Came into Verdun and was able to without much cost and trouble, get the wheel repaired. Verdun was a huge French-German Battlefied that wiped out towns along the front lines and took 500,000 lives overall.
I met my host Mylene at the bar Estam. She knew the owner and we enjoyed a beer while she set up transport and accommodation for me down the road. I have friends who are leaving for far away placed next month so I'm going to adjust the schedule to meet them. I think might take the Iron Horse to Caen, grab a ferry, and then head up the coast before turning around and heading back to Paris.
She arranged for friends to get me to Rheims (pronounced Rance??). I have a potential spot to stay which is good because those clouds are moving in again. At least it's warm.
Mylene has lived in Verdun her whole life and seems to like it here. It's a pretty city but a bit spread out. She goes out again after meeting me and I enjoy a fantastic sleep. I leave quietly in the morning but whisper a quiet goodbye to her. Very generous person.
I fortify myself with pastry (double chocolate, snails with icing and raisins) and go up the hill. The lady at the tourist office made it sound like Everest but it wasnt bad and it was sunny as well. I visited several sites and old fortifications. Interesting things were the towns that were swept away are still maintained and elect a mayor to continue on their memory. Strange to see town names where no one is living but I guess you could also say the same about many Northern communities as well! :)
Most stirring memorial was the Bayonet Trench. Someone came across a bunch of bayonets sticking out of the ground a few years after the war and found two companies that had been covered with mud and debris during artillery. Cannot imagine that violence. You can still see bayonet tips sticking up through the ground.
At the Ossuaire de Douaumont, they have inscribed several names of missing on the halls and I watched a film that said the theatre was surrounded by the bones of 130,000 people. I thought it meant the surrounding cemeteries but in the basement, they took all the unknown remains and put them down there. You can look in the windows and see the masses of bones.
The adjoining cemetery has thousands of crosses but i was surprised to see crosses saying "3 unknown soldiers" or the name of someone plus and unknown soldier. I'd like to know how this happens.
All around the place, you see trenches and thousands of shell holes now covered with green and filled with water. Once in a while, someone is named specifically but not much in the way of details exist. I've enjoyed touring this historical town and continue to move west.