Vergennes
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THOUSANDS of children from France and Germany were due to attend a memorial service today at the refurbished Verdun Memorial to mark the centenary of the start of the longest battle of the First World War.
There is no military element to the memorial service, as there are no surviving combatants of the battle.
"Time has done its work. Today, Verdun is no longer a memory, it is history," said Thierry Hubscher, director of the Verdun Memorial, which will reopen to the public tomorrow.
On this day 100 years ago, the German army fired more than a million shells along a ridge in Lorraine in northeastern France. Over the course of the 10-month battle - still the longest in global military history - an estimated 30 million shells were fired over the battlegrounds 50-square mile area. In places, it is believed that 10 shells fell on every square centimetre of land.
The Allies had been planning a summer offensive in 1916 at the Somme ‘to end the war’, which by then had been going for 18 months - but the ferocious German assault at Verdun took them by surprise.
About 300,000 French and German soldiers died and another 400,000 were wounded or captured during the 300 days and nights that the battle raged.
Early German advances were halted as the French army funnelled in reinforcements along a road known as the "Voie Sacree" (Sacred Way).
When the battle ended, on December 18, 1916, the front lines were exactly where they had been when the fighting started.
Six villages that were destroyed in the fighting - Beaumont-en-Verdunois, Bezonvaux, Cumières-le-Mort-Homme, Fleury-devant-Douaumont; Haumont-près-Samogneux and Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre have never been rebuilt, though their names remain on the official list of communes in France. These ‘Martyr Villages’, have been declared ‘Mort pour la France’ and awarded the Croix de la Guerre.
Commemorative events involving both France and Germany did not take place until 1984, when then-President Francois Mitterrand and his German counterpart, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, stood hand-in-hand at a memorial ceremony.
Even then, historic tensions were high. Just a few months earlier, Germany had been left out of the 40th anniversary ceremony of the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
Verdun is as important to France as the Somme is to Britain. In the UK, the Woodland Trust has appealed for help finding the so-called Verdun oaks, trees grown from acorns gathered at the battlefield. The Trust wants to plant acorns from these trees at a centenary wood in Surrey. Verdun oaks have already been located in Coventry, Pembridge and Leominster in Herefordshire, Southwold in Suffolk, and at the Garden of Remembrance in Lichfield, Staffordshire - but the Trust believes many more are growing across the UK.
In all, 10 million soldiers died in the First World War. Another 20 million were injured, or permanently traumatised by what would become known as ‘shell shock’.
France and Germany remember Verdun dead on centenary of the longest battle of the First World War -
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There is no military element to the memorial service, as there are no surviving combatants of the battle.
"Time has done its work. Today, Verdun is no longer a memory, it is history," said Thierry Hubscher, director of the Verdun Memorial, which will reopen to the public tomorrow.
On this day 100 years ago, the German army fired more than a million shells along a ridge in Lorraine in northeastern France. Over the course of the 10-month battle - still the longest in global military history - an estimated 30 million shells were fired over the battlegrounds 50-square mile area. In places, it is believed that 10 shells fell on every square centimetre of land.
The Allies had been planning a summer offensive in 1916 at the Somme ‘to end the war’, which by then had been going for 18 months - but the ferocious German assault at Verdun took them by surprise.
About 300,000 French and German soldiers died and another 400,000 were wounded or captured during the 300 days and nights that the battle raged.
Early German advances were halted as the French army funnelled in reinforcements along a road known as the "Voie Sacree" (Sacred Way).
When the battle ended, on December 18, 1916, the front lines were exactly where they had been when the fighting started.
Six villages that were destroyed in the fighting - Beaumont-en-Verdunois, Bezonvaux, Cumières-le-Mort-Homme, Fleury-devant-Douaumont; Haumont-près-Samogneux and Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre have never been rebuilt, though their names remain on the official list of communes in France. These ‘Martyr Villages’, have been declared ‘Mort pour la France’ and awarded the Croix de la Guerre.
Commemorative events involving both France and Germany did not take place until 1984, when then-President Francois Mitterrand and his German counterpart, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, stood hand-in-hand at a memorial ceremony.
Even then, historic tensions were high. Just a few months earlier, Germany had been left out of the 40th anniversary ceremony of the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
Verdun is as important to France as the Somme is to Britain. In the UK, the Woodland Trust has appealed for help finding the so-called Verdun oaks, trees grown from acorns gathered at the battlefield. The Trust wants to plant acorns from these trees at a centenary wood in Surrey. Verdun oaks have already been located in Coventry, Pembridge and Leominster in Herefordshire, Southwold in Suffolk, and at the Garden of Remembrance in Lichfield, Staffordshire - but the Trust believes many more are growing across the UK.
In all, 10 million soldiers died in the First World War. Another 20 million were injured, or permanently traumatised by what would become known as ‘shell shock’.
France and Germany remember Verdun dead on centenary of the longest battle of the First World War -
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