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Verdun a testament to Great War horrors |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Saturday, 05 June 2004 |
VERDUN, FRANCE -- There's only half of a human skull among the rubble of bones. Its gnarled, broken edge looks like a child's drawing of a lightning bolt. The skull is the ghastly welcome mat to a neat pile of human thighbones, stacked like logs for a fireplace and held in place by other human bones standing upright.
It's not a holocaust museum.
It's a national monument for the hundreds of thousands of men killed during the fierce trench battles of Verdun during the First World War.
"I wish every student could see that," teacher Robin Barker-James said yesterday as he walked away from a line of small windows that look into the ossuary where the bones of 130,000 unknown soldiers lie.
"If you want to understand war, this is the place," Barker-James said.
The area around Verdun is pock-marked with shell craters and random trench lines.
In one day, the Southwestern Ontario teachers and veterans -- on a trip back to Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-Day -- drove past more than one-quarter million dead soldiers who died in the trenches of the Great War.
The Verdun region of France, to the outsider, seems to have more military cemeteries than parks, schools or community centres.
This is a region where whole villages disappeared because of battles.
Their only markers are commemorative plaques.
The crosses are everywhere, some as far as the eye can see, sometimes with eight men to one cross.
The battle of Verdun, one of the bloodiest in history, left an estimated 550,000 men dead. "Where have we been and where are we going?" asked Normandy veteran Bill Findley of Courtland, after seeing the bones. "What man will do for power," he said, shaking his head.
The pile of bones at the Ossuary of Douaumont, visible from small windows at the back of the massive memorial building, gets bigger each year as more bones come to the surface. Farmers here need armoured plates under their tractors forprotection against unexploded shells that still turn up.
While it wasn't his war, it was a heart-wrenching scene for Doug Vidler, a D-Day veteran from Tillsonburg. That's because, he says, the First World War set up his war, and he can empathize with what soldiers suffered.
"It was a different war all together," he said, "but it gives me a comparison."
Many of the teachers from Southwestern Ontario wonder, as they walk the lines of trench that traverse the French countryside, why Second World War veterans would go to battle, knowing how terrible the last world war had been.
"They didn't talk about it, just like we didn't talk about it for years. I didn't start talking until 10 years ago," Vidler said of veterans from the Great War.
He's not sure advice from veterans would have changed his mind anyway.
"You're not going to be the guy who didn't do it. I didn't go in for king and country. It was the 'in' thing to do, just like there are in things now. You get away from home, girls love the uniforms and you get paid $1.40 a day. That's not bad."
And while the trenches of the First World War were horrible places, sometimes so muddy soldiers would drown, Vidler said the problem for him during the Second World War was he often didn't have a trench to duck into. He can't even take a guess at how many small holes -- called slit trenches -- he dug.
"You dig it for yourself and you dig it fast," he said. "Our slit trenches were six to eight inches deep. We didn't have time for more than that."
Fred Brett, another D-Day veteran from Woodstock, said he finds trenches interesting because of the ingenuity they required, especially when built under fire.
"You need to see trenches to understand what they went through," Brett said. "Those boys . . . it's terrible what they went through."
He, like Vidler, said he didn't know in the 1940s how bad the First World War had been, but would have gone anyway.
"Yes, I wanted to be a soldier and that was that," he said. "I got it. Boy, did I get it."
All Jack Wright, a Normandy veteran, could say while walking around one trench site was: "Thank God I was born 20 years later."
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/News/2004/06/01/480947.html
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