Russ McBee

Of all the wars in recorded history, World War I stands out as the most idiotic. It was completely preventable, it was fought for no good reason, and its unfinished business led to the rise of the Third Reich.

One of the bloodiest battles of that awful war took place in the countryside surrounding Verdun, France. From February through December 1916, the Germans and the French bombarded each other mercilessly from trenches and deeply protected forts. By the time the battle was over, almost a million casualties had been accrued by both sides; this site says half of those were killed, and I have printed materials which include another 300,000 civilian deaths from the city of Verdun and the smaller towns and villages surrounding it.

Over 800,000 people died at Verdun, and for no good reason at all.

This Dutch site characterizes the battle this way:

It was the most useless battle ever in history. Many, many soldiers died in Verdun, but the military situation of the war had not changed after this battle. Both opposing forces had learned nothing from this battle, as similar campaigns continued the precedent of carnage for the duration of the war.

True enough.

In 2003, Dad and I visited the Verdun battlefield. The countryside around Verdun is low, mostly flat farmland with small forests scattered between villages and picturesque farms. Its pastoral beauty hides the scars of the terrible history enacted on that soil ninety years ago.

A few miles outside Verdun, we stopped at a World War I German cemetery near Abaucourt, France. Northeastern France contains quite a few German cemeteries from both world wars, and all of them share a common trait: each German cemetery in France is filled with shade trees. I don't remember which German commander stated this, but someone Bismarck-like once swore "No French sun will ever shine on a German soldier's grave." Even though it was meant as an insult, the shade trees populating the German cemeteries in France are carefully maintained to this day.

The German cemetery at Abaucourt holds about 8,000 graves, arranged four to a cross (two on each side). In addition, several hundred graves of unknown soldiers lie buried along one wall. These two graves caught my eye; note the one on the left:

Another Jewish soldier's headstone sits next to a cross in that cemetery; in that case, the Jewish and Christian graves bear the same family name.

I've often wondered what befell the families of these Jewish soldiers who died for Germany; were they shown any mercy at all under the Third Reich, less than twenty years later, or was their sacrifice for Germany conveniently forgotten?

We continued on to the Verdun battlefield. Large areas of the battlefield are intact; forts remain, earthworks are still visible, and gun turrets dot the landscape, like this one at Fort De Vaux:

Another turret near that one:

The Douaumont Ossuary sits on a hill overlooking much of the battlefield. It is both a memorial and a grave. The ground level of the building contains a very large chapel with memorials to all the regions of France who lost sons there:

The Ossuary, true to its name, is also a tomb. Underneath the floor of the huge building rest the bones of the 130,000 unknown soldiers who died at Verdun. As a permanent and stark reminder of the horror of war, the bones are visible through thick glass along one side of the building; one shot of the bones is here.

The millions killed in World War I shocked the conscience of every person who survived that time, but the horrors of that war paled in comparison to the depravity soon to follow. Verdun remains both a reminder of horrors past and a warning against future political carelessness and arrogance.

The rest of my photos of the Verdun battlefield can be found here.