Rats and Other Vermin

As we did not have access to internet in Verdun I am posting now on what it would have been like living inside Fort Doumont. On May 19th we had a guided tour of the fort built by the French a few years after the Franco Prussian war of 1870 to 1871. It was one of 38 forts perched on the hilltops surrounding Verdun, France. It was held,obviously, by the French, but also by the Germans for a time. However, the history of it is not what I want to write about. Our Guide in one of the rooms where rain water was collected and stored told us about the rats and other vermin while we stood shivering in the cold and wet chamber filled with stallactites. Some in the group were squimish and wanted her to stop, but I found it interesting and horrifying at the same time.

Rats were a huge problem for soldiers all along the front including inside the walls of the fortress. Our guide told us of a story passed on to her by another man in another one of her tours through the fortress that his grandfather stayed in it and this is what he recalled. While sleeping at night they got used to the rats feet crawling all over them, but it was when their tales slid across their faces that they could not stand. He had nightmares every night thinking the rats were coming to get him for the rest of his life.

For wounded soldiers it was worse because the rats were drawn to the decomposing flesh and open wounds. Another soldier with a badly wounded arm was missed on the battlefield outside the fort by the stretcher bearers, so he was left on the field over night in danger of being hit again by another shell. They found him the next day. The rats had been eating away at his arm while he was stranded on the field. When he was carried in on a sheet, because actual stretchers would not fit in some of the tunnels, to the hospital room in the fort they had to remove his arm. This was done with no anesthesia. The man would not have been safe from the rats once inside. Wounded soldiers had to be kept under wire mesh weighed down with large rocks so the rats would not get at their wounds.

Rats were not the only problem in the walls of Doumont. Soldiers thick wool uniforms could be worn for days without being washed. When the water ran out 50 to 60 soldiers at night would have to walk 4 km under fire to fill buckets of water. This meant each soldier only got one cup each, because this was all they got they drank it and could not use it to clean themselves or their uniforms. After days of fighting their uniforms would have been very heavy and smelt awful being caked in mud, excrement, blood,and sweat. Their clothes also were a favourite spot for lice, which no matter what they did they could never be rid of. The lice they sais were born at lunch time and by dinner they were grandparents. The men would have constantly been scratching the bitting lice all the time.

So soldiers in the fort had to deal with thousands of rats, being completly filthy, and constantly bitten by lice, but that was not all. 2000 shells a day burst around the fort with deafening bangs, shaking the fortress and causing dust to fall from the ceilings. Added to that noise were wounded soldiers being carried in moaning, and crying. Those in the hospital like the man I talked about earlier would have been screaming being operated on fully conscious. The smell of hundreds of unwashed men, excrement, blood, and decaying flesh must have been stomach turning. The fort still today was dark, damp, and dirty, with the stench and screams of men and shells, and flesh eating vermin it must have been a living nightmare. Some soldiers even though they were much safer in the forts still preferred to be outside in the open, where death was more likely. The soldiers had no choice they lived in hell either way.

The point of writting this was that going through the tunnels they seemed neat and cool, but that is not how they would have been and I had forgotten as I am sure others have as well everything else that was going on in those tunnels and that the men had to deal with on a daily basis. We only see what is left but we can try to imagine the sounds, smells, and feelings the soldiers had.

Michelle Pearce