Verdun and the Somme

We spent the last few days of the trip on the WWI and II battlefield sites.  Quite a good way to round things off considering we started in January with a visit Selinus in Sicily where we saw the acropolis that had been destroyed during the war with Carthage in BC 300 and something.  As it happens we seem to have followed things fairly cronologically from then, Pompei to Rome, then all that Byzantine, to Norman, then Baroque stuff.

The battle sites are quite a strain on the emotions.  At Verdun the whole place was smashed to bits by the German offensive, nothing was left that wasn't pulverised by numerous shell explosions, even the 10 inch thick steel bells from the tops of the lookout posts had obviously been smashed and bounced about during the shelling.

The Somme didn't do a lot to lift the spirits either, from any position around Theipval you could see several war graves, all very well looked after, but lonely places.  This is one of the Canadian cemeteries, but had Welshmen, Yorkshiremen etc all mixed up with them.

The most compelling was the memorial to the Newfoundlanders, who were completely wiped out.  The Canadians bought the whole site and have left it so you can see the trenches and no mans land where they were caught in cross fire, and then the German trenches.  The most poignent thing is that the men (boys really) gravitated towards a tree which is marked, but it obviously didn't offer them much in the way of protection.