Verdun - FORT BELLEVILLE, the second of our recent trip reports. IMAGE INTENSIVE!

[TeeJF]

There is a spanking map of all the Verdun forts, ouvrages, etc. in "The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916" (Penguin History) (ISBN: 0140170413 / 0-14-017041-3) by Alistair Horne. Together with the help of Google Earth and my eagle eyed aerial fort spotter Tracy, we were able to pin point almost all of the forts on our nav sat before we went across and then we drove straight to every site we were interested in.

If anyone wants a set of Autoroute "pins" for the sites we have so far visited around Verdun then please contact me off forum.

This is the second of our most recent Verdun trip reports, this time covering one of the rear fortress line sites, "Fort Belleville" up on Belleville Ridge. We had tried to get into the practically identical Fort Belrupt earlier in the morning and despite the fact that it is now a part time underground paint ball site we still entered the lower level through what appears to have been an emergency exit. The trouble was, despite the fact that it seems to be structurally sound and hence very, VERY inviting, the small matter of a couple of feet of water and no waders prevented us going in any further... bit of a bummer that! So we toddled off instead to Fort Bellville which is situated at the top of a brand new housing estate. It was quite bizarre to see one house which has been built over what looks like the wagon road entrance to the fort and has utilised the arched gateway and tunnel to form a garage!!! Very enterprising.

Now at potential risk of upsetting the site moderators by disclosing entry details in an open post I would just like to say that no part of the Fort Belleville site is actually closed by even so much as a fence (apart from Mssr. Maison Nouvelle's garage that is!) so other than an Entree Interdite sign on the road there is absolutely nothing to bar your way except for some rather vicious brambles and nettles... indeed, if you were to approach the fort from the glacis you wouldn't even see the sign and the first you would know of it you would be wandering around inside the place! Having said that, due to the number of very large artillery shells this fort received the superstructure is VERY dodgy indeed and there are no fences to stop you falling 20 + feet down into a large courtyard from the woodland above it. And as this woodland is in effect the roof of the fort... and 400 mm shells make big holes... well you see what I'm getting at I'm sure.

BE VERY CAREFUL.

These rear echelon fortresses are quite unlike the forts closer to the sharp end of the Verdun battlefield. The line of German advance was cleverly channelled by terrain and strategically placed strong points towards the enormous and formidable fortress of Douamont, thus preventing any further movement towards, let alone beyond the city - indeed had the French bothered to garrison and man Douamont properly then the whole battle of Verdun might have gone a very different way. But as I said in my earlier report, Douamont fell to the Germans with barely a shot fired due to massive and totally unbelievable negligence and stupidity on the French part. The next row of fortesses back were smaller but none the less formidable and this line included Fort Vaux which held out against overwhelming odds for days, falling in the end not from want of fighting spirit or even a lack of ammunition, but for the simple want of drinking water. Back further still you have Souville which was the limit of the German advance, and then you come to the likes of Forts Belrupt and Belleville. From what we saw on our visit these fortresses appear to have been fortified garrisons designed primarily to provide cover for the assembly of reserve troops, supply train etc. There are also large covered rooms, presumably magazines for ammunition storage, situated adjacent to two large yards to the left and right of the fort, which are so big that I can see no other obvious purpose for them other than as lightly protected, open air positions suitable for long range artillery. Finally these rear echelon forts would have served as casualty clearing stations and command and control centres just as Souville did in the height of the nine month long battle. In the event of a German advance that deep then they could have been used as strong points for machine gunners and infantry but as this fort and nearby Belrupt were actually built so close to the city (and in Belrupt's case a long way around the right flank) then a German advance this far would almost certainly have meant that the city had fallen anyway. There are no mechanised artillery or machine gun turrets and no aparrent observation cupolas at Belleville but it is still a very interesting site if only for the architecture.

It was built from locally sourced dressed lime stone and the quality of the mortar is pretty amazing. Where it has been exposed to the weather externally it has inevitably decayed somewhat however where ever it has been sheltered to any degree, and that is NOT just internally, a lot of the pointing looks like it was done only yesterday. And as this fort has clearly never been repaired after a war that was almost a century ago then I am pretty sure it is still the original mortar. But the thing that struck me the most was the superb quality of the stone work... for a fort intended to be a practical aid to the defence of a city rather than as an obvious land mark with consequential "prettification" it displays superb quality of work by craftsmen who were clearly master masons.



The main entrance to the fort is sited on the inner side of a big courtyard which is surrounded by a large, reinforced earth wall. The outer gates are gone and the gate entrance building has been mashed by heavy artillery shells. The walls are also severly damaged by the same bombardment over many months. The fort interior is further seperated from the outer courtyard by a moat but the moat bridge is long gone.This photograph shows the fort's inner entrance situated within the flanking walls.

Gun embrasures in the fort walls giving extensive fields of fire down into the outer courtyard and moat...

A relatively easy climb will get you up onto the entrance ramp despite the missing drawbridge, if indeed that was what was utilised to protect the route into the fort proper across the moat. Gate houses with gun embrasures on either side of the entrance further protect the way in and the heavy duty door hinges are still apparent here. In the distance the outer wall and the remains of the main entrance can be clearly seen.

Looking down the entrance tunnel from the other end. Note "Eye in the sky Google Earth fortress spotter" ambling up in the distance...

A small inner courtyard seperates what appears to be a long block of barrack rooms or the like (just visible on the right of the photo) from the entrance tunnel and it's adjacent rooms, many of which on the entrance side (left of shot) have collapsed presumably from the prolonged heavy artillery barrages everyone of the forts suffered. Each barrack room on the right of the shot has a very narrow, full height corridor all the way around it's interior wall and where this has collapsed in places there appear to be rooms on a lower level, though we could not find any obvious entrance other than through the collapsed areas. My best guess is that these "corridors" were built to in some way create a sort of "air cushion" between the outer and inner walls further enhancing the strength of the building against artillery attack, though at Douamont and the other forts the area between the shielding earth and the concrete inner structure is filled with an impact cushioning layer of sand. Clearly this was never the case in Belleville as the "corridors" appear to have drains running the length of the floors. The air gap would of course enhance the waterproofing of the inner walls to some degree though I very much doubt that was their real purpose.

Any offers???

The rooms shown dead ahead on this photo are at 90 degrees to the barrack rooms and their immediate purpose was not immediately obvious though there appears to be either a long horse trough, or possibly a latrine, in the corridor to the left of the shot. The corridor opens onto the big courtyard area which we took to be one of two large artillery emplacements due to the fact that covered magazines are sited to the right hand side of the shot beyond the buildings shown here.

The horse trough or latrine...?

Inside one of the barrack block rooms. It was not possible to see any evidence of windows or indeed doors so the room's use was not immediately obvious. That said I think that the size of the entrance precludes it's use as a magazine as blast from falling shells could easily have penetrated such large openings and caused sympathetic detonation. The rooms adjacent to the yard beyond this area have much smaller entrances and no window gaps.

Roof fall...

Inside another barrack block - note the enormous fractures in the walls and the massive distortion of the structure. Immediately above this room is a huge crater caused by a very large artillery shell. The integrity of the room has been severly compromised and we were not keen to stay inside overly long!

The same room looking out...

A "cut off" interior wall built to prevent the enemy from firing directly along this corridor. At the end of the corridor loop holes can be seen which were used by the defenders of the fort for firing out across the scarp. There is an exit door to the scarp situated behind the cut off wall but out of view on this photograph. We used the exit to leave the fort on the forward side and we were then able to get down into the moat and come right back around the inside of the fort's outer wall back to the entrance area.

Hope you enjoyed these pics! Thamks for looking.

 

[gingrove]

I wonder if the barrack rooms with the narrow corridor round them could have once been powder magazines, and the corridor a lighting passage? Oil lamps where placed behind windows in the passage to light the inside of the magazine without the risk of having a burning lamp in the same room as the powder. This was quite a common feature in British forts like Spitbank, Nelson, and the Nothe in the days of black powder. Great photos thanks for posting.

 

[TeeJF]

Nice idea and as the fort build was likely to have begun when black powder was still being used (it was built with all the other forts there sometime in the period between 1870 and 1914) then it could well be correct. They might have bricked up the windows you mention when cordite came in because there are definitely no window openings now. Having said that I didn't look for evidence of any being bricked up either as this is a new concept to me. So on balance I'm thinking this is a very strong possibility. I haven't seen these passages in any of the other Verdun forts built at the same time though. Thanks for the food for thought bud!

 

[Snips86x]

Another great post with fantastic write up and images - Thanks!

 

[King Al]

Great write-up TeeJF!! nice one

 

[jonney]

Cracking stuff again TeeJF great photo's and write up

 

[cardiffrail]

Brilliant report. many thanks.

 

[godzilla73]

Great pics - the barack rooms with the outer chamber are likely to be powder magazines, and may even have been used as a shifting lobby, where gunners changed clothes to insure that they did not bring any inciendiary materials or damp materials into the magazine. There's a similar arrangement at Hubberston in Pembrokeshire as well, and at the St Martin's Battery in Dover. Air bricks would probably be in evidence here, as keeping the powder dry was the main purpose. The casemated barracks also look like those on the roof at the Drop Redoubt, which suggests that the structure is actually pre-WWI.
A really interesting site
Thanks for sharing
GDZ

 

[V70]

Excellent report and write-up.. cheers

 

[TeeJF]

Great pics - the barack rooms with the outer chamber are likely to be powder magazines, and may even have been used as a shifting lobby. The casemated barracks also look like those on the roof at the Drop Redoubt, which suggests that the structure is actually pre-WWI.
GDZ

I don't think I explained myself properly. Sorry. The rooms shown in the photos open onto the inner courtyard and have large windows and doorways which I thought unlikely if they were magazines as blast would not be deflected and anything in the room could then detonate sympathetically. The rooms also all had these odd narrow corridors running right the way round on three sides which were full wall height but less than a shoulders width. I thought the suggestion that these were for the placement of paraffin lamps within glass windows seperating them from the magazine was a possible and very credible suggestion despite the lack of any such windows now (bricked up?) however the big doors and windows still suggest to me barracks rather than magazines especially as I thought I saw tiny doors elsewhere leading to magazines adjacent to the open areas to left and right of the fort which were likely to have been arty areas. These rooms shown did not lead to any other rooms but opened directly to the outside areas. And your suggestion these forts pre-date WW1 is probably spot on as the work of fortifying Verdun began after the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870's and was still underway as the Great War began. During this time many things changed including the switch from black powder to cordite for small arms propellant which may explain the lack of the paraffin lamp small windows if the room was a magazine for example. Fort Douamont was upgraded dramatically early in the 20th century to cope with the much heavier calibres of howitzer arty the Germans were building. In the words of somebody who's name escapes me, this mystery room design is, "Velly interlesting"!!! Thanks for your knowledgable and very interesting comments.

 

[TeeJF]

At last, Fort Bellville's remains makes sense!

I managed to get hold of a book about the Verdun fortifications - "The Fortifications Of Verdun 1874 -1917" ISBN: 978-1-84908-412-3 by Clayton Donnel - and it explains clearly what we saw "on the ground" at Fort Belleville which became the subject of questions and some surmises in my report. I was very pleased to see that the suggestions you guys made were spot on, albeit with slight differences as to how they should be applied to the questions I raised in the first instance.

So... this fort, together with a handful of the others, was built in great haste when a failure in diplomatic relations with Germany occurred shortly after the Franco-Prussian war and a resumption of hostilities became likely. Belleville was only the second fort to be built and was begun in 1875. The final cost of it's construction was FF536,000, less than the cost of a three bed detached in London today! These forts were named "Panic Forts" as a result of the haste in which they were built and their general layout was practically identical within the constraints of the ground upon which they were built.

Initially construction of these forts was purely in conventional masonry but the advent of the invention of "picric acid" explosive at about the same time (a much higher explosive than had previously been available) together with the creation of longer, torpedo shaped shell casings and time fuses, (causing deep penetration of an artillery round before explosion deep within the underlying structure) meant that conventional masonry forts were rendered obsolete at a stroke. Clearly then something had to be done quickly to reinforce these panic forts in some way.

There were two methods used. The second method used slightly later and much in evidence at for example Fort Douamont, was to pour "special concrete" (concrete with a very high cement content) over the structure and up against the walls of the exposed parts of the buildings. A layer of sand was often poured over the masonry first and the concrete was then poured over the top together with a final layer of earth on top of that. Later still the concrete used both in initial construction and for reinforcement, was strengthened further still with re-bar, as can be seen clearly on one of my photos in my Froideterre report.

The first method however - and this was clearly used at Fort Belleville, the subject of my report - was to utilise a layer of concrete but with an "air gap" built between the masonry and the concrete to disperse blast. This means then that the suggestion that the parts of the structure we found with a narrow full wall height corridor all the way around parts of the internal chambers was NOT down to the need for isolated illumination of powder magazines but was infact for blast dispersion.

BUT... the suggestion of the illumination issue does arise in part of this fort, and in other Verdun forts too - an example of the isolated illumination for powder magazines can be seen clearly in this shot taken within Fort Douamont's magazines though the glass separating the corridor from the magazine is long gone, presumably a casualty of one of the many internal explosions Douamont suffered at the back end of the siege in 1916.

There ARE such powder magazines at Fort Belleville, and they DO have exactly that system used for completely isolating naked flame illumination from the magazine interior EXACTLY as was suggested. The magazines however are located in a part of the fort which is no longer accesible due to the fall of the corridor roof from the huge 42 cm artillery rounds which impacted on the superstructure above. The panic forts were nowhere near as well "armoured" against heavy artillery as the later forts and have suffered considerably under bombardment as a consequence.

My assumption that the large open areas to the left and right of the central barrack blocks were for artillery placement is correct and there were originally several large shelters built into the forward walls of this area but these too have collapsed and been partially buried by bombardment.

Finally, what I took to be embrasures for defending riflemen to shoot down into the ditch are more likely to have been a mix of firing points and placements for oxy-acetylene powered search lights used to light up the ditch at night.

Below is a plan taken from the reference book I have been studying. I hope it all makes sense! The annotations and accompanying text in red are my addition and are relavent to what we saw at Fort Belleville rather than to this fort (Dugny). There are also some slight differences as I mentioned above, most notably the absence of gun tuirrets but also the fact that the ditch defence flanking galleries at the front of the fort are built on the inner, scarpe side of the ditch rather than on the outer, counterscarpe side as can be seen in many of the later forts.

Many thanks to those of you who helped me solve the mysteries this fort visit threw up with your informed comments and suggestions. I simply adore tasty food for thought of this nature!

If these WW1 forts tickle your proverbial fancy then please "watch this space" as they say because we are off to Verdun again in a little over a fortnight and this time I've found a sh*t load more forts to visit and photograph, some of which look uber exciting because they are still very intact!

And as always, thanks for looking.

 

[gingrove]

What a fantastic piece of follow up research! Well done for solving the mystery of the air gap passages and thanks for posting the results.
Gordon

 

[Em_Ux]

Interesting stuff