The tragic view into Verdun’s ossuary

While the well-resourced Imperial War Graves Commission stridently adhered to its imperial framework and constructed over 500 pristine cemeteries after the Great War, its war-ravaged and underfunded ally, France, adopted a different approach.

Despite the efforts of French labourers to collect tens-of-thousands of shattered bones from the Verdun battlefield in the early 1920s, the sacred work of reburials was beset with problems.

In 1931, the newspaper Paris-Soir reported that the bodies of 12,500 French soldiers lay near Verdun unburied in rough wooden boxes, with sometimes seven to a box. Of these, 9,800 had been temporarily crammed in a shed for the last six years, sometimes in coffins with no lids.

The French Minister of Pensions, Champetier de Ribes, explained that this ‘provisional’ storage was necessary because their eventual resting place was not yet ready and an additional 500 bodies continued to be unearthed each month from the battlefield.

The newspaper blamed poor planning and a lack of government funding for the debacle. With an estimated 400,000 bodies scattered about the Verdun battlefields, efforts to recover remains were largely limited to accidental discoveries.

In later years, discoveries were reputedly left to a lone army chaplain who walked the battlefield each day searching for the telltale signs of diggings of the local Meuse boars, which were attracted to the rotting remains.

Rather than reburying the dead beneath tombstones, the French stacked the unidentified remains of 130,000 French and German soldiers into the Douaumont ossuary.

Today, these tangled bones are brutally exposed for plain view through the ossuary’s grime-smeared portholes. Looking through the portholes is a jarring sensation. It’s a quick glance motivated by curiosity rather than a lingering stare.

You walk away shaken – perhaps an appropriate response considering the travesty of the missing.

Scott’s novel ‘Night in Passchendaele’ Out Now:

https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761265976/night-in-passchendaele/

http://scottbennettwriter.com

Photo source: The Atlantic

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