Caures-Wald – Bois des Caures –
Allied culture of remembrance
Following the end of the fighting, relief was great on all sides in view of the attacks by the Americans, which had been fought with utter tenacity right up to the end. Out of joy over the end of the fighting, Germans and Americans fired off their stocks of flare ammunition, and scenes of fraternization occurred. Souvenirs were exchanged. Many American soldiers were of German descent and proficient in the German language.
American remembrance
Immediately after the war, a strong culture of remembrance developed, especially overseas. On the American side, this initially focused on the combat sectors of the west bank of the Meuse. Above all, the Romagne-sous-Montfaucon war cemetery, which was to become the largest of the First World War outside the USA, constructed starting in the early 1920s, stood at the center.
In addition, interest focused on the American memorial in the area of the ruins of the village of Montfaucon, where the Americans had suffered the heaviest casualties during their attacks. Later, the memorials of the St. Mihiel salient, above all the American monument on the Butte de Montsec and the St. Mihiel/Thiaucourt war cemetery, also gained renown. However, the fact that American units had also fought immediately north of Verdun and suffered heavy casualties was then and remains today a rather neglected facet of the First World War.
In the narrower northern and eastern front sector around Verdun, apart from the broader Memorial for Members of the 316th Infantry AEF east of Sivry-sur-Meuse, there was initially no memorial site for the American units deployed there in the final days of the war. On September 24, 2008, on the initiative of French military historian Pierre Lenhard and the municipality of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, a memorial for the American soldier Henry N. Gunther was dedicated on the Côte de Chaumont. Gunther was of German descent and lived in a heavily German-speaking neighborhood in eastern Baltimore. He worked as a clerk at the National Bank of Baltimore. In 1917, he had become engaged to an American woman also of German descent. Like many people of German descent, his family faced considerable resentment after the outbreak of the war. He also saw no point in volunteering for the army. Shortly before the Americans entered the war, however, he was drafted.
Henry N. Gunther was a member of the 313th US Infantry Regiment (79th Division) and was killed by German machine gun fire a few minutes before the armistice on November 11, 1918, near Chaumont-devant-Damvillers. Because of defeatist remarks in a letter to a friend, he had been demoted in July 1918. According to accounts by his comrades, immediately before the agreed-upon ceasefire, he had charged a German machine gun nest in violation of orders and was fatally hit. He is said to have been the last American casualty of the First World War. The circumstances of his career and his death can be read on the memorial’s information board. They suggest suicide by the young American soldier.
The memorial for Henry N. Gunther is located in the area of the German Kriemhild-Stellung, specifically at the site of the furthest American advance on November 11, 1918. Stationed there were the remains of the 31. Landwehr-Infanterie-Regiments (31st Landwehr Infantry Regiment), which just a few days earlier had still had to fend off American attacks in the area of the Caures-Waldes.
Austrian remembrance
On the Austrian side, official remembrance of the deployment of their own troops in the fighting of 1918 on the Western Front did not take place at all until a few years ago. To this day, there are very few treatises in military-historical literature about this interesting yet neglected chapter of Austro-German war history. It is known that Austrian artillery was involved in German operations as early as 1914. Hardly anyone knows, however, that several infantry divisions of the Danube Monarchy were deployed on the Western Front in 1918. The focus of military remembrance in Austria has always been on the fighting on the Italian Alpine front. No war diaries or other records are known from the units involved in the west, nor are any other serious sources available. All of this makes corresponding research difficult.
Until the late 1990s, neither Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. nor the Austrian Black Cross (OSK) was able to provide detailed information on the whereabouts of the Austrian fallen or individual gravesites on the Western Front. This may come as a surprise, because in the Verdun and St. Mihiel sectors alone, the three Austro-Hungarian divisions deployed there suffered more than 19,000 casualties in the last five months of the war. Among them were nearly 800 fallen from the fighting north of Verdun. Today it is known that the dead soldiers—as well as many Russian and Italian prisoners of war who were brought along as laborers by the Austro-Hungarian troops and died during the fighting—had initially been buried in provisional cemeteries. When French authorities began dissolving these burial grounds in the 1920s and created the German war cemeteries that exist today, no distinction was made according to the nationality of the fallen. Austrians and their auxiliary troops were simply buried together with German fallen.
In 2002, the book “Le prix d’une alliance: Les Austro-Hongrois sur le front ouest 1914-1918” by Jean-Claude Laparra was published. The former general, military historian, and author had painstakingly investigated the whereabouts of the Austrian fallen while working on the book. Based on his research, it was possible to locate more than 300 Austrian soldiers’ graves in various German war cemeteries in the region.
In 2010, on the initiative of the then Austrian Consul General in Strasbourg, Wolfgang Strohmayer, initial contacts were established between Austrian and French institutions. Strohmayer traveled to the First World War sites on the former Western Front. In Verdun, he met Jean-Claude Laparra and was persuaded to realize an appropriate participation by Austria in the commemoration ceremonies in the years 2014–2018 in the greater Verdun area.
On June 14, 2014, the time had come. A commemorative plaque was unveiled at the German Consenvoye war cemetery. It commemorates the 62 Austro-Hungarian soldiers resting there who had died in the fighting north of Verdun and also in the Bois des Caures during the last half of 1918.
Already on September 22, 1984, the cemetery had been the scene of a meeting between Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterrand. At that time, it was still unknown that not only German but also Austrian soldiers had found their final resting place there. Also on June 14, 2014, north of the village of Samogneux on the D 964, with the participation of the Austrian Consulate General, local political representatives as well as members of veterans’ associations and the military, a monument was inaugurated.
The model used was a monument that had been erected in December 1915 on the Grande Tranchée de Calonne south of Verdun for Austrian artillery units deployed there from September 1914 onwards by members of Infanterie-Regiments von Courbière (2. Posensches) Nr. 19 (19th Infantry Regiment von Courbière [2nd Posen]), according to information in the 1935 regimental history. The exact circumstances of its creation remain unclear to date. The monument was located slightly north of the large IR 19 cemetery on the Tranchée de Calonne, near the access road to the memorial site for the French writer Alain Fournier and his men. The monument is said to have been destroyed toward the end of the war. Today, only the massive base remains. The new monument near Samogneux is today the only known monument to Austro-Hungarian troops in the Western Front sector.
French commemoration
On the French side, the events in the Bois des Caures developed into an essential chapter of the culture of remembrance related to the Battle of Verdun even during wartime. Attention was focused directly on the events at the beginning of the Battle of Verdun on February 21 and 22, 1916, and very specifically on the person of Colonel Émile Driant, who stood with his two Jäger battalions at the center of the German attack.
Driant was ideally suited by his person and background for the creation of a heroic epic. Born on September 11, 1855, in Neufchâtel-sur-Aisne, he studied law and humanities in Reims; starting in 1875, he attended the Saint-Cyr Military Academy. His officer career took him to Tunisia, where he became an aide-de-camp to General Georges Boulanger. With him, he moved to Paris and married Boulanger’s daughter Marcelle there. Following the nationalist scandals of the 1880s and the Dreyfus Affair, Driant retired from service in 1905.
Afterwards, he dedicated himself to political interests. He used his collaboration with the Parisian periodical *L’Eclair* in the following years for several articles clearly directed against the parliamentary form of government. In addition, he was active as the author of several military and futuristic novels and other works, frequently using the pseudonym „Capitaine Danrit“ as an author. He traveled to the German Empire and was able to experience German militarism in the form of several large Prussian maneuvers. These impressions prompted him to warn, with his 1906 book „Vers un nouveau Sedan“, against a repetition of the developments that had led to the Franco-Prussian War of 18070/71. In 1910, he was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies as a representative of the city of Nancy. In his capacity as a deputy, he supported French rearmament efforts as well as the maintenance of effective security along the eastern border against the German Empire.
After the outbreak of the war, Émile Driant was reactivated and assigned to the staff of the Governor of Verdun, General Michel Coutanceau. He received command of a half-brigade consisting of the two Chasseurs à pied battalions, the 56th and 59th. The units participated in the French defensive efforts in the Argonne and the Woëvre Plain in 1914. They suffered heavy losses. As early as 1915, they were deployed in the Louvemont sector north of Verdun. From the summer of 1915 onward, Driant pointed out the danger of a German attack against the fortress belt around Verdun. At the same time, he spoke out vehemently against abandoning the eastern bank of the Meuse and in favor of strengthening the defense system there. The Battle of Verdun began on February 21, 1916. Colonel Émile Driant met his death during the fighting in the Caures Forest as early as February 22, 1916.
Immediately after the end of the fighting, efforts began on the French side to clarify the fate of the officer. Rumors emerged that Driant had been taken prisoner or had been able to escape. Even President Raymond Poincaré and King Alfonso XIII of Spain intervened in the investigations. Ultimately, in March 1916, a letter from the mother of the young German artillery Leutnant (second lieutenant) Theobald von Schroetter (1. Nassauisches Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 27 [1st Nassau Field Artillery Regiment No. 27]) clarified Driant’s fate. Baroness von Schroetter, at the request of her son, had contacted the widow Marcelle Driant directly via a contact person in Switzerland to describe the circumstances of her husband’s death. Among other things, the letter written in French states:
“Madame, my son, artillery Leutnant who fought in your husband’s sector, asks me to write to you and assure you that Mr. Driant was buried with all respect and care and that his enemy comrades have created an honorable grave for him. It is my desire, together with my son, to express our deepest condolences to you. (…) Mr. Driant has been buried very close to battalion commander Étienne Renouard (…) on the edge of the Caures-Wald between Beaumont and Flabas. The grave is tended so that you can find and visit it in times of peace. (…)“
寸法from: Letter from Baroness von Schrotter to Madame Marcelle Driant dated March 16, 1916
Driant’s now obvious death led to manifold activities on the part of French politics and the press. A large number of obituaries appeared in almost all newspapers. On behalf of President of the Chamber of Deputies, Paul Deschanel, a eulogy for Émile Driant was delivered in the Chamber of Deputies on April 7, 1916. On June 28, 1916, a memorial service was held at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, attended by the entire French state and military leadership. Driant’s widow, Marcelle Driant, was also present. She was personally escorted into the cathedral by Paul Deschanel. The memorial service was professionally captured in photographs and marked the beginning of the heroic epic surrounding Émile Driant as well as the two Jäger battalions from the Caures-Wald.
With the end of the war, investigations began regarding the burial site of Émile Driant as well as Commandant Étienne Renouard. Both had been buried on the spot by German troops immediately after the fighting in February 1916. Contrary to the comforting words of Baroness von Schrotter in her letter of March 16, 1916, to Marcelle Driant, the graves had naturally been destroyed during the subsequent fighting up to 1918. In his memoirs on the deployment of the 25th Division before Verdun from the 1930s, General Victor Kühne describes that he had taken photos of the burial site and also transmitted them to Driant’s widow via contacts in Switzerland. A photo showing two simple graves with birch-wood borders can be found on the information board at the original burial site near “Hessen-Platz” (D 905/D125), unfortunately of poor quality.
After the graves could be located, both officers were exhumed for the first time on August 9, 1919. Present, besides Marcelle Driant, were Lieutenant Robin (9./BCP 59), who had himself participated in the fighting in February 1916, General Renouard, the father of Étienne Renouard, as well as the governor of Verdun. It was possible to identify both officers, which was easily done in the case of Émile Driant on the basis of his uniform. Commandant Renouard was transferred by his father to the Faubourg-Pavé French Cemetery in Verdun. The mortal remains of Émile Driant were placed in a coffin and reburied on the spot. The grave was provided with a new border and further grave decorations.
In the following years, differences arose on the question of what should happen to the burial site. Ultimately, it was decided to erect a mausoleum for Driant and some of his fallen Jäger at the road junction D 905/D 125. The French sculptor Grégoire Calvet, who also originated the idea for erecting the eternal flame under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, was commissioned with the creation of the facility. The monument and the other parts of the memorial were created in the following years in a quarry between Rupt-en-Woevre and Génicourt-sur-Meuse.
On October 9, 1922, the mortal remains of Émile Driant were exhumed once again, re-identified, and subsequently transferred to Ville-devant-Chaumont. There they initially remained unburied. On October 21, 1922, in the presence of only a few state and military representatives as well as his wife Marcelle Driant, Driant was buried in the new memorial in the Bois des Caures. In addition, some of his chasseurs found new graves there.
On October 22, 1922, the official dedication ceremony took place, which in turn was attended by many notable state and military representatives, such as André Maginot and General Noël de Castelnau. Starting in 1922 — interrupted by the German occupation during the Second World War — a memorial ceremony has been held in February of each year in the Caures Forest for Émile Driant and his chasseurs.
were AI-edited (notice pursuant to Art. 50 Regulation (EU) 2024/1689).