1917



Lonz said:
I thought that place was harrowing until we went to the Verdun mass grave the next day. Just an insane number of crosses, it was really hard to get your head around what it all meant.
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It was very depressing, all of those lives wasted on both sides, fighting for a stretch of fields.

I will try to visit Flanders again soon, it was eery being in places where a relative had once been, I also felt strangely at home when we spent a day in Ghent.

I know a little bit about the history of verdun, did you visit due to a connection?
 
Lonz said:
I thought that place was harrowing until we went to the Verdun mass grave the next day. Just an insane number of crosses, it was really hard to get your head around what it all meant.
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Verdun is hell of a place was there a couple of years ago.
The opening bombardment the forward french troops underwent is virtually unimaginable .Mature trees being blown up and being lifted again by 3-4 shells in a row before they hit the ground, 2 million shells fired before the storm troops went in, sweeping barrage like a machine gun but with 400 mm shells. Something like 80,000 shells on the kilometer square bois de coeur alone. Then the first sight of flame throwers coming out of a snow storm
Germans ended up losing more men over the full campaign though i think .
"Price of Glory " Alistair Horne is the book on it and part 4 of Dan Carlins podcast "blue print for Armaggedon" is also mind blowing statistically . I never really fully understood the degree to which the troops were continually living in a charnel house, next to corpses ( or bits of them ) every minute . The trench walls were literally coated in swarms of flies . Madness
 
Feed the Monster said:
Saw it last night. It’s technically dazzling but it’s nowhere near the best war film I’ve seen. It lacked something for me although I can’t quite put my finger on what. I didn’t get drawn in emotionally at all and whilst the carnage of no mans land was done really well, the battle scenes such as they were seemed a bit insipid and didn’t do justice to what must have been horrific.
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My thoughts exactly.
 
Saw it on Friday, Very good. Not the 'Epic' that some are calling it. The story is a but weak, but the acting, the CGI and the camera work is excellent. Lots of nice cameos.

7/10
Stevie Freestein II said:
One of my great grandfathers was killed in October 1917, we visited tyne cot last year. A sobering experience.
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Same. My great great uncle (Harry O'Brien) died in WWI aged 21

His brother, survived 4 years leading one of the battalions who dug the trenches, came home, gave his wife 5 more kids and died in a mine collapse when my Grandad was 6 weeks old
 
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Lonz said:
I thought that place was harrowing until we went to the Verdun mass grave the next day. Just an insane number of crosses, it was really hard to get your head around what it all meant.
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Looking through the small windows in there Douamont Ossary where you can see the bones of 100,000`s was a very sobering sight. Out of all of the WWI battlefields I have visited, Verdun still looks like a battlefield site whereas the likes of Ypres and The Somme are now pleasant, ploughed fields. The scars, trenches and craters are still very evident at Verdun.
 
Feed the Monster said:
Saw it last night. It’s technically dazzling but it’s nowhere near the best war film I’ve seen. It lacked something for me although I can’t quite put my finger on what. I didn’t get drawn in emotionally at all and whilst the carnage of no mans land was done really well, the battle scenes such as they were seemed a bit insipid and didn’t do justice to what must have been horrific.
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Been to see it tonight and that's how I'd describe it too. My daughter had seen it in the week and thought it was really good, I was a bit disappointed.
 
Skandhaless said:
Verdun is hell of a place was there a couple of years ago.
The opening bombardment the forward french troops underwent is virtually unimaginable .Mature trees being blown up and being lifted again by 3-4 shells in a row before they hit the ground, 2 million shells fired before the storm troops went in, sweeping barrage like a machine gun but with 400 mm shells. Something like 80,000 shells on the kilometer square bois de coeur alone. Then the first sight of flame throwers coming out of a snow storm
Germans ended up losing more men over the full campaign though i think .
"Price of Glory " Alistair Horne is the book on it and part 4 of Dan Carlins podcast "blue print for Armaggedon" is also mind blowing statistically . I never really fully understood the degree to which the troops were continually living in a charnel house, next to corpses ( or bits of them ) every minute . The trench walls were literally coated in swarms of flies . Madness
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That is quite possibly the most readable book I have ever read on WWI. Such a startlingly vivid read. When anyone mentions the French being cowards, I point them to this book. The defence of Fort Vaux was one of the bravest feats I have ever read about. They only surrendered after they ran out of water and had been licking moisture off the walls. When they walked out of the fort, the Germans gave them a guard of honour to mark their bravery and many dived into shell holes to drink the putrid corpse filled water as they left. How those who survived that battle managed to retain their sanity after the heavy bombardments day after day.
 
mickb2112 said:
That is quite possibly the most readable book I have ever read on WWI. Such a startlingly vivid read. When anyone mentions the French being cowards, I point them to this book. The defence of Fort Vaux was one of the bravest feats I have ever read about. They only surrendered after they ran out of water and had been licking moisture off the walls. When they walked out of the fort, the Germans gave them a guard of honour to mark their bravery and many dived into shell holes to drink the putrid corpse filled water as they left. How those who survived that battle managed to retain their sanity after the heavy bombardments day after day.
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Horrendous mate , literally something from hell. The drumroll bombardment coming your way , the flame thrower assualts mopping up, the hand to hand , corpses buried in the floor of your trench so the ground was spongy , reinforcements losing over half their number in the approach trenches before they saw a German. All conducted in a lunar landscape of mud and body parts .
It was literally a perfect human meat grinder . Churchill wrote a great commentary on the terrible lunacy of the instrumentality of it but i cant find it anywhere .
 
Skandhaless said:
Horrendous mate , literally something from hell. The drumroll bombardment coming your way , the flame thrower assualts mopping up, the hand to hand , corpses buried in the floor of your trench so the ground was spongy , reinforcements losing over half their number in the approach trenches before they saw a German. All conducted in a lunar landscape of mud and body parts .
It was literally a perfect human meat grinder . Churchill wrote a great commentary on the terrible lunacy of the instrumentality of it but i cant find it anywhere .
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Absolutely spot on. I think they used to call it the meat grinder. Most of the French army was rotated through Verdun at one point and the troops coming out of line would baaa like sheep at the green rookies heading to the trenches.
 
mickb2112 said:
Absolutely spot on. I think they used to call it the meat grinder. Most of the French army was rotated through Verdun at one point and the troops coming out of line would baaa like sheep at the green rookies heading to the trenches.
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Yeah the french at least did quick rotation , i think the poor jerries were there for longer stints . Give Dan Carlins pod cast a listen if you haven't absolutely spell binding and informative . I've read about ww1 for 40 years but never thought about the true individual human reality of it until I listened to it .
 
Skandhaless said:
Yeah the french at least did quick rotation , i think the poor jerries were there for longer stints . Give Dan Carlins pod cast a listen if you haven't absolutely spell binding and informative . I've read about ww1 for 40 years but never thought about the true individual human reality of it until I listened to it .
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I`ll check that out. I got two large books for WWI and WWII by AJP Taylor around 1978 from my parents for Christmas and I was hooked from then on. I always remember a painting of Verdun called Hell or something like that with solders in gasmasks in a water filled crater with a corpse at the side in the book by Georges Leroux which really stuck with me. I spent 2014-2018 reading about WWI in chronological order so spent a year reading about each year of the war. Doing the same for the 80th anniversary of WWII so have just started reading about the events of 1940.
 

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