Verdun Revisited

"If Verdun is taken, what a disaster!" warned France's President Raymond Poincare. "If it is saved, how can we ever forget the price?" In the crudest ten months of World War I, Verdun was saved. But the price was so disastrous -- half a million French and German dead -- that it has never been forgotten by either nation.

Over Verdun's ravaged fields one moonlit night last week, a bell tolled mournfully from the vast hilltop monument of Douaumont, where 100,000 nameless skeletons are entombed. French army drums and bugles sounded the solemn Sonnerie aux Morts, France's ancient salute to the fallen. A chorus of clear young voices intoned the German army's somber hymn, Ich hatt' einen Kameraden. Then a torchlit procession of 1,400 young Germans and 700 French youths wound down the damp hillside. The ceremony was part of a movement started by Father Theobald Rieth, a German Jesuit who set out ten years ago to turn the graveyards of two world wars into meeting grounds for a new generation of Europeans.

Rieth's hard-working bands have searched out and restored neglected German graves from the Finnish tundra to the Tunisian desert and--where permitted--have cared for Allied cemeteries as well. From its first camp with 60 volunteers in 1953, Rieth's Reconciliation over Graves program has grown into an international movement in which more than 3,500 volunteers from 16 other countries have taken part along with some 30,000 Germans. This summer 6,345 Europeans out of more than 20,000 applicants, aged 16 to 25, have given up vacation time to work in staggered two-week shifts near war cemeteries in France, Britain, Luxembourg, Italy and Austria. They are unpaid, get spartan rations, and have to foot up to half their transportation costs.

At first the German expeditions often met with a flinty reception in areas that had suffered from German brutality in both wars. The movement's stiffest test came in Verdun. For the first time since World War II, the black, red and gold flag of Germany was flown from the town hall, and the band played Deutschlandlied. But the French seemed touched by the occasion.

The first night of the Germans' weekend visit, the Verdunois turned out appreciatively for a concert of Bach, Handel and Mozart, played by young German musicians in the 12th century cathedral that was shredded by German Big Berthas in 1916. Many of the visitors were invited to meals in French homes; even when they had to speak in sign language, the lesson was plain. The price of Verdun, as a German high school student put it, was not eternal hatred but eternal awareness that "we can help prevent the repetition of these terrible happenings."

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