The battlefields of Verdun

After our brekkie of cereal and milk (supplemented a little later with our first éclairs of the trip), it was a short walk from our very central AirBnB to the Romanesque-meets-Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame which is very beautiful especially the lovely chapel in the crypt below. It is one of the oldest cathedrals in Europe, dating back to 990.

We cycle UP out of Verdun to the Champ Bataille de Verdun into the heart of the battlefields as Verdun was right on the border of France and Germany in 1871 when Alsace and Lorraine were annexed.

For 300 days and 300 nights, 300000 men were killed or declared missing and 450000 were wounded. The battle here at Verdun was a major turning point in the Great War.

First stop was the monument to Maginot, French Minister of War (1922-1924) after WWI who argued successfully for a line of fortresses built along the French-German border so France would never suffer a devastating defeat again. Unfortunately this plan failed in WWII because the Ardennes forest area on the French-Belgium border, which was thought to be impenetrable, in fact wasn't because the Germans blasted the forts in the Blitzkrieg campaign which isolated the forts and the men in them allowing the Germans to go around them.

Next stop was the Lion of Souville memorial which marks the furthest that the Germans managed to advance towards Verdun in their attack of 12 July 1916; then we had a look at the machine gun placements at Fort Vaux.

We took it in turns guarding the bikes (and eating our yummy filled baguettes bought in the morning at the local boulangerie - how incredible - 10€ for 3 and including the éclairs!) at the Verdun Memorial - a big museum complex, apparently one of the finest WWI museums in Europe; it WAS very good.

We stopped briefly at the site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of several villages totally destroyed by the Germans and never rebuilt.

I had planned on ensuring we got to the Douamont Ossuary (Ossuaire de Douaumont) today. It is a memorial containing the remains of both French and German soldiers who died on the battlefield during the Battle of Verdun. I had read somewhere that it has an excellent 20-minute audiovisual and it was very good, pulling together everything we had seen today.

Finally, we cycled a couple of kms to the Douaumont Fort - the largest and highest of the forts surrounding Verdun; and then the Tranchée des Baionnettes. The story was that Father Ratier, an army chaplain who had been a stretcher bearer with the 137th Infantry in 1916, found a line of some 39 bayonets protruding from the ground: each one marking the location of a body and here the legend started and the spot is marked by a memorial known as the "Trench of Bayonets".

I think we did a pretty thorough job of taking in the sights and sounds of this area. Very sobering.

From Wiki:
One French Lieutenant at Verdun who was later killed by an artillery shell wrote in his diary on 23 May 1916:
"Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad".

Indeed.

We had a buzzy ride downhill from here through some gorgeous fields to the River Meuse (7 kms) and a further 4 kms to arrive at the small village of Marre late afternoon as a light rain started to fall.

Couldn't resist this after a very grey day:

We had a lovely meal. Dave tried a biere picon; picon is a caramel-coloured, flavoured bitters drunk as an apéritif, which traditionally accompanies beer in the east and north of France. I don't think he liked it much.

Ride: 26.5 kms