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 uneart...