amazing...

V.

Very atmospheric photo!

I've been to one of those villages - actually, just looked it up and it was this one.

Thanks; actually, this photo may should have been a bit more saturated but well, I still have to practice a bit in photo editing.

And it's not surprising that you went there, it's just next of the memorial and, furthermore, it's the most known destroyed village of the area of Verdun. But it's really breathtaking to think that where there're now shell holes and trees, there was a village a hundred years ago, it really shows how much devastating were the battles during WWI. As a personnal experience, one of my great-grand-father fought there, during one of the many battles for Fort Douaumont, and was injured by a schrapnel in this area, to see places like that, where there're a shell hole by cm², permit to realise the horror that millions of soldiers lived during four years.

I found it incredibly moving that they have been kept as villages, with up to date signs and speed limits. I am always impressed by the honour France pays to the fallen.

Honnestly, it happened after the war, it was still in memories and there was, at that time, a patriotism that was present in the heart of everyone and this respect. But times have changed and now things are totally different, now, if you've a French flag, you're considered as a nationalist, and the governement has no more respect for the fallen, few months ago, they wanted to do a concert for the 100 years of the Battle of Verdun and as artist, they didn't invited many little artists who wanted to pay tribute to their ancestors, they wanted to produce one of the worst scumbag of the French music, a homophobian, racist rap singer who, sorry for the expression, just shit on France but who keep getting the advantages that France can bring him, furthermore, when he was interrogated on why he accepted to do that, he answered that was just to produce himself, not for paying tribute. Finally, as most of the population was trully against that, excepted preteens dazed by reality TV, the governement was forced to cancel the concert, and that happened right in the good period for them, they, in the same time, just get a third of the French population with a completly stupid reform about the worker rights...

But as I said, the honor we pay to the fallen disapear more and more, when you go to cemeteries and you see children riding on the crosses and the parents next of them who just say nothing and let their kids do wathever they want, you began to wonder where is the respect, as for the a Franco-British military cemetery in the Artois called the Meknes Trench Cemetery, lost in the middle of nowhere and only accessible by an old path that's don't look to be maintain and which has from each side, on a good 50m, an unauthorised rubbish tip. After, obviously, it remains some people who want to keep the honor given to the fallen but they sometimes are barelly helped by the governement...

That's very sad - I've always had positive experiences at French sites. I hope these centenary years provide opportunities for education and remembrance.

Well, commemorative places are generally well maintained thanks to passionate people with the budget they can have...

And well, as for the centenary years, I'm not sure it will goes in the good way for few things... First for what I told you upper, and then, because today, video games are also playing, for better or for worst, an important part in the modern education and beliefs and when one sees what's the latest most known exemple of the "commemorative" WWI video game, it will not goes for the best. The video game Battlefield 1 is an insult to millions of men, though I would not deny the presence of American forces during WWI, even if they only declared war on April 1917, it's a shame that French were "forgotten" and then added in DLC with the argument "It's because we wanted to make them special" when French soldiers were fighting since the first hours of the war, and another point that upset me a lot, outside of the many historical errors, was the fact that you can only play the campaign as an American soldier, not even as a German nor a British soldier.

Plus, but this point isn't just from today, but we tend to forgot many nations when one speaks of WWI, just as exemple, how many people know that Japan was fighting in China and in the Pacific against German troops with a high level of success and a rather "low" rate of losses? I think that we tend to forget too much Belgian (though the video game Verdun added them), Austrian, Italian, Serbian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Indochinese soldiers that fought during this war, though I most probably have forget few other forgotten nationalities that fought during this hellish period.

But I must said that I'm rather worried about how history will be teached in few years (though, history always has been the propaganda of winners and never have been teached objectively), when you see that more than a half of the history teacher in France glorify a half-dictator and hide completly the very good relations that France had with Spain while it was still a dictatorship and many of the racist and uncoventional acts that occured from the late 50s to the 70s...

There's a bit of that in every country. In the UK we tend to whitewash how many people approved of Italian and German politics in the 1930s, and the opposition to receiving refugees from Germany. And I know far less about the French troops in the First World War than I do about the British - or the Germans, come to that.

It's scary that such a significant event is disappearing from living memory in our lifetimes. Nobody left who served; those who remember it now were children while it was going on.

You know, France did the same thing after the war, they tried to hide the fascist implication during the war but the reality began to be told after the events of May 1968 and in 1972, when Robert Paxton published a book about France under the Vichy governement though, hiding the French collaboration was necessary, when the Liberation began, French people where eager for vengeance and humiliated and killed savagely thousands of people considered as traitors or collaborators though some of those collaborators were among the people who were punishing. To hide the collaboration and to promote the resistance was a way to calm the population and it worked. But as for the UK, France isn't fair about German refugees, when the Armistice was signed in June 1940, the French governement delivered to the Nazis thousands of German refugees gathered because they were suspected to be of the 5th Column, that was the first Vel' d'Hiv roundup and if the French State apologised for the second Vel' d'Hiv roundup, this one was totally forgotten.

I doubt there are many countries that behave impeccably through a war, or afterwards...

Some day I will cross the oceans, see this myself, and pay my respects. I'd also really like to visit the Douaumont Ossuary.