Military History | Hôtel de ville de Verdun — The Fire Brigade in the Cellars

The régiment de sapeurs-pompiers de Paris records in its own history of the war that on 20 March 1916, twenty-eight days after the German offensive opened north of the town, a captain and thirty of its men left the capital for Verdun with three motor pumps. Water decided how they worked. The mains were out of service and the only supply left was the Meuse, so they set tanks at points across the town, in the upper town particularly.

The place they were sent to keep from burning had almost nobody in it. Verdun's civilians had been evacuated, and Chemins de mémoire, the French defence ministry's heritage service, describes the besieged town as holding two bodies — the staff in the underground citadel, and the fire brigade quartered in the cellars of the mairie. The detachment took the Hôtel de Ville because it stood centrally and because its cellars were solid enough to hold men through a heavy bombardment.

By the regiment's account the detachment was relieved every three months, turned out to roughly 150 fires, lost two men to shell splinters on 7 August 1916 and had about ten more wounded. It went back to Paris on 26 September 1917, after eighteen months.

The building went up in 1623 and has been the town's since the eighteenth century. It was classified a monument historique by decree of 12 July 1886; a fire gutted it in the 1890s and it was made good by 1898. It is the working town hall now, at 11 rue du Président-Poincaré, and a war museum beside the marriage room keeps medals the city was given, among them the Légion d'honneur brought by Raymond Poincaré.

📸 Cover: the cour d'honneur of the Hôtel de ville de Verdun, by Aimelaime, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.