Thursday 9th July – Week 4 – Verdun

Today is World War I day. Verdun was the centre of one of the major conflicts of WWI. While the French leadership were concentrating all their efforts on preparing for the Somme, the Germans were building up capability and infrastructure to attack Verdun. The Germans were desparate for a morale boosting win because the population were becoming despondent with the lack of progress that was being made in the war.

On the morning of February 21 1916, they began their attack and in the first 10 hours unleashed 2 million shells on the towns around Verdun. The fighting which went on for 300 days and while the Germans originally made good progress towards Verdun, they were constantly thwarted by the French and at the end of the 300 day war, they were back to where they started and around half a million people were dead.
Verdun is a very historic town and our day started with a walk around the old town. Verdun is on the Meuse River, which flows through the centre of the town, making an attractive centre piece and the site of many of the cities restaurants and bars. We visited, town gates, the town hall, the cathedral, the head quarters for the World Capital for Peace and the Carrefour Des Marechaux, the siting of 16 statues of generals of the 1870 Franco Prussian war and WWI.

The cathedral had beautiful stained glass windows and an intriguing entry door system. When you approached, there was a door that said 'pull', which when you did you were immediately confronted with a door that said 'push'. I'm not sure what the intention of these back to back doors were, but if it was to keep the noise out, it railed because I fell into the church laughing at it. Maybe it's designed to keep the birds out.

The Carrefour was the furthest point from the centre of town on our walk and the point at which todays shower took place, which had us sheltering under an archway for half an hour waiting for it to slow down a bit.

After a lunch of Carpaccio of Beef and Pizza (a fairly standard lunch), we head out of town to the war memorials. We visited the Monument de Lion, the museum, the Ossuaire of Douaumont, the destroyed town of Douaumont and the Fort de Douaumont.

Over the course of the battle, their was 60m shells fired and some of these were pretty big. This had a devastating effect on both the local towns and the local countryside. By the end of the war, 9 villages that housed around 3,000 people had been completely destroyed and because of the risk of unexploded shells, they have never been rebuilt. All the towns now have memorials on the site where they existed, and to this day each town has an elected mayor, so that these 'lost towns' are able to carry on in some small way.

The Monument of the Lion marks the point at which the Germans were stopped and rather than the usual proud rampant lion statue, the lion is very much an ailing lion, lying on its side (see photo). Just down the road was the museum, where we spent a couple of hours. Our knowledge of the two World Wars in not as extensive as it could be and it was interesting to read that while the match that ignited world war I was the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of Prussia by a serb, the Germans and French had both been angling for a fight. The Germans wanted to share in the spoils of colonialism that was serving the British, Portugese and French so well, while the French were still smarting at having lost Alsace and parts of Lorraine in the 1870 Franco Prussian war. Both sides entered the war expecting an easy march to victory in Paris or Berlin, but 4 years later at the cost of millions of lives, little had been gained by either side (except the French got back their captured lands).

WWI saw the rapid development of artillery shelling, hand grenades and chemical warfare (mustard gas). In addition, the bright red trousers traditionally worn by French soldiers, were replaced with a much paler trouser, designed to help the soldier blend in with the landscape. Both sides went into the battle expecting wounds to come mainly from bayonets and bullets, whereas most wounds were the result of shrapnel for the shells or the grenades. On the upside, WWI saw the rapid advancement of plastic surgery, x-rays and telecommunications. It was the latter that enabled the war to be co-ordinated over such a large front and the Germans laid 8 – 9 million kilometres of telecommunications cables along the front over the course of the war.. Anyway, that's what I learnt from the museum and it was really interesting.

Next stop was the Ossuaire de Douaumont. This is the permenant memorial to the fallen French soldiers. The remains of some 130,000 are encased in the lower vaults and there is a massive cemetery with all the crosses lined up in neat formation. The Ossuaire has a huge tower, which we climbed to the top of to get aerial views of the cemetery, the surrounding countryside and the museum.

We then visited the destroyed village of Douaumont and it's fort, which at the time of the German invasion was manned only by a few elderly (probably my age) reservists.

Although it is now nearly 100 years since the war, the countryside all around the area still shows all the signs of all the shelling that went on and although it is now a forest, all the ground is still crater
ridden and there are many trenches still in existence, with their barbed wire.