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Battle Without End: The casualties of Verdun
Weekly Standard ^ | March 14, 2016 | Geoffrey Norman

Posted on 03/04/2016 8:33:58 AM PST by C19fan

There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the “Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell.

When you walk around the outside of the building you find small windows, and when you look through them what you see are bones. Human bones and skulls. Piles of them. They are the remains of more than 130,000 men who were killed here and whose bodies could not be recovered or identified and so remained in the mud, blown apart again and again by artillery shells, in what was arguably the most awful battle of the First World War.

(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...


TOPICS: History; Military/Veterans
KEYWORDS: france; godsgravesglyphs; thegreatwar; verdun; war; worldwari; worldwarone; ww1
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The accounts of what soldiers went through at Verdun at unbelievable.
1 posted on 03/04/2016 8:33:58 AM PST by C19fan
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To: C19fan

2 posted on 03/04/2016 8:37:40 AM PST by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
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To: C19fan

The Germans have World War I cemeteries in France, also. They’re very somber places. I can understand why many Europeans questioned their entire civilization after the horrors of the Great War.


3 posted on 03/04/2016 8:39:22 AM PST by jumpingcholla34 (.)
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To: C19fan

The damage to France was incalculable. And later, at the Somme, the same decimation visited the English. The Great War was a game-changer in so many ways ...


4 posted on 03/04/2016 8:42:23 AM PST by IronJack
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To: C19fan

Lantern of the Dead - entrance to tower and surrounding ossuary. Note: muslim graves in surrounding cemetery face mecca
5 posted on 03/04/2016 8:42:48 AM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: jumpingcholla34

My daughter and I visited 14 battlefields across northern France and Belgium last August: From Mte St Michel on the west coast over through Normandy (1944), Crecy, Agincourt, Paris, Waterloo, Dunkirk, Sommes (Fromme-Ypres) area, Battle of the Bulge, Verdun.

Even the museums showing the British losses in Belgium and the still-shell-torn woods and hills around Verdun are sobering, unsettling to read and walk through.


6 posted on 03/04/2016 8:49:23 AM PST by Robert A Cook PE (I can only donate monthly, but socialists' ABBCNNBCBS continue to lie every day!)
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To: jumpingcholla34

WW1 was the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the human race. The wholesale slaughter of an entire generation of men, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the disastrous Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Great Britain that redrew the map of the Middle East and the rise of the House of Saud gave us Hitler and Islamic Terrorism. I have no sympathy for Europe.


7 posted on 03/04/2016 8:54:00 AM PST by D_Idaho ("For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...")
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To: C19fan

The link seems to be bad. I tried Googling the title and Weekly Standard and got the same problem.


8 posted on 03/04/2016 8:56:03 AM PST by rey
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To: C19fan

I still fully believe that when western civilization finally collapses it will be seen that World War I was the beginning of the end. It destroyed the civilizations faith in itself and its institutions.


9 posted on 03/04/2016 8:57:40 AM PST by drbuzzard (All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.)
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To: rey

http://www.weeklystandard.com/battle-without-end/article/2001399


10 posted on 03/04/2016 8:58:41 AM PST by moose07 (DMCS (Dit Me Cong San ) - Nah. Put the Cheese down and step away.!)
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To: C19fan

Robert Pirsig (author of the book ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE) wrote a book called LILA. In this book, he argues that WWI destroyed The Victorian Era and gave us The Roaring 20s. He wrote that the Soldiers and their families blamed The Victorians for the horrific losses of WWI. Can you imagine one nation suffering 20,000 dead in one day at one battle?

The West turned 180 degrees and started living the “Anything goes!” life.

I think there is a real correlation to this and what happened to the United States after The Vietnam War. The LEAVE IT TO BEAVER world gave way to the SEX, DRUGS, VIOLENCE AND ROCK AND ROLL world.

We see the effects of WWI and Vietnam to this day.

Perhaps the biggest winners were the socialists/communists.

In a world where anything goes, millions of dead foreigners didn’t matter.

That is why it is so important to find and develop the best military leaders. Poor military leaders affect the entire nation.


11 posted on 03/04/2016 9:00:02 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: C19fan
There had been warning signs at Verdun. (French) Troops there, in the last days of the battle, had taken to bleating like sheep as they marched toward the front line.

The Americans and British saw the near collapse of the French and it motivated Wilson to finally declare war on April 2, 1917. I have seen it argued - if the Americans had stayed out, the war would have ended in a stalemate shortly thereafter. Its all speculation, but history certainly would have been different.

12 posted on 03/04/2016 9:06:14 AM PST by PGR88
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To: blueunicorn6
Can you imagine one nation suffering 20,000 dead in one day at one battle?

And 40,000 wounded on the same day!

13 posted on 03/04/2016 9:09:03 AM PST by 17th Miss Regt
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To: C19fan

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the Great War never ended. Just 20-year pauses every now and then while the nature and technology of warfare catches up and the battle lines are re-drawn. See the Middle East.

And no, mankind cannot be “fixed.” And sooner or later it will vanish from the earth.


14 posted on 03/04/2016 9:11:02 AM PST by TTFlyer
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To: C19fan
S little bit of history not many people know of: -------------- The Germans were thus well aware of his plan and prepared for Mangin's attack, which came in the spring of 1917 and failed with heavy casualties. Nivelle had promised that if the attack were not immediately successful, it would be halted, and his men would return to their trenches. But after the initial failures—and some 100,000 casualties—he pressed the attack, pushing French troops to the limit and, then, beyond, until at last .  .  . they mutinied. There had been warning signs at Verdun. Troops there, in the last days of the battle, had taken to bleating like sheep as they marched toward the front line. They had, again and again, been thrown carelessly into attacks that had no chance of success. Now they were refusing to go back into the line and into the attack. Nivelle was relieved, with Pétain appointed in his place. He was the only general the soldiers trusted with their lives. He was also exhibiting the first symptoms of the defeatism that would eventually consume him like a cancer. But he was the indispensable man in France's time of need. He steadied things and gradually brought order and discipline back to an army in which almost half the divisions had shown symptoms of what was euphemistically called "collective indiscipline." Some 500 men were brought up on charges and sentenced to death, though fewer than 50 were executed. There is still uncertainty about the episode. The French covered it up very effectively, for understandable reasons of security in the beginning and for reasons of pride and shame, one assumes, after that.
15 posted on 03/04/2016 9:11:53 AM PST by 2banana (My common ground with terrorists - they want to die for islam and we want to kill them)
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To: C19fan

The poeple who in 1918 should have been lined up and SHOT:
Douglas Haig
Lloyd George
Clemenceau
“King” Goerge
The Kaiser
Paul Von Hindenburg
Erich Ludendorff
add whom else you think should have been SHOT!


16 posted on 03/04/2016 9:14:27 AM PST by US Navy Vet (I am "Chump" for Trump,)
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To: PGR88
I have seen it argued - if the Americans had stayed out, the war would have ended in a stalemate shortly thereafter.Its all speculation, but history certainly would have been different.

Given Hitler's motivations relative to WWI and the Treaty of Versailles, it could have averted WWII. Which could have averted what we see in the Middle East today. Possibly. We'll never know.

17 posted on 03/04/2016 9:16:23 AM PST by Bloody Sam Roberts (Why do we give our hearts to the past? And why must we grow up so fast?)
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To: blueunicorn6

Edwardian intellectuals were already taking the hatchet to the Victorians, usual inter-generational war. Lytton Strachey hatched his idea of his hit piece “Eminent Victorians” before the Great War stated. But the Great War took it to another level.


18 posted on 03/04/2016 9:18:05 AM PST by C19fan
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To: US Navy Vet
"add whom else you think should have been SHOT!"

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Goring,

19 posted on 03/04/2016 9:21:40 AM PST by PUGACHEV
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To: C19fan
If you haven't already, read Alistair Horne's "The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916".

It is the definitive book on Verdun IMHO. Written back when veterans of that horrific bloodletting were still alive to be interviewed.

It's a view of the battle from the Poilus and Landsers that fought it on the ground.

20 posted on 03/04/2016 9:22:15 AM PST by NFHale (The Second Amendment - By Any Means Necessary.)
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