war. what is it good for? absolutely nothing.
Posted on | July 7, 2010 | 2 Comments
yesterday we leapt up early and drove out to verdun, which is actually not in champagne, but over in alsace-lorraine.
if you don’t know what went on in verdun during WW1, then get googling, because it’s a gripping read.
the germans decided they wanted to capture verdun at any cost, and the french simultaneously decided they wanted to hold verdun….at any cost.
both sides paid dearly over the next couple of years, with approx 550,000 dead and 800,000 wounded.
several small towns around verdun were flattened completely and after the war, it was considered too hazardous to rebuild there because of the insane amounts of artillery stuff lying around and buried to several metres in the churned up mud.
one such little village was fleury and one was douaument.
the whole area has been reforested and they have kept some of the carved up trenched ground just as it was….with a peaceful layer of grass covering it now.
there are memorials and monuments and cemeteries and ossuaries over a 10 km radius and it is really all very sad.
i was oddly moved to see a foot long metallic sliver of the bell from the church of douaument…almost the only thing left from there.
these villages still have an elected mayor and council, whose job is to keep the memory of the villages alive…..these ghost councils are unique in france and perhaps in the world.
we visited the souterraine citadel in verdun itself and went through the creepy chilly dim and gloomy tunnels.
there was a waxwork style scene with a voice-over of the unknown soldier being chosen at verdun, prior to being buried under the arc de triomphe….i always wondered where he had come from.
all in all, a very sobering day out ….as if i needed any further evidence to be anti-war and a complete pacifist and utter sook.
one wonders if that sort of battle would happen today. would people allow it to happen?
on a lighter note, the public toilets at the citadel were fully the equal of the nastiest i have experienced anywhere in asia…squat style, unclean and sans papier toilette. bizarre.
the drive there took us out of our now-familiar grape vines and across plains of golden wheat, with the odd windfarm.
we saw a few huge long trucks bearing a single windmill blade each…..staggeringly huge when you get close up to them.
we took a shortcut on the way home and ended up in cramant via a bit of a goat track through the moet vines.
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July 8th, 2010 @ 4:05 PM
Oh my gosh, you visited Verdun. I do quite a bit of reading about WWI and have visited the battlefields of northern France and Belgium and want to visit Verdun as well. It is shattering isn’t it, so many lives lost. There is a gravestone of a private in the cemetery at the Australian National Memorial in the Somme, which reads, ‘Another life lost hearts broken, for what.’ It is all so sad.
July 8th, 2010 @ 9:49 PM
gerta, the whole thing was just so terribly sad.
but verdun is now kind of the world centre for peace….if anyone is listening to that…..