Before I get to the sights of the battlefield, let me just tell you about the beautiful B&B we're staying in! It's an 1851 manor house that's owned by an elderly couple named Wurtz. Mrs. Wurtz, who is a sweetheart, speaks no English so we communicate with her using our Google Translate app. But Mr. Wurtz speaks a little English and we understand him fairly well. Last night when we checked in, he spent about 30 minutes showing us the maps to use for the battlefield and finding restaurants, etc. He was so helpful and kind, and I loved listening to him try to find the right English word to express his thoughts. It's exactly how I feel when I'm trying to remember how to say something in French that I know I've memorized! :-) He is just wonderful!
Here's a picture of Tammy and Mr. Wurtz looking at a map.
The manor house is on a quiet little street in Watronville, which is about 15 minutes outside of the city of Verdun. The exterior doesn't look like anything extraordinary, although I love the light blue shutters, but the inside is just exquisite! Every single room in the manor is decorated with such detail! The whole main level of the hous (which includes a sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and their own living areas) is so inviting and warm.
I think there are three guest bedroom/bathroom suites that they let out on the top floor, and then there's a guest house out back that can hold up to six people. Also out back is a beautiful, large garden overflowing with flowers, seating, and space to wander. Here's the view from our window!
Using our translator app, we learned from Mrs. Wurtz at breakfast that the house was built in 1851 and that the whole back of it was bombed out during WWI. The front was left completely intact, however, so only the back half had to be rebuilt.
They've lived here for the last 10 years, and she was very pleased to hear that we think it's so beautiful! It's clear they take great pride in running this manor. In fact, she told us that the cherries on the breakfast table came from their back yard, the apple juice was home pressed, and all four kinds of jam were made by her. (Rhubarb, tomato, cherry/peach, apricot) Yum! The rest of the breakfast included fresh baguette slices, chocolate croissants, butter, charcuterie, and two big wedges of cheese (one soft like a brie and the other was some kind of Swiss cheese). It was a delicious bounty of food to choose from!
Mrs. Wurtz is a great hostess! She was very friendly and answered all our questions about the place. I'm so glad we chose to stay here.
Alright, now let's get to our exploration of the WWI sights today! Let me just say that I had no idea how vast the Verdun battlefield is AND how much of it is inaccessible because it's so unsafe. This was a huge learning curve for me today, and I loved every minute of it! I think, over the years,, I had learned more about the Somme and Flanders because those were places American and British troops were fighting and that's more of my background. Verdun is totally about French troops and I just didn't know enough about it.
We started our day by going to the Ossuaire de Douaumont (The Ossuary of Douaumont), which is a memorial containing the remains of soldiers who died on the battlefield during the Battle of Verdun in World War I. (Technically an ossuary houses the bones of the dead, and that's exactly what this one does.) It has been designated a national cemetery. It is shocking, and massive, and just completely overwhelming, but it's also such an important place to Verdun (and France as a whole country).
The picture to the right shows one wing of the ossuary. At the bottom (where the man is squatting) are a long series of windows that show the crypts underneath the memorial halls that you'll see in the pictures below. The crypts are full of the bones of unidentified WWI soldiers that have been coming off the battlefield for the last 95 years. They are still finding remains today out in fields, forests, etc., and every single bone comes here to this national place of mourning. (We were able to see the piles of bones through those low window, but I just didn't think it was right to put a picture of them on here. That just seems disrespectful, somehow.) This ossuary houses the remains of over 130,000 soldiers who died in the Battle of Verdun. Can you even fathom that number? I can't. That is so much larger than any of the other cemeteries we visited on this trip, it's just hard to imagine.
And down the hill from this massive structure is the National Cemetery of France for the dead of Verdun. Another 15,000 French soldiers are buried here, in the regular rows of graves typically seen in French military cemeteries.
Inside the Ossuary itself, on the main level above the crypts, the atmosphere is similar to that of a cathedral - voices are hushed and the smallest sounds echo along the halls. There are two main arms of the building with candles at each end. Their flames glow through the dim orange light that permeates the interior.
Along the hall are alcoves (with the names of areas of the battlefields inscribed above them), and mock tombs inscribed with the names of cities in France. Names are also inscribed on panels on the walls and the roof. There is also a chapel, which seems entirely appropriate for such a mournful place.
Inside this main level, there was a special exhibition that was so touching and emotional. All throughout the two wings hung huge (8-10 ft. high) photographs of elderly WWI veterans; in the pictures the veterans are each holding a picture of themselves taken around the time of the war. These were so beautiful and so perfect to remind all of us that these men gave up their normal, everyday lives to suffer through such torment in the trenches of Verdun. I could've spent all day wandering through these pictures, looking at every wrinkle, every sparkling set of eyes, every youthful face so unaware of what was to come. This is one of the most powerful photographic exhibits we've seen!
At the ossuary, we saw a short 20 minute film about the battle. The black and white photographs used in the film seemed familiar to us from all the books and movies we've seen about WWI, but many we saw for the first time because they were from the French archives. The narrative in the film was absolutely beautiful; it was eloquent and almost like a poem in its phrasing and rhythm - really unlike any of the documentary films we've seen in other WWI museums. I loved it! It talked about how the Germans chose a quiet part of the Western Front for their massive attack at Verdun to break deeper into France. They moved 100,000 men and over a million shells into the forest surrounding the town, and they secretively built water pipes, a power plant, bunkers, etc. in order to surprise the French and successfully move the line forward. The battle lasted for 300 days and men all over France knew that eventually they would be sent to Verdun and there chances of coming home were slim.
Verdun changed everything in France. Rich and poor died alike. Atheists and religious men cried out in fear together underneath the barrage of shells. Conservatives and free thinkers cowered together in the trenches awaiting death. The movie said that "images, not words, are needed to tell the story" of Verdun. As we walked through the ossuary and cemetery, Tammy said that this was France's "Gettysburg", and it definitely seemed like it.
After we left the cemetery, we went to three different forts that are all very similar to what I've shown you before in pictures on the blog. I'm not going to go into details about each place, but I'll show you a few pics that will give you an idea of what they were like. (This one to the left is Fort Douaumont which is close to the ossuary.)
These pics show what the fort looks like now, 100 years later, and unused. It was kind of eerie walking through all these dark, water tunnels, but it was fun to explore everthing!
This was the lavatory so you can see the long row where the sinks and faucets were.
These pictures are from the woods down the road from the fort. They are more underground bunkers,trenches, and gun emplacements. However, in most cases, you can't go out exploring the woods for cool stuff like this because it's so unsafe. There is a huge swath of land in the battlefield that Verdun has designated a red zone. That means that no one can build, sightsee, farm, or anything else in this zone because of all the unexploded ordnance.
There were so many of these explosives at the end of WWI that they just decided it was safer to leave them where they had fallen and declare it unusable space. So all the guidebooks have huge warnings in capital letters telling you NOT to leave the paths that have been pre-cut for tourists. And there are danger signs all over these tourist sights warning you to stay on the path because WWI can still kill you! I'm not kidding!
This is the Dying Lyon monument and it is striking! It honors the French soldiers who fought in the area, but it also marks the closest that the German forces ever got to the city of Verdun.
The sculpture of the lion is so detailed and tragic looking. I think it's supposed to signify the powerful army of Germany losing the war.
The memorial in this picture is so interesting and different than anything we've seen before. It's called the Bayonet Trench Memorial,, and it's on the location of a trench that was shelled nonstop for three days in June of 1916. After the war was over, a commanding officer came back to visit the sites he'd been in during the war and all he found here was a dirt filled trench with rifles sticking up out of the deep soil. The story began to circulate that the men who were shelled in this trench were buried alive and this is all that remained. No one knows if the story is completely true, but people were struck by the image of these rifles poking up in a line from the dirt. Thus the memorial was born..
Inside the building above, is a long open space full of dirt and crosses marking the spots where the rifles (bayonets) were seen protruding from the ground.
This was another really beautiful memorial of a fallen soldier. It's devoted to the French politician Andre Thome who fell in Verdun on March 10, 1916. As a member of parliament, he was not obliged to serve in the army, but he volunteered and made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.
This is a memorial to the fallen Muslims of WWI.There were actually quite a few Muslim soldiers because of the draft which included French colonists from North Africa and the Middle East.
Here is a memorial to the Jewish soldiers of WWI.
The next few pictures are of another really sad story about the Battle of Verdun. The battle covered abouteight square miles of land and, as is the case in most wars, many towns and villages were razed. The difference with the Battle of Verdun is that nine of the towns here were never able to be rebuilt because of the unexploded ordnance located all over their former locations.
So approximately 2,500 people, who had already evacuated because of the battle, were never able to come home and rebuild. They had to move somewhere else and start all over in a new town. As a result, these towns have now become a national treasure of France. They've been designated as special historic sites and each one has a memorial to represent where the town used to be located.
This is the memorial at the former site of the town of Douaumont.. There is a chapel inside and a few memorial markerss on the lawn.
This is the memorial for the town of Fleury. One of the new things they're doing at each of the nine sites is to create apath where the single road would've been in the town and put markers up for the site of each house, store, farm, etc. along the road. This is going to take awhile to finish for all nine towns, but the process is already started here at Fleury and it's so touching to see.
This is the path that shows where Fleury's main road was located.
Here's the location of the grocery market and someone's farm. I think eventually the markers for farms and homes will have the families' names on them.
This is what the land looks like where the town of Fleury was located. It's just completely pock-marked with craters from the shell explosions and trenches. The only flat parts are where the memorials and paths are. It's really sad to think of these families losing not just their homes, but their entire town as well.
Well, that's all I'm going to post tonight. We saw a lot of other memorials, destroyed towns, trenches, etc. but there are just too many pictures to put on the blog. Suffice it to say that this was a full day -- full of sorrow, learning, appreciation, and discovery. It was definitely a day well spent!
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