WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2009
It is haunting to stand upon ground where so many young lives brutally ended. Where so much agony spread itself over so small an area of space and time. The spirit and the body become separated trying to comprehend what occurred here in 1916. Looking from the knoll, the long rows of crosses, each with a name and the words, “Mort pour la France,” slowly fade into fog and history. Fifteen thousand crosses. Fifteen thousand young men dead – but that is only a portion, a very small portion, of the horror that was Verdun. A greater portion of that horror, lies silently behind me, in the Ossuary du Douaumont.
In February 1916, the Germans began a long planned, major offensive against the French forces near Verdun. They were hoping for a breakthrough to end the trench warfare that had settled across the front lines. As often happens, plans fail. The German offensive, supported by a massive artillery barrage, initially gained a small amount of ground near Verdun. The French who resolutely fought the advance, stalled the offensive and dug in. The result was the hell of Verdun.
As the days turned into weeks and weeks into months the battle raged. Bombardment upon bombardment, attack upon attack, counter-attack upon counter-attack. The towns, the forests, the fields, the animals – nothing was spared. Everything within twenty-square kilometers was churned into a formless, life-sucking, frigid mud -- punctuated by the lifeless corpses of trees and men. Death here dropped instantly from the sky from hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces constantly pounding the trenches. Or more slowly during the massed attacks across the no-mans-land of razor-wire, mines, and machine-guns between the trenches.
On an average day, and it is horribly wrong to call any day at Verdun average, one thousand men died. One thousand men shot, gassed, or blown to pieces by artillery. One thousand men, every day for 300 days – the mind simply struggles to grasp it. Three hundred thousand young faces who would never return home, who would never again hug their families, or laugh or cry again.
And finally we come to the ultimate horror of Verdun. Of those three hundred thousand who died at Verdun – nearly half were never found. Half of the dead were simply blown apart and churned into the horrid, cratered mud of Verdun by 25 million artillery shells that fell during 300 days.
The reality of that terror lies directly behind me: The Ossuary du Douaumont. Today, especially, it is very real. Today is the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month – Armistice Day – the moment in time the slaughter ended. In the background the French military detachment stands at attention, a wreath is placed, and the bell in the tower of the Ossuary rings its solemn chord over the fog-shrouded battlefield.
The Ossuary is a long, black, narrow building with a tower in the middle that resembles the dreaded artillery shell. Inside, like the trenches, it is unheated, cold, damp, and somber; dimly lit, with names of people etched in the stone, and pictures of the survivors of the battle and the war.
To begin to feel the absolute horror of Douaumont and Verdun requires you to walk outside the building. To walk along its length and stop at the small ground-level windows and look inside. Here lie the partial remains of one hundred and forty thousand, unidentified, young men whose bodies were churned into the mud of Verdun. Bone by bone, fragment by fragment, over the years they were unearthed, found, and brought here. Each window looks upon a room containing stacks of their bones and bone fragments. French or German? No one knows. Each window more horrors; leg bones, finger bones, skulls – room upon room – immeasurable sadness.
As horrible as was Verdun, it was only a small part of the Great War that waged from 1914 through 1918. A war in which there were 8 million military and 8 million civilian casualties. A war in which suffering and death touched nearly everyone in Europe.
As you stand here and try to come to grips with what happened during the Great War or as we now call it World War I, you must ask why? Why would Governments have started this war? Why would they continue the insanity that was consuming the people they were supposed to protect? Why would Governments force young men into uniform and into such horror? What was the terror in the hearts of those boys in the trenches when the only choice is to move forward and kill others or stay back and be killed as a traitor? And how could Governments, recalling the terror of WWI have repeated the insanity in 1939?
Those questions bring me back to today – 11 o’clock, on the 11th day of the 11th month of 2009. If you believe Patriotism means obeying the State and becoming one of its martyrs, I recommend visiting the Ossuary of Douaumont on 11-11-11. Here on a national holiday, the French come to honor those who gave ‘their last full measure of devotion.’ Today, standing beside me there is the small French honor guard, a small band, a group of 15 to lay the wreath, and perhaps 25 others who have come to commemorate the 300,000 who fell here.
So sad, less than sixty people to recall the loss of millions destroyed by their Governments. So horribly sad, ninety-one years later, millions more are dead and none seem to have learned. I wish I had asked my Great Uncle Jim, who served here in France, what he believed before he died.
Photos of the Ossuary de Douaumont