June 10 - Verdun

Frustrated note: I have been doing battle with blogger and I'm just not getting how to manage it. Part of the problem is that it is designed to place the most recent entry first. I've kludged solutions for navigation. Perhaps Becky will be able to figure out a better way.

This is the final post.
Our first post on this trip is the intro, May 31-June 10, which includes a trip map.
The full Picasa album

We left Metz early, in order to make a stop in Verdun, the site of years of bloody and pointless fighting during World War I, taking up nearly all of 1916. I had somewhat prepared myself by reading Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which isn't about Verdun, or any other battle, in particular, but about the life of soldiers engaged in trench warfare.

The Verdun Memorial is a serious and unpatriotic memorial, paying proper respect to the lives lost. A centerpiece of it is a museum with exhibits that include the background of the war, and life-size model of a bunker.













The battlefield sites are not bunched together, but spread out over the large area of battle, and now separated by trees and fields. It is quiet. In some places there are signs forbidding picnicking and other recreation.

One famous sight is a memorial built (by Americans) around a trench where men had been buried in a blast; their remains were discovered because of the guns projecting from the dirt.














Elsewhere, there is a machine-gun bunker in a hill. Now the hillside is green, but during the fighting it must have looked like a scene from hell. The day we were there was grey and drizzly.









Finally, in front of an enormous French military cemetery, there is the Douaumont Ossuary, built in the 1930s, which contains bones, unidentified remains, of a great many French and German soldiers. The conspicuously phallic tower, said to be in the shape of a military shell, is a place from which to view the entire battleground. We did not have time to enter.














We only had a couple of hours to spend in what could certainly be a full day of meditation on a grim piece of history.

The drive back to Charles de Gaulle was not difficult, just tedious, finally, to get back to the car rental place and then to get our gate.

our trip Picasa album for all photos
blogger: intro to our trip
June 9 Alsace to Metz