Walking in Europe

Today was a wonderful day, long in the saddle (113kms) but very meaningful in terms of the number of memorials and stops of interest related to the Western Front. But perhaps the most impactful and emotional for me was the Verdun Douaumont Memorial. The shear numbers of young people who died was staggering: combined casualties of French and German armies are estimated to be as high as 900,000. Of those, half were deaths (so 450,000…almost half a million young lives) and the other half were injuries many of which would have no doubt caused a prolonged death of permanent injury. The Verdun Memorial is stunning and yet heart wrenching, an emotional tribute and yet a haunting and sombre marker of the terrible toll of human life that war brings. The massive ossuary building contains the unidentified remains of 160,000 combatants…160,000…

Passage from British WW I era poet Rupert Brooke that captures the heartbreaking loss to humanity when peoples lives are needlessly cut short by war.

I’ve added pictures to the gallery of some of the other necropoles (remembrance cemeteries) from our travels today. Just as moving in many ways. These are found in the woods and fields of where so many horrific battles took place.

Thank you Tony for this great pic that captures so much