As we turn our attention this weekend to the centenary of the signing of the armistice to end World War I, I look back at a visit that Padma, Xander, Joseph and I took this summer to a battlefield in France which proved to be the ultimate test of human endurance.
The Battle of Verdun was fought for 303 days from February to December 1916. It was the largest and longest battle of the First World War on the Western Front between the German and French armies. Estimates vary but range in the neighbourhood of 750,000 casualties and 300,000 deaths. Morale amongst the troops was abysmal as they lived in close quarters in mud and sustained constant bombardment and horror. The formerly verdant forests of the region were a tangled mass of splintered wood. It was hell on earth.
One hundred years later, we walked through an eerily quiet forest where the village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont once thrived. Before the war it was a busy commune of 400 farmers and woodworkers. It was totally obliterated during the Battle of Verdun and changed hands 16 times. It was uninhabitable due to corpses, poisonous gas and explosives. After the war, the French never rebuilt the village. Even after 100 years, the forest could not remove the scars of the war. Today, concrete markers show where the butcher once lived, or where a farm once stood or where children attended school. If you closed your eyes in that forest you could almost hear the joyous calls of the children before that fateful day in February 1916 when the village ‘died for France’.
From the village, we travelled a few kilometres to the Douaumont Ossuary. It’s a rather chilling experience to walk among the skeletal remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers that lie within the ossuary. We walked outside to the cemetery and read some of the names off the white crosses which marked the final resting spot of 16,000 French soldiers. It was uplifting in a way to see that France continued to honour their war heros by maintaining the cemetery in immaculate conditions and ensuring that, despite a drought, the roses placed at each memorial continue to bloom.
Today, the President of the United States visits France – a President who seems to be challenged to learn from the lessons of history. Let’s hope that his visit to Europe to commemorate the Armistice strikes a chord with him about the horrors of war.
