Battle of Verdun

We went for a walk to the tourist office in Verdun via the bakery and found some monuments and a Vaughan fort on the way.

After picking up some info we continued a loop along the river back to the van beside the 3 supermarkets.

We then drove to our first site for the day in the battlefield- Fort de Vaux.

This was originally an open fort built by the French in the late 1800s that was no longer fit for purpose when the new weapons had the range to be able to bomb the middle of the fort. So they covered it in a layer of 1m of sand and 2.5m of concrete. It makes it a very ugly fort.

The fort was originally occupied by the French in WW1 and thinking it wasn’t going to be relevant in the war, it was partly disarmed with the big guns moved elsewhere. This was the wrong thing to do as this became the front line of the war with the Germans. In 1914 after standing up to many attacks by the Germans they had to surrender the fort. Later in the war the French won it back.

We went inside in the tunnels seeing the dormitory, communications post and the area where the Germans broke into the fort. The French tried to block up the passages but couldn’t fight them off.

We next found the first aid area, an area where a lot of soldiers had died with a memorial and 2 large guns.

The tunnels were very cold and eerie. It was good to get outside and check the top area. It was pockmarked with craters where bombs had hit. However due to the thick layer of concrete they didn’t break through.

We had an entry ticket for the other fort you can visit - Fort Douaomont. There were 44 forts in total.

This fort had lots of water leaking in so it was very damp throughout. Again it had been an open fort inside and had been covered in concrete - hence the cobbled street and rail line.

There was a large gun that moved upwards in a shaft so it could sit on top of the fort and fire.

Again the Germans had overrun the French and occupied the fort for a couple of years. Someone mistakenly set fire to the French weapon store and a large explosion killed around 200 German soldiers in their dormitory. They just sealed it up and left it - as it is today - very gruesome! Memorials to men were in various places and we saw fired cartridges and shrapnel. It was a long way down to the second level.

With relief we got outside on top of the fort to see the protruding gun emplacements and to see the views - the fort was in a good spot to see the enemy.

On the way down the road we found French trenches that had been for communication when the Germans occupied the fort.

Next stop was the war cemetery with nearly 17,000 graves beside the ossuary with bones of 130,000 unidentified men. It’s only by seeing these can you imagine the numbers of men that were killed. There were around 600 Muslims from the occupied countries of France- Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

We next went to the remains of the Douaumont village that was evacuated when the Germans started bombing the area. After the war the French government decided it was too hard to clear the area of unexploded bombs and corpses so left it as a red area. The street and house positions have been marked out. Only the church was rebuilt.

The sun was going down as we finished and we drove back into the town of Verdun to find a nice quiet spot beside the River - not near noisy traffic, trucks or supermarkets.

We had a warm gluhwein to heat us up and cheer us up after all that death and destruction.