Concrete and Earth, Cold and Damp: A Visit to The Ww1 Fortifications of Verdun (Part 3: Froideterre Fort)

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This is part three of a multi-part article. To begin at the first part, click here.

Continuing along the Thiaumont Ridge from the MF 3 battery site, my companion and I came to a turn off signed for Froideterre. By the junction we could also see a wall and entrance dug into the side of the hill, and on the other side of the road some intriguing metal cones on top of what looked like wells. Which to visit first? We chose to take the side road up to the fortlet of Froideterre, hoping that visiting it might put the other structures into context.

When you arrive at the infantry fortlet of Froidterre you find yourself in a courtyard (now the car park) facing a wall of concrete topped with earth and grass, with metal domes peeking out above.

Although it is an unmanned site and one cannot get inside, there is an explanatory panel at the entrance to the car park with a plan of the fort and the area around it. What we were looking at was the interior of the fort, the concrete wall being one face of the largest of a line of four bunkers, the face pointing away from the enemy, the face the garrison entered by.

Photo 3: interior face of the main blocks at Froideterre (photograph by Bruce Officer)

As you can see from this photograph, at the end of the barrack block the earth and grass topping slopes down into the courtyard allowing one to easily get up onto the top.

So we did.

From up on top one can better understand how the fort worked as a defensive (and offensive) structure. We could see several turrets and a small dome poking up through the earth above the blocks of the main structure below, and each surrounded by concrete aprons. Standing with our backs to the courtyard, the earth topping of the fort sloped gently downhill towards what seemed to be a rather smoothed-out ditch.

Photo 4: view sideways along the fort from the top (photograph by Bruce Officer)

The larger turret housed two 75mm guns, the offensive armament of the fortlet (75mm, or 3 inches, being the diameter of the shells they fired). The smaller turrets were each for two machine guns, the defensive armament for repelling any attempts to storm the fort. An attacker coming from the north or northwest (the expected direction of attack) would not have seen the concrete main structure of the fort at all, just a low hillock topped by the turrets and surrounded by barbed wire, a ditch with a sturdy iron fence, and more barbed wire. All that earth of the front slope of the fort protected the concrete living quarters from shells as much as the concrete itself did. And that the fort had suffered heavy bombardment indeed was obvious from the dents of shell craters in the grass all over the top of the fort.

Continued in part four.