Nothing would grow in Verdun for years after the battle. A professor of geography at the Sorbonne said the prolonged bombardment of 1916 caused the equivalent of 10,000 years of natural erosion in a single year. But, of course, life moves on. Slowly, surely, new roots anchored themselves in Verdun’s poisoned soil. First, a mossy carpeting of hardy plants such as thyme, yarrow, and Queen Anne’s Lace covered the ashy, sterile wasteland. Feral apple and pear trees from the annihilated orchards of the ruined villages soon followed. Wild orchids thrived in the lime-rich, disturbed soils. Invasive species took hold in scattered patches, their seeds and pits brought in by foreign armies’ rations and the hooves of warhorses. Thousands of tons of ordnance were removed a pallet at a time by diligent crews of démineurs. Cemeteries and ossuaries were built, remains interred. In 1923, the Corps des Eaux et Forêts launched a massive reforestation program to accelerate the process. They selected fast-growing conifers — Austrian black pine, Scots pine, and Norway spruce trees — that could root into rocky terrain where the topsoil had been blasted away.
They planted those trees knowing that well over one hundred thousand soldiers were never recovered after the battle. Loss measured no longer by the number of deaths, but the seeds planted. They started in 1923 and didn’t stop for eight years. It’s estimated they planted 36 million tree seedlings. They brought in a wide variety of help including laborers, government workers, Christian missionaries, and more. Eventually, broadleaf trees — deciduous species such as oak, birch, alder, ash, and maple — were planted as well. In place of the scorched wasteland were stands of pine and spruce creating a revitalized, woodland cloak. In the 1960’s, forestry managers logged some of these Norway Spruce and replanted European beech — a species native to the Meuse region. Other saplings sprouted in their place, a burgeoning mosaic of mixed forest. Life moves on.
To speak of life without death is to describe sound without silence. One shapes the other.
They are opposites yet contain complementary rhythms. But in Verdun, these two are entangled in a way that is difficult to separate. The fighting in 1916 shattered the distinction between the two. Now, life emerges from so much death. Trees grow skyward and become a shroud over an uneven and dented landscape using soil fertilized by over one hundred thousand dead. Life becomes an alternative measurement of destruction. You can find it in the holes left by recently removed tree stumps where smashed pottery and stone rubble of destroyed buildings cling to the severed roots. You can find it in the elevated arsenic levels detected in the soil across the region. You can find it in the stomachs of the livestock grazing in the region who have to undergo regular shrapnel removal by placement of magnets through gaping mouths which pull the razor sharp pieces of lead from their gastric tracts.
In 2018, the beetles arrived.
Following a prolonged drought combined with steadily rising temperatures over the last several years, forests all over northeastern France experienced an outbreak of the European bark beetle. They bore through the outer bark of spruce and pine trees and nestle into the phloem,where the circulatory system of the tree is located. It is essential to transporting the sugars that keep the tree alive. Here, the beetles feed and lay their eggs. They nibble their way around creating narrow galleries all throughout this essential layer. They go no deeper than the phloem. Half a centimeter, two at most. They don’t attack the roots or the crown or the xylem. They don’t need to. It is fatal. Once they have girdled the phloem, the tree is unable to circulate any of the essential sugars to the other parts of its body. The needles turn a sickly brown and the tree quickly dies. The beetles also carry a fungi that stains the wood blue and can affect its quality and durability.
When I was in Verdun in 2023, I saw proof of this everywhere. Forestry crews were present in almost every part of the battlefield I visited. Felled trees were stacked corpse-like alongside many of the roads in long, towering piles. It was like someone decided it was time to start over again and had cleared the landscape of so many of the trees that were planted after the battle. The shards of bark left behind were almost as plentiful as the shrapnel. I picked up many and marvelled at the damage of the galleries. Delicate, looping, flourishes lined the underside and at first glance might be mistaken for some type of folk calligraphy. There was an unsettling beauty in the destruction—the haunting realization that what caught my eye means certain death for another organism.
During the battle, the largest artillery shell in use was the French 400 mm Howitzer. The shell was the size of a grown man and needed a crane to be loaded into its rail-mounted cannon. It could hit targets over nine miles away. The European spruce bark beetle is about 4.5 mm long and looks like a speck of dirt if you’re not paying attention. Tiny, tiny creatures. They have names that sound like 19th century serial killers: “the eight-toothed spruce bark beetle” and “the six-spined engraver pine beetle.”
Death and violence go hand in hand. But violence comes in many different shapes and forms. It can be an explosion loud enough to tear your eardrums or a concussion that can rupture organs without even needing to scratch the skin. But it can also be so quiet that even if you sit there, absolutely still and wait, you’ll never be able to hear it.
Most of the affected trees are from the first generation planted after the war. They form the main canopy. These trees are only just beginning to approach maturity, far from the end of their lives. Many could live several hundred years in ideal conditions. They have natural resin-based defense systems because even something as benign as a tree needs to be able to put its fists up in this world every now and again. When activated, the resin drips over the affected areas and traps intruders inside. But drought weakens a tree’s ability to activate these resin systems which left many defenseless against the outbreak.
The beetles are just doing what beetles do. They are what ecologists call “natural disturbance agents.” They play a small part of the rich biodiversity that sustains the forests. They thrive in the summer months. Then they die in the winter. But rising temperatures have extended their period of activity and this in turn amplifies their impact.
The most effective way to put a stop to the infestation was to cut down large swaths of trees to act as a breaker between the infested and not yet infested so the beetles could not reach them the same way you would create a protective berth during a large forest fire.
A soldier, in 1916, writing in the middle of the fighting described the barren landscape of amputated tree trunks surrounding Verdun’s Fort Vaux as “a corpse with tortured features.” I’ve read that for years after the battle you could take a tour of one of the forts from an old veteran who fought there. Just before the sunset, if you stood on the crumbling parapets, it wasn’t uncommon to find these veterans below foraging for snails for supper, collecting them in rusted German helmets. Even in the darkest of moments, the land still resembled a living body and a resource to those who fought there.
On my last visit in 2023, I wandered the nine ghost villages bombed to pieces during the Battle of Verdun and left in ruin by the French government as stark reminders of the cost of war. After years writing a novel set in one of these villages — a place I had known mostly through imagination — I needed to stand in the petrified annihilation of it all. The natural world had reclaimed everything, growing freely where wooden floorboards and brick once lay. I found squat cement blocks which marked the locations of various establishments. The cobbler was here, a farm once stood there, this was where our butcher had his shop. Smashed pottery can be found if you look close enough. I found what I believe was a brush from a shaving kit, in Douaumont, the same village where Charles De Gaulle was wounded and captured. It was near some exposed earth where they had cleared a few trees. When I picked it up, the brush came apart in my hand, the last few bristles sticking to my fingers like eyelashes.
Today, each village also has a small chapel built after the war where descendants still return from all over the country once a year to pay their respects. They huddle there together, on the day of their town’s patron saint to remember a world they have never known. I can’t help but admire the commitment. Their bond — a shared inheritance of loss — becomes another word for home. It’s unreplicable. There’s nothing that feels more like home than the warmth, maybe from a wood-burning stove, tucked into the corner of a darkened house. In the center of a room, you might forget you’re in a house at all. But it’s in the corners, where you’re pinched between two walls and just inches from the outside world, that you feel protected from the eye-drying cold of a February night.
Sometimes, after I finish shutting all the lights off and locking the doors before I head to bed, I notice certain things about my house like the way the light through a ventilation grate plays on the wall. The silence edged with the barely-there whisper of various appliances you have to pause and listen for because the hum is so much a part of the house that you won’t even notice it’s there. When I’m doing the laundry, I take note of all the exposed pipes in between the wooden rafters, running the length of the ceiling. I note where the water comes in from the city plant, where the gas comes in from Columbia Gas, where the electricity comes in from the grid. The faded Star Wars sticker on a bedroom doorknob left by a child from a previous family. The blue paw print on the edge of a step from a cat who tracked paint in a previous renovation. These are the things that make this building more than just a house. The building becomes a home where a small family sleeps through the night with relatively few worries that it will be there when they wake up in the morning. It gives me a particular calm, a sense of security, however illusory that might be. The sense of protection feels flimsy having visited Verdun and touched the shattered foundations of homes that also once held sleeping families.
But, of course, life moves on. Thanks in large part to the active management of the Office National des Forêts (ONF), it appears the infestation has slowed considerably since 2023. Some ecologists are experimenting with new species of trees in the area that can better tolerate higher temperatures. Pôle Excellence Bois, a French organization that brings together key stakeholders in the forestry and wood sector to create innovative strategies and promote the many uses of wood, launched a campaign called Je suis le bois bleu or “I am blue wood” which finds resourceful ways to use the blue-stained timber for various projects. If it is harvested in time, the wood is still very durable and strong. At that point, the aversion is more an aesthetic one than a functionary concern. This campaign is directed at educating people on these matters and normalizing the use of this wood for construction and other projects. As Pierre Paccard of the ONF put it, “The forest doesn’t need man… it’s man who needs the forest.” The Départment du Déminage still removes unexploded ordnance and the ONF replants trees, Sisyphean tasks that seem less absurd and more dignified after having stood on its disrupted soil. Together, this stewardship, from continued reforestation to wood reclamation, appears to have allowed the forests of Verdun to vault over another calamity. Perhaps the forests will survive us. Or perhaps they will be reshaped again in an entirely new form. The tension draws me back to the ridge above Douaumont, one hand on the trunk of a tree, the weight of a stone shard from a ruined village in my pocket. Pulled between the two, I feel them both at once.
