"I was supposed to go to a certain village and I went through a small place where there was a mound of stones in the middle of the road. I walked a bit further and I asked a passing convoy 'where is the village?' They said 'You passed through it'. I never found it.
There were no trees left, they had all been destroyed. Sometimes you saw a foot sticking out of the earth. That's how brutal the bombardments were."
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The photo above shows the remnants of what used to be a flourishing town in the French countryside prior to WW1. The sign which reads "This was Forges" stood as a reminder of what annihilation looked like and the sheer scale of how impactful slow churning industrialized warfare really was.
It wasn't uncommon for entire villages and towns to be wiped off the map. During the Verdun offensive, 9 villages were pounded to dust in a single day, and the same area would be hit by over 32 million shells in a span of only 10 months. It is estimated that in places 10 shells fell on every square centimetre of land.
The nine “martyr” villages of the Verdun ridge were never rebuilt. They were declared “Mort pour la France” and given the Croix de la Guerre. #reality #ww1 #war #stayzero #zerofoxtrot