TO KNOW, in part, why the European summit is taking place this weekend, one should visit the great shrine of Europe, the grave of a million men and the womb of the false god of European unity, Verdun. This weekend 80 years ago the Battle of Verdun came to an end, and from that Golgotha emerged myths which were to consume and enervate the French people in ways which we even now cannot comprehend.
In Western European history, there has been nothing like Verdun.
The Somme was bad, Third Ypres far, far worse but Verdun was in a class of its own because of the sheer intensity of the killing ground, and the enormous numbers of young lives funnelled to their certain doom from the villages of France and the hamlets of Germany. Lessons can be learned from Verdun, to be sure; but I remain increasingly concerned that we have learned the wrong lessons, that Verdun and its aftermath - which included the French capitulation in 1940 - and have impelled us all down a path which will not lead us to some sunlit uplands of amity, but to a world of impossible complexity and rancour.
If we do follow that path, it will be for the good intentions which resulted from the Battle of Verdun. I have often walked the rolling acres of Picardy where so many hundreds of thousands of young men went to their end; I have paced the clay pastures beyond Ypres where the molecules of vast numbers of human bodies now circulate in the food chain.
No words can convey the tragedy these places mean for families in Germany, France, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India. They raised their sons that their lives be squandered here, in these few fields. The waste is unbearable; the suffering greater than that which could be never atoned for, even by a week of silence every year, and by festooning ourselves in red floral symbols of loss.
Place of Cain
But I have never felt the chill of evil on the Somme or in Flanders as I did at Verdun. It is the place of Cain, and nobody can blame the leaders of Europe for wanting never to return to such a place. It is a place of pilgrimage to French schoolchildren - thousands troop solemnly though the shattered remnants of the concrete emplacements every year. They can see the trenches which offer only a slight impression of the true hell their great grandfathers and their great grand uncles went through.
For La Patrie, those men went to their certain deaths; went there in that knowledge, up the Voie Sacree assured that there would be no return. Their duty was to die for France. When they were dead, others would take their place. And others, theirs. Duty, and compulsion, impelled this sacrifice. It is awful, and it is barbaric, and it is no wonder that the meaning of all that happened here fuels the popular imagination in France in a unique way.
For the Battle of Verdun was not simply fought across extended trenches, stretching for miles. The battle had virtually a single focal point, around the fort of Douaumont, and at that juncture are concentrated not merely the remains of hundreds of thousands of French and German men, but the toxic residues of the poisonous gases and the millions of shells which saturated the region for five months. Fliers above the battle reported that shells were raining down on Douaumont like rain; and not for hours, not for days, not weeks, but months, without respite for a second.
Abominable bravery
When in later years, especially after 1940, the British and others made jokes about the bravery of the French, they were forgetting the astonishing, abominable bravery of the French at Verdun. Never again would a civilisation produce what the pre war French civilisation had done; the magic flowering of the culture of Apollinaire and Alain Fournier, Debussy and Saint Saens, and the unsurpassable genius of the lmpressionists, while still generating hundreds of thousands of young men prepared to die for their country. These are opposite, contradictory impulses; only a culture as vibrant and varied as that of Frances capable of that contradiction. Once. And once only.
To wish to avoid this monstrosity, this violation of everything that was taught in the Sermon on the Mount, is no great mark of a great wisdom. Baffled by contradictions of its recent past - on the one hand, the second renaissance of the end of the 19th century, on the other, the sacrilege of the First War - it was hardly surprising that France was to lose its way in victory; hardly surprising that when war returned, the French discovered they had lost the arts of war and preferred those of peace. These are not dishonourable arts. They are laudable ones. But they can lead us to false paths.
False paths
Is Europe, with its Europhiles now barely being questioned as, more and more states are dragged into the gravitational fields of the Brussels bureaucracy, now walking down the wrong path? Can it really be said that the political and moral destinies of Spain are in anyway governable from the same centre as those of Poland, or Croatia, or Finland, or whoever else might join the Union for Euro enthusiasts speak of a 27 state membership within 10 years?
It is, I suppose, possible that the interest of Spain, once again resuming its historic position as a great commercial maritime power in the Atlantic, can be reconciled with the interests of other European countries. It is, I suppose, possible that it is no more than mere caution, cowardice, conservatism on my part which makes me doubt it; for the centrifugal inclinations of free societies tend in the long run towards separation, not unity. The US is the exception, for reasons too complex to discuss here.
And discuss is the word. Discuss is what we do not do. We are happy to receive Euromoney without asking why or how, or most of all, when for one day there will inevitably be a reckoning. As the Ministers of the European Union gather in Dublin, and the pall of a million young lives lies upon the ruins of Verdun, it really is time we asked ourselves serious questions about where we are going.
The dead of this century have laid upon us the obligation of care. It is an obligation we have been bribed into forgetting.