Came across this post today from Life Magazine. Really it is a stupefying war on every scale but this is incredibly sad. I have not had the opportunity to visit this battlefield/cemetary but aspire to do so at some point.
Just gruesome.
Quote:
Written By: Liz Ronk
In the spring of 1964, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedtwho served as a German artilleryman during World War I and saw action in the terrible fighting at Passchendaeleand correspondent Ken Gouldthorpe traveled to Verdun, in northeastern France, where one of the costliest battles of WWI took place five decades earlier. Here, LIFE.com presents Eisenstaedt's quietly powerful color pictures from Verdun: images of an idyllic landscape that still bears the scars, and seemingly harbors the ghosts, of "the war to end all wars."Quote:
Of all the battle sites along the 350-mile sweep of the Western Front [Gouldthorpe wrote in the June 5, 1964, issue of LIFE], none has come to symbolize the carnage and futility of World War I's fighting more than the fields and hills of Verdun. Here the Germans tried to bleed the French army to death. . . . Today in an ossuary near Douaumont, even now smelling of death, rest the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides: skulls, thighs, and almost indistinguishable the hobnailed sole of a soldier's boot. The erupting shells of a thousand bombardments killed and dug up and mixed and then reinterred the bodies until they intermingled inseparably beneath the mud. [But] not all the memorials honor unknown soldiers. In the wall of Fort Vaux . . . a couple of poppies from nearby fields decorate a plaque [picture #17 in the gallery] to one French victim of Verdun. It says, simply, "To my son. Since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry."
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Douaumont Ossuary, 1964. Photographer served during WW1https://t.co/JeJstjZAZU#history #WW1 pic.twitter.com/SIaZeJmEyL
— myrmekochoria (@myrmekochoria) November 26, 2024
Just gruesome.
