonalized element in a supraindividual operation. One is no longer the same person one was before. This transposition, of course, doesn t take place all at once. Bit by bit, through a series of minor horrors experienced and mastered, one s new state is born and consolidates. When one is back again in the rest area, and one s earlier state of 4

5 5 mind is restored, one seems to have been living in a half-dream! and that s partly why (quite apart from reflexion being swallowed up in action) it s difficult to express war memories that aren t purely anecdotal. Transcribed and edited R. Bunselmeyer, March 2018 The full text of these and others of Teilhard s wartime letters may be read in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, Trans. by René Hague. Harper and Row, 1961.