Le Pere Sybille – a Memory of the Great War

For the first time in 90 years no surviving French soldier from the First World War participated in today’s memorial services. The last “Poilus,” as soldiers who fought in the war are known in France, died in April. Only five are now left, four British and one American, who survived the Great War, which ended 90 years ago today.

The aftermath – 20 million dead; an entire generation gone; a continent in ruins and impoverished; a nascent thirst for revenge in Germany that would produce yet another war – are well known. But the individual stories are largely forgotten. This is one of them.

Some 30 years ago, when I had first moved to France, I ended up running a bar/restaurant in St. Veran, a small village in the Southern Alps. The Sybille family owned the property, which I rented. The family head was a ski instructor, who was only too glad to have someone else running it. His father, however, then a man in his 80’s, was glad the place was functioning again.

He often dropped by for a drink and a chat, and I guess you could say we became friends. His first name was Antoine, but everyone called him le pere Sybille, as he was the oldest, and highly respected, member of the family.

He had told me he’d been in the “Grande Guerre”, but hadn’t said much more about it. One night, however, we got to talking, and I asked him, as politely as I could, where he had fought. He didn’t answer for a long time, and I was afraid I’d insulted him by asking such a personal question. Then he looked at me and said one word – “Verdun.”

I in turn lapsed into silence – remembering everything I’d studied and read about one of the bloodiest and most useless battles in a war that featured dozens of them. After the stalemate on the Western Front, the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, conceived a plan to bleed France to death. The German army attacked the area around Verdun, where France had suffered a humiliating defeat in 1870. The plan was to force the French army to feed men into the battle to the point that its reserves and supplies were exhausted.

To an extent the first part of the plan worked. After the Germans took Fort Douaumont, they closed in around Verdun, leaving only one road – known ever after as the “Voie Sacrée” – to supply men and supplies to the battlefield.

Up that road one September afternoon in 1916 marched the young pere Sybille. Most of his company of 25 freshly trained soldiers came from St. Veran, as conscripts from the same localities were routinely assigned to the same units. He was with friends he had known since childhood.

He told me, somewhat hesitantly, that they had fought for three days with little or no rest. They successfully repelled at least three German attacks. On the third day he was wounded by an exploding shell that tore off a good portion of his left leg. In the hospital he learned that only three men from his company were still whole. The others were dead, missing or wounded. He didn’t say which, but I knew from his expression that most of them had probably died.

He survived to fight again, but not at Verdun. During the Second World War he led a group of resistance fighters, who struck against the Italians, who had invaded that part of France after its defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.

I asked him a few questions, but could tell he really had no interest in resurrecting old memories. In St Veran’s Mairie (City Hall) one wall is a memorial to those from the village who gave their lives for France. Like most rather isolated French villages there aren’t a great number of family names – Sybille, Jouve and Himbert are some I recall. Those names appear repeatedly on that roll of the dead, as well as on the town’s war memorial. St. Veran is not unique. Every French village (no matter how small), every town and city has a memorial to the dead from the Great War. The 11th of November remains a solemn day of remembrance.

Almost all of the Great War’s battlefields have slowly reverted back into farmland, pastures and forests – not Verdun. It remains a panorama of craters, pits, shell holes, trenches and mounds of earth, extending over many square miles. Here and there are memorials to the villages that disappeared in 1916, never to be rebuilt. Leaving the battlefield unchanged honors the more than 300,000 men from both sides who died there, as well as the wounded and the missing, who fought across its surface for 10 long months.

Le pere Sybille passed away many years ago, but his memories and his experience at Verdun have merged with those of his comrades to become part of France’s collective memory. They will not be forgotten as long as there are French men and women to remember them and the sacrifice they made. Verdun is also there to remind them.

Topics Germany