Verdun

We've gone from a post about a key battle from WWII to a post about a key battle from WWI. Coincidental, but I'm sure it will be entertaining.

We will, however, start with an important French historical event long before either World War: the Hundred Years' War. And the star of this post will be Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d'Arc, as the French call her) is a figure surrounded in the mist of legend, and yet even when all of the myth is pulled back she is a fascinating human being. An unremarkable peasant girl, she was born in the midst of the Hundred Years' War (which actually lasted 116 years), a war for succession to the French throne between the French and the English. From the age of 12 she claimed to receive messages from God, and was devoutly Catholic. When she was 15 she said that God had told her to chase the English out of France, and with permission from the French Dauphin, rallied French troops to in a single battle lift a siege on the city of Orleans. She became an important leader for the French cause, despite being only 15 years old and having no military experience; a natural-born leader. Though she never actually fought in a battle, she directed troops, developed military strategies, and attempted to find diplomatic solutions with the English. She helped create a turning point in the war and led many decisive battles. By the time she was 19 she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, who held her on trial and eventually burned her at the stake as a "heretic" (which makes no sense because she literally said that God told her to do everything that she did). Despite having an extremely short life she accomplished a lot, changing the course of history. 25 years after her death the Pope reviewed her life and decided, "Oh wait, she's not a heretic after all," and then 500 years after that, "Whoops! Guess she's a saint!"

A painting of the famous Saint Joan of Arc

Anyway, the town that we were going to, Rouen, was the site of her death-by-burning. I think that the modern Burgundians like to forget the fact that they were the ones who sold her to the English and instead recall her as a hero, because they dedicated a beautiful church to her and have statues of her left and right. But, you know, that's none of my business. I love that Joan of Arc managed to be an important tactical military leader at the age of FIFTEEN in a time when women were second class citizens. That's pretty impressive. On our day in Rouen we went to a few cathedrals and churches, which was pretty cool. The Rouen Cathedral is famous because Monet did a well-known series of thirty or so paintings of it, each one in a different light.

One of the famous Rouen Cathedral paintings by Monet

*Sigh* Scaffolds, scaffolds, and more scaffolds.

Unfortunately it was under restoration (Why is everything always under restoration? My dad was thinking of posting a series of photos on Facebook called "The Scaffolds of Europe," we've seen that many of them) but it was beautiful nonetheless. The Rouen Cathedral was also partially destroyed during World War II by, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, if you are aware of the less-known aspects of Second World War history), the Allies. During the Allies' liberation of France they actually bombed some towns or cities that had a high population of German soldiers in them, with some amount of disregard for the French citizens. (I'm sure you can see why that one isn't often written in the history textbooks. But it happened often enough that eventually it was no longer very surprising when we went  to a French cathedral which had been bombed by the Allies towards the end of WWII.) It was pretty insane because there were actually pieces of shrapnel still buried into the columns of the cathedral. 

Shrapnel in the column of the cathedral

The destruction wreaked on this cathedral is truly incredible....

After that we headed to a cemetery that had been used to dispose of the bodies of Black Plague victims in the 16th century. It was pretty... macabre. Basically it was an old wooden building with a large courtyard. When the town was hit with a second wave of the Black Plague (the first one being in the 14th century and killing two thirds of the city's population) they didn't have enough space in their traditional cemetery and so just dumped all of the corpses of the plague victims in this courtyard, pouring liquid lime on top to decompose them. Once there was nothing but bones left they would store those in the second floor of the building. About 20 years after that second wave of the plague they carved macabre skulls and bones into the facade of the building. Weird. There was even, in the wall closest to the courtyard's entrance, the mummies of a cat and a rat. I don't know if those were from the 16th century as well, but they sure looked like they could be, which was kind of gross and weird. Now the building houses an art school, oddly enough. It was actually pretty decrepit, skull carvings aside, so I can't imagine it's pleasant to go to school there. 

Yay! Nice and festive!

Eww.... was that really necessary?

Our final stop at Rouen was the Joan of Arc Church. It was very modern, definitely the most modern church I've seen in Europe so far. (Probably because Joan of Arc wasn't made a saint until the 20th century.) From the outside it wasn't the most aestheticlly pleasing, but the inside was gorgeous. It had a ceiling that swept upwards on two sides, kind of like a piece of cloth or a curtain or something, to meet at the top. One wall was made entirely of stained glass. It didn't have the traditional cross shape of a church, but rather was shaped kind of like a triangle. It was beautiful, and we enjoyed it a lot. Maybe those Burgundians are trying to make up for the fact that they sold this girl to the English, eh? ;)

Such a gorgeous ceiling!

On a side note, the place that we were staying at in Rouen had a cat named Chupa. Nicholas was completely enamored with her and immediately started calling her "Little Boo-Boo". Seriously, I would love it if we could get Nick a cat but he's allergic. :(

The day after that we went on to our next town, Reims. On the way we also went to a museum about World War I, which was fascinating because for the past month or so whenever we had to travel by car (which has been a lot) we have been listening to a podcast about World War I, or the Great War. I know a lot about the Second World War; I've been fascinated by it for years and I've read many a book on it. I may not be able to tell you exact dates of when stuff happened, but I could give a pretty detailed description of what happened in it, in chronological order, and explain what events led to other events. World War I, however, I knew absolutely nothing about before, say, last summer. I had some vague idea that it began because some guy killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and that led to people sitting in trenches for a really, really long time and shooting at each other and hoping not to get gassed, but that was as far as my knowledge went. I also knew that it was because of their losses in the First World War that the Nazis started the second, but really that was only a further branch of my WWII understanding. Now that we've started listening to this podcast, however, I feel that I have a much better understanding of it. The podcast is in five episodes, and the overall podcast station is called Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Dan Carlin is some random history buff dude who's really, really good at telling stories. He's not a historian but he manages to turn history into something approachable to everyone, and he's always entertaining to listen to. Anyway, I now had a pretty detailed understanding of the First World War, and so it was fascinating to be able to apply everything I learned to the museum. Like, "Oh look, this is the uniform he described," or "This is when the Schlieffen Plan went wrong," or "Remember how Dan Carlin was describing how everyone was so unprepared for modern warfare? You can really see that here." It was a great museum and we enjoyed it a lot; I can now reasonably say that I'm as much a WWI buff as I am for WWII.

German uniform at the beginning of the Great War.

French uniform at the beginning of the Great War. You can bet they didn't wear those for long; they're like giant targets.

Anyway, back to Reims. There was some weird mix-up where the woman who we were renting from via Airbnb never bothered to tell us what time we needed to arrive to her place, so we weren't sure if she was still going to allow us to stay there or if something had gone wrong. We ended up calling Airbnb and they got us a hotel to stay in, which was really nice. (Airbnb has an immaculate track record for customer service, as far as I can tell.) That aside, our stay there went really well. We visited another cathedral (this one also bombed out by the Allies, even worse than the one in Rouen) which was beautiful.... and under restoration. Aaaargh!

Why?!!! 

More importantly, though (at least I think so) is that Reims was the place where Germany signed their unconditional surrender at the end of World War II. At this point, of course, Hitler was already dead, having commit suicide during the invasion of Berlin by the Soviet forces, so Alfred Jodl was instead sent to sign the surrender agreement. We ended up going to the Surrender Museum, which was a small museum dedicated to the signing of the surrender—in the very building in which the historic event took place. There were a few rooms about the general state of the war, and then finally the long-awaited room where the surrender was signed 70 years ago. It was pretty amazing, because it had been furnished exactly as it was in 1945 when the signing took place. The entire walls were covered with maps showing the movements of armies over the course of the war. It was very cool. In fact, today, May 7, 2015, the day on which I happen to be writing this post, is the 70th anniversary of that signing. Totally coincidental. So if I manage to finish this today and it gets sent out to all you faithful readers, maybe take a moment and remember the day, 70 years ago, on which peace was finally reached in Europe after years of bloody war. (Man, now I really need to finish this post on time.) 

Room where the signing took place

The day after that we went to Verdun. Like I said before, I was fully prepared with my knowledge of WWI because of the Dan Carlin podcast, so it was a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise. But just to make sure you have a full understanding, I'll give you all a little background knowledg and set the stage.

The Battle of Verdun would not, 20 years before it happened, been considered a battle. It would have been considered a full war on its own. It lasted ten months, and was one of the extreme examples of the world's wake up call to the carnage of modern warfare. It was 1916, and the war's era of trench warfare was in full swing. Gone were the days of 1914, when all sides were dealing out massive blows to each other in large battles. It had gotten to the point when the two sides were attempting to grind each other to the nub, to throw so many of their opponents' soldiers into the meat grinder that was the Western Front that the losses were too big and they would have to surrender or have their entire society destroyed. There are mixed ideas on why Germany decided to attack at Verdun. It was definitely an extremely fortified town, surrounded on all sides by forts. It would be hard to take, despite the fact that many French forces had been pulled from the forts to fight elsewhere on the front. (The French were convinced that forts were now a thing of the past and would have absolutely no place in modern warfare.) The German Chief of General Staff (really the supreme military leader) Erich von Falkenhayn, later said that he intended to turn Verdun into a bloodbath so as to "bleed France white"; to throw so many French forces into the meat grinder—at great cost to his own forces—that it would push France out of the war. Some historians believe that this was not really his original intention and simply a way to excuse the carnage which proceeded, sort of drawing the bull's eye after he shot the arrow, but that is beside the point. If Falkenhayn wanted a bloodbath, he got one. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed on each side, and little was gained. One of the most painful aspects of the Great War is that over the course of years of trench warfare, nothing was gained. People would be fighting to gain and regain the same land over and over for months on end. Even if thousands of lives were spent capturing the next row of trenches, in a few weeks the enemy would simply recapture them and all those lives were lost for practically nothing. This was the battle of Verdun.

When we first drove through everything seemed to be pretty normal. We were going through gorgeous, lush green forests; it reminded me a lot of the area around my grandmother's house in Palisades, NY. It was odd because at first I noticed that the ground was rather bumpy and uneven. But I took no mind of it until my father said, "Wow. Look at all those craters." Suddenly it hit me. Those little hills, the unevenness of the ground... those were craters from artillery. It threw the entire experience into a whole new light, because the craters were everywhere. They were so close together that there was hardly enough flat ground between them to walk on, if we had tried. There was a solemn silence in the car and we just drove on, watching the hilly mounds and the forest fly by. It was seemingly endless. Eventually we reached our destination, Fort Douaumont. It was one of the many forts which surrounded Verdun. At first it was hard to tell that it was a fort, because the entire concrete front was so beaten and destroyed that it looked as rocky and uneven as a cliff. The top was a grassy hill, as unevenly cratered as the forests. We took a tour of the fort, which was interesting. It had been obviously originally held by the French, but was easily taken by a few German forces when they found an opening in the fort made by an artillery shell. It was then held by the Germans for the majority of the 10-month "battle," with many an unfortunate accident with explosions and fires. I really appreciated that the tour of the fort didn't just cover the experiences of the French forces, but those of the German forces as well. It wasn't a one-sided war, and it would be terrible for people to still be holding grudges after nearly 100 years. It turns out that the majority of the fort had to be re-constructed for people to be able to go in it, and before that it had looked just as misshapen and wrecked as the front did when we first approached it. After our tour of the fort we headed out into the nearby woods to explore. It was insane because no sooner had we left the car, we saw traces of trenches still in the ground, not to mention the undulating sea of craters which was the ground. It was pretty shocking to me that there was still so much physical evidence of the war, which took place roughly 100 years ago. It really made everything feel more real, that we could just walk out into the woods and find craters and ruins of trenches where soldiers lost their lives fighting over the same blood-soaked ground for months with so little gain. And then we walked a little further into the woods, and bam! there was a bunker. It was so ruined that one could easily see that the concrete roof had caved in somewhere in the middle. Chunks of concrete and even crumpled sheets of metal were scattered around it. On either side of the caved in center you could see deep, gaping holes that were the remains of the inner rooms it once held. Inside it was crumbling to pieces, with huge slabs of concrete hanging from the ceiling by just a few metal strings. These metal strings stuck out of the concrete everywhere, poking out at odd angles. One could almost see the events that took place nearly 100 years ago in their mind's eye: the death and grime and destruction that never ceased, the soldiers sitting and shivering in muddy trenches, artillery pounding the land until its lush trees were just sticks poking out of the ground a few feet and its flat undergrowth was a shapeless, lumpy field of mud, machine gun fire spraying everywhere so that you couldn't stick your finger above the trench without fear of having it blown off, the constant rumble and roar and shaking caused by the artillery, and every now and then a charge of soldiers attempting to take the next trench or the next fort, only to get unceremoniously shot and left dead in the barbed wire. The trees had grown back, the carnage and weapons were gone, but the wreck of forts and bunkers were still there, there were traces of trenches which were now just a foot or so deep, and the land was forever scarred. 

That's pretty much the story of the Great War. Death, pointless death, for a reason as stupid as one assassination. I often wonder how they handled it. How could you throw your life into this, knowing that you would probably die a pointless and useless death, unremembered? To live such a violent and filthy and dangerous life day after day after day is simply unimaginable. To think that all of Europe was thrown into violent war in a matter of weeks—can the normality of someone's life really end that quickly? There were a lot of complicated dynamics which went into this war, but if you take it at face value, it seems pointless.The Austro-Hungarian archduke was killed, but does that really make it so that the rest of the world, almost, has to also be dragged into it? At face value, no; when you look into the dynamics at play, you see that it was really inevitable. Really I feel that the two main themes of World War I were the following: pointless, constant carnage and a wake-up call to what modern warfare looks like. And its lessons rocked the world for decades; shaped the world for an entire century.

The battered exterior of Fort Douaumont

 Craters from extensive artillery fire

Ruins of a bunker

Remains of a communication trench

The forest after a weeks of heavy artillery pounding

Images from the Battle of Verdun

Fort Douaumont

I encourage you all to do some of your own research on the Battle of Verdun. There are many more photos which I would have wished to include but am not, for lack of time and space. But just look up Battle of Verdun on the Internet and browse through photos for a little bit. It's extremely powerful.

We never actually went to the town of Verdun. We did see the land where there had been a town that was destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. That was the end of our Verdun tour. The next day we did some champagne tasting (my parents let me try a sip; champagne is like stars on your tongue and is absolutely amazing) and then went on to Semur-en-Auxois, an adorable town outside of Dijon. We were staying in the house of my friend Nika's dad, and both the house and the town were gorgeous. It was a totally stereotypical French countryside town, with cobblestone streets and vines growing on stone cottages, a giant tmedieval tower which had a crack down its side, and a beautiful river.

 Is that not adorable?

We really enjoyed it, and my cousins Ella and Giulia came down from Milan to visit as well. It was great to have the peeps all together. The house also had a beautiful garden, complete with a mini orchard and a mini vineyard. The four of us ended up using the space to play "Chronicles of Narnia" together. (I'm sure you've heard of it; it's both a book and a movie series.) The game basically entailed the four of us standing in a line with a bowling pin in our hands and then on the count of three we would all draw our "swords" and yell, "For Narnia, and for Aslan!" and then charge up the hill, fighting off the hoards of enemies. I was Susan, Nick was Peter, Giulia was Edmond, and little Ella was Lucy. About every five minutes one of us would get injured and die dramatically, staggering around and saying final words, but oh, wait, in the first book/movie Lucy has a magic potion thingy which cures everybody so we're not really dead! It was a lot of fun. Try it sometime; yell, "For Narnia, and for Aslan!" and then charge. It's also helpful to have a "sword" to draw and point out dramatically while you do your battle cry. I'm sure you'll awaken your child's spirit inside of you. 

"FOR NARNIA, AND FOR ASLAN!"

After our few days in Semur-en-Auxois we got in the car, and guess where we went next? It honestly crept up on me, I forgot entirely that it was our next destination and it wasn't until we were in the car driving there that it hit me and I began to get really, really excited. So! Our next destination was... drumroll please... the one and only... the city of love... Paris! The city that my three-year-old little brother wanted to go to. As we approached our rental appartment my parents put on La Vie en Rose and we looked out the windows with awe at the gorgeous Parisian houses. 

To be continued!