Once upon a time, near Verdun

Today, ninety years ago, the guns fell silent and children of Europe viewed in horror the madness that had been unleashed by their leaders on their behalf.


Words are too few and too unsatisfactory to express what the hills and the valleys of Northern France and Belgium had been witness to during the previous four years. To this day, live ammunition and human remains are still to be found in the meadows and forests that nature has reclaimed for herself from what was once a cratered moon landscape of an endless battlefield.


The ghosts remain, in villages long gone and yet remembered, calling out to us after all these years, to remind us of what befell them by a cruel chance of fate.


The village of Ornes, one of the villages détruits close to Verdun which was almost literally wiped off the face of the earth. See the church on the first postcard, and what was left of it in the second, in 1918.


The village was abandoned, the emptiness that could not be filled by human hands or voices was absorbed into the landscape, pitted with reminders of a horrifying legacy we dare forget only at our own peril.


The church still stands, with a simple cross on the altar in the haunting silence, in a place where grenades, mortars and gas had silenced an army many years ago.


The fallen came to rest, at the Ossuaire de Douaumont, a cathedral for the fallen and a place of reflection for the living.


Inside, the vaults contain a monument presented by each of the French départments, the walls covered with plaques honouring the named and the nameless buried outside.


The young and the old lie together, brothers in arms united in a death not willingly sought.


The entrance, a message of hope passed on by a generation of survivors, entreating us not to forget the good in all of mankind despite all the demonstrated evidence to the contrary.


I originally started out looking for a YouTube clip based on Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, on the title page of the score of which was quoted:

"My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity…
All a poet can do today is warn."

I settled however for a theme taken from the BBC series "Dr. Who" which, to all intents and purposes, conveys the hurt and the sadness of a generation which had so appallingly taken leave of its senses but was destined to do so yet again within another twenty one years.


Lest we forget...

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