Motorbike Diaries -Day 53 ( Friday 10th )

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From Colmar to Verdun —  Poignant- Emotion- Thoughtful
Up early and had what the hotel classed as a full breakfast, bread, butter cheese and marmalade?!
Then headed off to Verdun 196 miles which actually passed very quickly and easily the roads were wide clear and fast with little traffic. Stopping a couple of times for coffee to take photographs on the way.
Then after about a hundred miles I came to what would have been the beginning of the Western front back in 1914. You start to see traces of the First World War -some concrete bunkers in the middle of ploughed fields and every now and again a cemetery filled with white crosses.
It made you realise what must’ve happened here a hundred years ago although now the landscape has changed and it is all farmers fields which I guess is a good thing.
Got to Verdun late morning and to be honest I expected it to be just one or two big monuments to commemorate the war maybe a museum   etc
How wrong could I be, the area is HUGE –
Covering literally dozens and dozens of square miles with so many historical sites, monuments battle sites- Trench systems, fortifications, a huge amount of bunkers , gun emplacements, museums and so on  – in fact it almost became overwhelming. I spent the whole of the day exploring, thank goodness I had a motorbike it would have been difficult otherwise.
Verdun – Was one of the biggest and most iconic battles of the First World War it went on for 300 days and 700,000 people were killed !!
See some of the pictures below-
It was incredibly emotional and poignant. Also thank goodness there were almost no tourists and I had many of the places to myself.
At one point I sat on one of the bunkers on my own for about half an hour just contemplating what must have happened here and what it must have been like- quite difficult to imagine sitting in the bright sunshine on a quiet day listening to the birds –  100 years ago it must have been so incredibly different-
Can you imagine 700,000 people killed in 300 days- over 2000 every single day-
What Were These Generals Thinking
How in goodness name could anyone come up with such a mindbogglingly ridiculous plan !!!
“I say chaps, why don’t we get the officers to blow their whistles really loudly so the enemy know we are  coming
then the men can climb out of the trenches and walk slowly through the mass of barb wire towards the enemy’s machine guns”
and if for some incredible reason it doesn’t work-  You Know What
we will get them to do it again the next day, and the day after that-
a stroke of genius, the enemy would never expect that !  WTF!!!
In the evening I rode into Verdun to find somewhere to stay. I saw what I took to be a rather cheap hotel, which suits me very well !  🙂  🙂
called the Saint Paul, see pictures and booked in and yes it was very reasonable and in a great location- Run by a dear old lady who seems to do everything herself cleaning, reception, making the breakfast, you name it.
Had a quick shower, shave etc  and spend a couple of hours walking around and repair air condition for the people in village , had a bite to eat, couple of glasses of wine- all very nice but couldn’t get the thoughts out of my mind of what it must have been like 102 years ago in 1916.
It’s sad to think that right now there will be absolutely no one left alive who was there
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