Big event this week was my USO trip to Verdun, France yesterday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
Once again up really early to get to the bus on base but at least I had plenty of room to recline and sleep a bit. Verdun is almost due west of Stuttgart, about 5 hours away. So, Verdun was the site of one of the most costly battles of WWI. Lasting 10 months, from February until December 1916 and covering about 500 sq miles of contested land, the battle caused almost 750,000 casualties of which one third died, and completely erased several villages around the main city.
I thought this trip was going to be a battlefield tour but it was more of a museum tour. The first stop was a the Memorial Verdun which opened in the late 1980s and was just re-dedicated two weeks ago by French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkle on the 100th anniversary of the battle. This was a fantastic museum with three floors of exhibits and multimedia displays but we only had an hour to spend there. Still, that was enough to see some pretty cool exhibits. One of the biggest problems both the Germans and the French faced was the mud caused by the constant turnover of the ground from moving troops, vehicles, and explosions. Here's a display of a field kitchen on a simulated mud field that, to my surprise, visitors are invited to walk on. Interesting but it doesn't quite have the same feel of mud that sucks the boots off your feet.
Our next stop was at another memorial, the Douamont Ossuary, which is, as I found out, a building designed to be the final resting place for human remains, as opposed to an in-ground resting place (cemetery). This ossuary was designed and built to resemble a medieval sword plunged into the ground.
In this photo (not mine) the left wing is the chapel and the right wing has work/administrative spaces. On the back side of the building are small windows at ground level and through these windows are the bones of an estimated 130,000 soldiers.
Up in the tower is a view of the cemetery (which is only representative) and the battlefield which is now a forest.
This same view one hundred years ago would have shown nothing but churned dirt. On the road up to the ossuary some of the land was cleared of trees to show what it was like. Even though there's grass & weeds the gigantic mounds of dirt are still present. Imagine giant snow moguls, except made of dirt and everywhere as far as you can see. Also on the road is a path down to a memorial where one of the villages was. Having been destroyed by artillery and taken several times alternately by the Germans and French there was nothing left and no one to rebuild it for - so just a memorial.
The final stop was in Verdun itself where we had some lunch and then a visit to the Citadel. Being an old city, Verdun had walls and city gates. These fortifications were improved over the centuries, including a fortress built in the mid 1800s into the base of a small mountain, very similar to the Maginot Line. In fact, one of the participants in the battle was a young sergeant who later became a Member of Parliament and the head of the French Ministry of War in the late 1920s; Andre Maginot.
Lots more to see but we only had one day. Au revoir!
