![]() ![]() ![]() The road was so important that it earned the name Voie Sacrée-the “Sacred Way.” The road was little more than an unpaved country road when the battle began, and it had to be widened and frequently resurfaced with crushed stone during the battle. ![]() With the battle lines nearly encircling the city, this road was Verdun’s primary supply route. Instead, these ghost towns join the monuments and cemeteries spread across the area as a memorial to those who died.Īnother part of the story of the Battle of Verdun that remains written on the land today is the large highway that comes into Verdun from the southwest. The woods have grown up around these abandoned villages, which France decided not to incorporate into remaining communities. The devastation caused by months of trench warfare-the huge network of trenches and tunnels, the craters left by shelling, the unexploded munitions, the residues of poison gas, and the human remains-was so complete that six villages north of the city were not rebuilt: Cumières-le-Mort-Homme, Haumont-près-Samogneux, Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre, Beaumont-en-Verdunois, Bezonvaux, and Fleury-devant-Douaumont. (Maps and photographs show that some of the area was wooded at the time of the battle, as well). The front line during the Battle of Verdun passed through the now-heavily-wooded areas north of Verdun and curved clockwise (toward the southeast) through the strip of forest east of the river. The river is framed by deep green woodlands. In this image, Verdun is a small city on the banks of the Meuse River surrounded by the geometric pattern of farmed and fallow fields. Among the places where the earth itself tells a story of our past is the French landscape around the city of Verdun, where more than 300,000 French and Germans died during a World War I battle that went on from mid-February to mid-December 1916. Human history isn’t confined to books some of it is written across the surface of the Earth. ![]()
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