A Humbling Experience

I took a side trip out to Verdun during our week in Paris. For those of you who don't know the historical significance of Verdun I will give a brief summary. The city of Verdun and the surrounding countryside played host to the longest and bloodiest battle of the First World War. It is the text book definition of attrition warfare with the number of dead and injured easily topping one million over a nine month period. Nine outlying towns, with populations of up to one thousand residents, were wiped completely off the map. The rubble of some of these towns fought for, taken, and retaken up to sixteen times.


The picture above is what remains of the town of Fleury. The pockmarked landscape, a few bricks, paths marking the route of former streets, and small markers where homes, shops, and schools used to be are all that remain of the town. The landscape seems to be cloaked in perpetual silence. Walking the former town by myself was a humbling experience. Knowing that the ground I was walking on used to be a thriving French farming town. Knowing that it had been reduced to rubble and the earth churned over again and again by millions of shells...leaving it a desolate wasteland of death and mud. Knowing that every foot of this former town had literally been soaked in the blood of thousands of French and German troops. And even in the warmth of a French summer day I felt small and cold.


This feeling was repeated time and time again on my tour of the battlefield. The picture above is of The Trench of Bayonets. An entire company of French troops (that's roughly one hundred men) were huddled in their trench waiting to go over the top when a series of simultaneous explosions lifted the earth in front of them and buried them alive with their bayonets sticking out of the ground. A memorial was built over the trench and it wasn't until recently that they removed the bayonets.

This photo is of a sealed off portion of Fort Douaumont which the Germans took during the first days of the battle. The earthen fort, which was largely underground, was used as a rest stop for battered German units pulled back from the front and as a way point for fresh units to move through on their way to the front. A massive explosion in the lower levels, which caught an entire room full of stored flame throwers in its path, traveled upwards into a series of underground galleries where German wounded lay, killing nine hundred men. The survivors sealed off these galleries and turned them into mass tombs for their comrades.

Even after seeing these places and learning what went on there it is difficult to fully comprehend what really happened. The reality of it is so far removed from anything we know today that it is almost impossible to understand it beyond an intellectual level. One can only be shown what remains and be given the facts. And yet even with this minuscule amount of information I am still left humbled by the horror of it all.