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Fort de Landrecourt |
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Fort de Landrecourt was designed and built during the "crisis l'obus torpille" in the 1880s. During that time German siege artillery advanced considerably in a very short period with the advent of ground penetrating artillery rounds which would collapse subterranean shelter etc. This rendered many of the forts built prior to 1883 obsolete at a stroke. These long, torpedo shaped, artillery rounds, filled with a much more powerful explosive, meant that the design used for the earlier forts had to be radically reconsidered. The problem was that underground installations on the earlier forts were protected with a blast dispersing cavity sandwiched between two walls, and then covered over with a relatively shallow depth of ordinary concrete and top soil, and this was woefully inadequate against the new rounds. For a photographic example of this method of blast proofing please take a look at our Fort Belleville page, specifically at photograph 14 there. The answer then was to excavate much deeper into the ground and then cover over with a much greater depth of fully reinforced concrete, together with a far greater topsoil back fill. This was further augmented with a thick layer of sand between the reinforced concrete and topsoil. Thus we see at Landrecourt the genesis of the design which is so evident at Douamont etc. Built at an altitude of 330 metres on the left bank of the River Meuse, Landrecourt filled the gap between forts Dugny and du Regret. After it's initial completion, it underwent several periods of improvement works which included the installation of a 75mm artillery turret and two Hotchkiss MG turrets in 1904 together with their associated armoured observation cupolas. In 1907 a Bourge Casemate armed with two 75mm quick firing artillery pieces was constructed and the two moat caponieres towards the front of the fort were converted into the much more effective "coffres de contre escarpe" or counterscarp galleries.
In the woods immediately behind the fort there are a series of quite extensive artillery emplacements. Although poorly protected against infantry attack these emplacements did offer significant shelter against counter barrage artillery fire. It is possible to see several reinforced shelters for the gun crews, horses, and for safe ammunition storage, together with water troughs etc. We gained entry to Landrecourt with great ease and we were standing right behind the main entrance gate composing ourselves when I spotted someone else heading down towards our entry point. Naturally we had no idea whether this was going to prove problematic or otherwise, so we made ourselves scarce down towards the end of the reinforced concrete section of the fort, in the hopes that this individual would wander on by. Whether he even came into the fort or not we never found out but sadly it meant that our explore was less than thorough as we spent most of our time from that moment onwards creeping around corners generally on the alert. Then in addition the battery on the camera decided to go flat long before we had taken nearly enough photographs - perhaps then this is one fort we may well have to return to next time!
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The moat at
Landrecourt, like so many of the forts around Verdun, was at the time of
it's initial construction protected by "caponiers" - concrete block
houses with enfilade fields of fire along the moat in all directions.
The term caponier literally translates as "chicken house" (from capon).
Originally this form of block house evolved from a simple covered
passageway which ran between the wall of the fort proper and the opposite
wall of the ditch, but this created a weakness in the form of an
unprotected traverse by which a ditch might be crossed. The answer was to
make the caponier accessible only from within the fort and then stop it's
front wall well short of the opposite moat wall. To avoid the fire from
one caponier hitting the next, these mini-forts were usually set at
alternate corners of the fort firing towards a blank wall further along
the moat. Caponiers are usually wedge shaped so that they can fire down
both angles of the moat ditch. The weak point of caponier design is the
roof which was exposed to plunging artillery fire, especially from siege
mortars and howitzers. In order to deal with this problem the roofs had to
be extremely thick, and very steeply sloped. Between initial construction
and the outbreak of the Great War many of the Verdun forts had their
caponiers converted to counterscarp galleries and Landercourt was no
exception. Counterscarp galleries are earth shielded
and usually sit flush with the wall of the moat in which they are built.
They are
therefore much better protected and far more effective. The down
side of counterscarp galleries is that they are vulnerable to mining so in
some forts both are occasionally found together. 
