Zone Rouge

A pleasant place to walk? Trees providing shade on a hot day, lots of wild flowers, butterflies, charming woodland paths and seats.

However, things are not quite as they seem. The lumps and bumps, holes and crevices were man-made by a bombardment of shells. The path marks the route of a long gone road, the markers indicate where a house, a farm, a school once was. The trees were planted by the French government to cover an area devastated by war and called ‘Zone Rouge’.

This is Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of nine ‘villages détruits’, destroyed by war in 1916.

In 1913 this village had 422 inhabitants. At the start of the First World War in 1914 there were 400. Then came the battle of Verdun. In 1916 the German army launched a large offensive against Verdun - on one day more than a million shells were fired. And the battle continued.

The result was ‘an annihilated landscape, a barren wilderness’ *

 * Cat Flyn: Islands of Abandonment

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Whenever we are in Northern France we seem to come across battlefields. I thought we had visited them all, but no - here was another one at Verdun. Gordon knows a lot about the First World War, he reads endlessly about it, so it is not surprising that we end up in such places. I had not anticipated such a huge area - an area of forts, memorials, museums . . . and  ‘ruined villages’.

Anyway we are now sitting in the shade at our Logis for the night - cold beer at hand, awaiting dinner. And thinking perhaps of Ukraine and other places under bombardment - what was it all for? What is it all for?