Unfathomable

I have been fortunate enough to see Normandy and the D-Day memorials of eastern France. Yet sometimes I think the most important European conflict to consider and understand in that time may truly be World War I. After all, World War I essentially prolonged a stale mate before World War II, and made tensions grow to the oint of becoming evil. That being said, Verdun is one of the most haunted place that I've ever been to. Even on a warm, beautiful summer day like we had on Saturday, I felt a chill walking through the abandoned villages, old forts, memorials and cemeteries that we visited. Although lush green grass grew over the ruins of the fortresses, and daisies and purple wildflowers carpeted the ground, the eerie reality of Verdun is that beneath the surface there are thousands of old bullet casings, bombs that never exploded, and the bodies of soldiers buried in the soil. 


When learning about WWI, I hear so many figures that are so shockingly huge that I can't fathom the immensity of their impact. How could 600,000 soldiers have died in one battle? What does it really mean that France lost millions, an entire generation, in the war? How could a town completely disappear? All of its buildings and inhabitants were utterly destroyed. While I feel that it is impossible to know the devastation and hell that was WWI, I know that I have a much better understanding of the weight behind each statistic.


I think that war statistics can often come across as very cold, almost to the point of being meaningless. When rattling off death tolls and battle dates, our guide excitedly declared 130,000 Frenchmen died for France in the battle of Verdun. What bothers me is that each and every man had a name and family and place in this world. There are so many bodies that are identified and it's hard to grasp the impersonalization a number does when truly considering statistics. Because how then can you preserve the truth that each soldier comprising that huge death toll was a person just like you?