Verdun France

For Memorial Day this year we decided to do something a little different....we visited a French/German battle area in France. The battle of Verdun was one of the bloodiest armed clashes in history! Zach printed off a ton of history that we read on the way. The two main forts were Douaumount and Vaux. The area of the battle was about 20 miles. It lasted From February until December of 1916 so we are talking WWI. Exact numbers are not certain, but it is estimated that 500,000 french and 430,000 germans were killed, wounded or missing.

I don't have time to cover all the history, but if you get a chance to look it up (and you like history) then I reccomend it. In the end all of this fighting was for absolutely nothing! The germans didn't want the land, they just wanted to kill the french! The french were protecting something not that important. Absolutely insane if you ask me! Hundreds of thouseands lost thier lives! The ground is still bumpy and wavy from the constant shellings and it is said that nothing will grow except the pine forest. It covers the whole battle area. They think it's because the ground is so polluted from decaying bodies and chemical warefare agents they used at the time. We went in the first fortm but the second one was at the end and everyone was pretty tired! We hiked a lot and really had a good time.