Information Related to "When Will Mankind Find Peace?"
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When Will Mankind Find
Peace?
Some 80 years removed from the horror of his youth, an old soldier turns his thoughts
to peaceful pursuits. His story echoes an unrealized hope for mankind.
by Joel Meeker
His name was Ferdinand. He was 97
years old when I met him in the war-battered underground fortress of Vaux in northeastern
France. He was slowly and carefully signing books in the shop of a fortress museum
that commemorated some of the great battles of the First World War fought on this
site--battles in which he had participated. Ferdinand willingly spoke to the visitors
who, like me, came to see the battle sites first hand.
It's hard to imagine the violence of the battle that took place on the fertile plains
of Lorraine during what the French call the '14-'18 War. Here, around Verdun, one
of the oldest cities in France, French and German troops clashed in a series of horrendously
bloody battles running through the spring and summer of 1916. In successive seesaw
attacks, hills, forts and strong points were taken, lost and retaken many times by
both sides.
Many of the battles centered on the underground fortresses at Douaumont and Vaux.
These giant reinforced-concrete bunkers had huge metal turrets that could rise above
ground level to fire 155-mm. and 75-mm. cannons, then drop back underground for the
protection of gun crews. Hundreds of men could be housed underground to service the
huge cannons, armored machine-gun nests and observation bells that made the forts
so formidable.
On a nearby hill stands the sobering Douaumont national war cemetery, in which 15,000
French soldiers are buried in neatly aligned rows. In all, 43 French military cemeteries
lie in the region of Verdun alone, containing more than 80,000 graves. Nearly 55,000
German soldiers are buried in 29 German war cemeteries.
A Staggering Human Tragedy
The combined number of dead in the Verdun sector alone is estimated to be as
high as one million. Of these, fewer than a quarter have been identified and
buried in marked graves.
So many dead were lost and left unburied in the no man's land between the lines of
battle that, after the war, huge piles of unidentifiable remains were gathered and
interred in a large monument called the Ossuaire (from the French word os,
"bone"). Through small portals at the base of the monument, visitors can look into
the burial chambers and recognize heaps of human bones representing some 130,000
soldiers.
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