Verdun and Trier

Under the Imperial Baths.

Our knowledgeable guide fills us in on the long history of her city.

Strange men?

Entrance to Trier.

The ossuary, surrounded by 16 000 French graves.

Francois Jean Bresset. Mort pour La France.

In front of the Porta Nigra (the Black Gate) dating from Roman Empire times.

We said au revoir to Paris after an early morning Etap breakfast (toast) and were on our long journey to Germany, with a stop at Verdun and a drive through Luxembourg on the way.
Verdun was the sight of some of the fiercest fighting in WWI, an area in Eastern France held highly in the French national pride. The neighbouring provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been annexed by Germany after France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, and Verdun became a frontier town, heavily armed with military forts built into the landscape. The Germans launched a major offensive here in February, 1916, the aim of which was to “bleed the French army dry”. World War I had become a war of attrition, with each side trying to “win” the battle by killing as many of the enemy as they could – territory gained and lost over the course of the battle could be measured in hundreds of metres. The quaint little French rural villages in the area were flattened, and in 10 months, hundreds of thousands of French and German boys and men lost their lives. For nothing. We visited the Musee Fleury-Devant-Douamant, near the site of the former village of Fleury, where veterans of the battle have constructed a mock up of the battlefield, and where an interesting assortment of artillery, uniforms, weapons, and other implements of war are on display. We then visited what is left of Fleury – a rebuilt chapel with no parishioners, and a series of markers showing who lived where and what they did for a living. The landscape is bizarre – craters covered in grass and trees that 90 years ago was a morass of mud, stinking corpses, and unexploded shells, and that 100 years ago was a peaceful farming village. Our final stop in Verdun was the Douamont Ossuary. After the war, there were about 130 000 bodies rotting in the fields. They were, for the most part, unidentifiable, so the decision was made to create an ossuary to house the remains of all these unknown soldiers, both German and French together. They built the ossuary as a reminder of why World War I must be the “war to end all wars”. Within 10 years of the completion of the ossuary, the Nazi war machine had sunk Europe into another war. We
After a short drive through a small country, we arrived in Trier. Last year we had two excellent guides take us around this new stop on the LFMSS tour, so we tried our luck with the local guides again this year and were not disappointed. Trier has a long, illustrious history, going back to when it was a major Roman city. The Porta Nigra (black gate) and the Imperial Baths hearken back to Trier of long ago. It was amazing to find out that the baths, of which a substantial wall and system of tunnels still remain, were once a gigantic, beautifully tiled leisure centre, with hot and cold baths, sports courts, restaurants, library, games rooms, etc. And all the way up here, on the edge of the empire, with the barbarians just outside the gates. The Romans were experts at good living (except when they overdid it – I don’t relish the idea of having a vomitorium in my favourite restaurant). We visited the oldest Christian church in Germany, built under the orders of Constantine, the emperor who basically force converted the entire Roman Empire to Christianity at the behest of his Christian mom and sister. In Langley, a hundred year old church would be considered ancient. In Trier, parts of the main cathedral date back 1700 years. We’re currently in Warsberger Hof Hostel, and the kids are all hanging out in the hall with a couple of strange men. They kind of spooked us, so we are holed up in our room hoping they go away, but the kids just keep talking to them. On further checking, the strange men are just Kayden and Antony. Not to worry.