The Battle of Verdun ended on December 18, 1916. Millions of artillery and gas shells had been fired over the course of the nine-month battle. We don’t know how many people were killed during the battle because so many of the dead were never found and recovered. Estimates of wounded and dead are in the hundreds of thousands. One hundred and nine years later, land around Verdun and other World War I battle sites still contains unexploded ordnance, human remains, and poison. Historian Christina Holstein estimates that it will take at least 300 years to clean up just the Verdun battle site. In Zone Rouge, Michael Jerome Plunkett creates dueling portraits of two men who live in Verdun, whose lives metaphorically explode for good and ill.
Ferrand Martin has been a démineur—a minesweeper—for decades by the time we meet him at the beginning of Zone Rouge. He’s known for his steadiness. His calmness reassures new recruits to the de-mining department of Verdun; his hands are renowned for the way they smoothly defuse century-old ordnance. Like the other members of the crew, Ferrand goes where he has been called: farms where bombs have been ploughed up, old houses where people have found gas canisters while gardening. The crew gathers everything up and takes it away to be safely destroyed. The only thing that breaks the routine is when they uncover human bones. When that happens, academics and forensic experts have to be called in to recover the dead. Sometimes, though rarely, they can find out who the person was in life.
Ferrand’s quiet heroism contrasts sharply against our other protagonist, Hugo LaFleur. Hugo is the (symbolic) mayor of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of the “towns that died for France.” Not only is Hugo the kind of person always angling to make money, he’s also the kind who chases every woman who might give him the time of day. It doesn’t matter that he has a wife and child, or that he has a comfortable living, or that no one is all that enthusiastic about his schemes; Hugo just can’t seem to help himself.
Plunkett switches back and forth from Ferrand to Hugo to show us what each man is made of when the mud and merde start to fly. Plunkett also muses on the futility of World War I and its semi-forgotten dead and the possibility of ever restoring the land of the Zone Rouge. Can the land ever be restored? Fleury and the other dead towns will never be what they were, but maybe someday children will be able to run through the woods without fear and the livestock will be able to graze without having to have their stomachs inspected for old shrapnel. Maybe, someday, arsenic, chlorine, and other toxic substances will be cleansed from the soil and water. And whose job will it be to do the cleaning, now that more than a century has passed and everyone involved in causing or fighting the war is long gone?
Zone Rouge is often melancholy but I very much appreciated its emotional and intellectual depth.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
