"CHAMPAGNE - COUP DE BELIER OR GRIGNOTAGE?" Champagne-Ardenne by mtncorg

There are few tourists to France who are not familiar with the name Champagne. The bubbly products of the vineyards found along the western slopes of Champagne are world-famous. Here are quaint villages, gorgeous vineyard-clad hillsides and magnificent adult beverage to sample why you are taking in all of that tamed rural beauty. Ahh, to travel to Champagne is to see the French experience at its best.

Most of Champagne is east of those grape-covered slopes, however, and is comprised of vast plains with a series of low undulating hills with vast tracts soaked in as much blood as the west is with wine. This is to see some of the worst in the French experience. It has been written that Champagne is the graveyard of the French Army and as you travel over those plains you will quickly see why, passing one military cemetery after another after another. 111,659 French soldiers are buried in the Champagne clay – the largest cemetery being at la Crouee next to the village of Souain-Perthes-les-Hurlus where almost 31,000 lay – 21,688 in eight ossuaries. The Champagne-Ardennes accounts for over 10% the known French dead killed in World War I - most killed in the horrific offensives of 1915 for little purpose.

Monument and Ossuary at Ferme de Navarin

Countries remember their wartime efforts in different ways. Winning a battle – or a war – usually is an important factor in memory. Verdun is the battle best remembered amongst the French – glorious monuments, semi-restored forts, brave memorials to the dead. Here in the Champagne, there is only the dead lying under an endless sea of crosses – or the equivalent for the Muslim dead and the occasional Jew. The one magnificent monument at Navarin is really there more for the final victory in late September-October 1918 when the French finally, with Allied help, pushed the Germans north off the plains.

French generalissimo Joseph Joffre decided that with the beginning of trench warfare in late 1914 what was needed to restore the war to one of movements instead of stalemates was to simply batter head-on through the German lines. From December 1914 until March 1915 he pushed his troops to give him that coup de belier – breakthrough ala the battering ram – in a series of attacks known as the First Champagne Offensive. For Joffre, the only thing that was offensive was the French casualty figures of 100,000 for a territorial gain almost not worth talking about. Not one to learn from his mistakes, Joffre launched a series of even larger attacks between September to November 1915. For a slightly larger gain – almost the same area gained as in the District of Columbia – he doubled up on the number of casualties to 200,000 with over 30,000 killed outright. Instead of the belier, Joffre rationalized his attacks as grignotage – “I am gnawing at them.” he said. The Victor of the Marne ended up gnawing himself out of a job.

Did I say there were grapes in the Champagne, too?

September 1918 was a different time and place from those wasteful offensives which ground on day-after-day with little to show but the poverty of France for losing so much of the vitality of her future. The German Spring Offensives had run their course, ebbing away the German’s own ability to provide a belier of their own. Having failed, they had little left, but a dogged ability to defend. The Allied counterstrokes that began with the Second Marne began to push the Germans inexorably backwards. 26 September saw the big American Meuse-Argonne offensive open up just to the east of the Champagne. In concert, the French opened up their own offensive across the old Champagne battlefields. This time, the weakened German lines slowly wilted. With American help, the French pushed the Germans out of the Champagne plains and back north of the Aisne River by mid October. The fighting here was over until another war.

My trip across the Champagne took me to those cemeteries, as well as to the few monuments that exist. It is an area worth passing through, even if only briefly, just to pay tribute to the flower of France that never got the chance to fully bloom.