“Many of us here use writing as a means of staying alive…”
So wrote a French commanding officer, holed up in the underground citadel of Verdun, during the longest battle of World War I. The subterranean tunnels of the citadel were the command post, the ammunitions store, the place from which troops were dispatched or returned from the front, where bread was baked for the soldiers’ rations and wounds were tended.
I was a little apprehensive about visiting Verdun, where over 300,000 soldiers lost their lives on the western front in 1916. Like many young boys, our two are fascinated by soldiers, war stories and, particularly tales of the two World Wars. We knew we wanted to take them somewhere they could experience (and get a more sobering sense of) this history.
Pre-kids, we had visited the D-Day Beaches, Ypres in Belgium and the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute Vienne, which remains preserved as it was on the day in June 1944, when the Nazis rounded up and shot all the men, then herded the women and children into the church and set it alight. The sombreness and weight of the energy in that ruined village is something I will not forget.
2 Comments
Fascinating . An area I would like visit . What terrible thing had the villagers of Oradour -Sur _Glane done that deserved such treatment and, was anyone ever held accountable ? Unbelievably brutal , I never fail to be surprised at mans inhumamity to man.
Well done on giving the kids an appreciation of our history. Is it too much to hope that if we remember the horrors we won’t make the same mistakes???