The village itself was so badly damaged in the First World War battle of Verdun in 1916, that it was one of a handful of villages which the authorities decided not to restore.
Fleury before the War had 422 inhabitants, and information is quite good about what they did for a living: several farmers, a grocer who also ran the cafe, three pubs, and the “marechal” – not the boss, or a policeman, but the blacksmith. But in 1916 it found itself at the epicentre of the struggle for a stretch of northern France. The inhabitants fled. The land occupied by the village changed hands 16 times, as the success of assaults by either side shifted the front line just a few tens of metres, sometimes. By the end of the War in 1918, the combination of artillery shelling and ground combat had left little of the village standing.
I’d like to say it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like. But the sad truth is that we see on our TV screens each night pictures of the destruction in Mosul, Aleppo, and other war-torn places, which are suffering the same fate at the moment.
Let’s hope they can be rebuilt. For Fleury and a few other places, the decision was taken not to try to rebuild the village. It’s a few hundred metres from the Verdun Memorial which provides a history of the whole battle and an extensive exhibition. So plenty of people visit Fleury, walk along the one-time roads, and see where the different tradesmen lived. The area is now forested, so being honest, the markers didn’t really work for me: I could have done with a ground plan to help imagine how it was in 1914, though one photo of the Rue de l’Eglise (Church St) helped. But it certainly serves as a vivid memorial to the senseless destruction of a battle where the number of dead, at 300,000 is hard to get your head round.