Verdun

Verdun
In 1914 the lights went out and Europe played murder in the dark. 10 million suffered and died, without counting the countless unspeakable injuries to body and soul.

We made a time to reflect on Europe’s own recent and terrible history, our story, the one which began with the First World War.

The earth is slower than us, she bears the irreparable shape of war. The grass, grown and mown, softens the contours and keeps them in sight. The bodies and bones of hundreds of thousands of beloved sons are gone, broken up and buried, but the ground remembers.

When the war was over, the life and landscape was completely overturned, a massive landfill of metal, corpses and explosives, too dire and dangerous to build on. So they decided to let forest cover it and grow from it. The dismembered stumps of villages, the cacophony of battle, the hundreds of thousands of pits and falls where men died were lost in the woods. The trees are tall now, the peace intense, and very much alive.

The fine straight stone forts seem to have suffered the erosion of a thousand years compacted into a few months. The inside of the forts held and today have been taken by tourists. Their dark secrets must be seen to be believed.

R&B run on the grassy top of the fort, feeling what it was like to throw themselves down in the pits and scramble up their walls : happiness here, another generation’s vigour, another mother’s love.