Verdun 2

The ‘epargnes’, where the caps of the hills were blown off, turned inside out from peak to trough buy the diligence of miners and mines placed under enemy dug-outs.

France was invaded, the French Coq de Combat is outraged atop his monument. France lost 1, 357, 800 men, and when you include all casualities in addition to those killed in action, this represents 76.3 percent of troops mobilised, as compared to 908,371 British deaths, 35.8 percent of troops mobilised.

In the more « civilised » beginnings of the war, the ‘Kroneprinz’ (Crown Prince Wilhelm) had this shelter built, with nicely detailed window frames.

This is an extraordinary place, the Douaumont Ossuary, where tombs are laid out in long lines, each containing 14 cubic metres of mixed human bones. The building looks out onto the far plains, the forest, and the forest of crosses upon crosses, each one a loved one, nothing to salvage but the name and the honouring. A place to cry.

How could such a thing ever be cleared up ? In the chapel of the Ossuary the French artist Georges Desvallières designed these stained glass windows. He lost two sons in the 1914 - 18 war, fought in it himself, and became interested in developing religious art following the war.  In one picutre he envisages two ruddy faced angels lifting up a soldier grey faced in death. In another, Christ takes up a dead soldier, boots and all, and presses the soldier’s face to his in a gesture so pure, it gives me hope for a love revival.

What would the dead from this time and this place say to us?  I don’t seem to hear them say ‘remember’, I hear rather : save yourselves.

Verdun, rebuilt, is now a world centre for peace.

How can we understand more about violence, recognise it and transform it before it grows great enough for a great war ?

"Formally I have condemned violence, I have escaped from violence, I have justified it, I have said it is natural.  All these things are inattention.  But when I give attention to what I have called violence and in that attention there is care, affection, love, where is there space for violence?"  says Jiddu Krishnamurti.

“The fact is that we are violent, and to ask "How am I not to be violent?" merely creates the ideal, which seems to me to be utterly futile. But if one is capable of looking at violence and understanding it, then perhaps there is a possibility of resolving it totally”.

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.