VERDUN RESTORED.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5466, 26 August 1929, Page 2

VERDUN RESTORED.

A NEW CITY HAS ARISEN. THE MEMORIAL UNVEILED. On June 23, the 13th anniversary of the day upon which the German advance was broken, M. Doumergue, President of the French Republic, unveiled the great memorial to the defenders of Verdun. A flight of 78 steps leading up from the Place Petain gives access to the monument. On a triangular column stands a Gallic warrior, his hands resting on a sword, symbolising the defence of Verdun throughout the history of France In a crypt beneath lies the Golden Rook, containing the names of all those who fought and fell before Verdun. The celebrations also commemorated the completion of the ancient city’s reconstruction “after 10 years of labour as unremitting as the 10 months’ toil of its defence,” says the London Times. “In those 10 months the city, its belt of forts, and the villages that surrounded it, were the target of the most destructive bombardment that the world had yet seen. Forts were blown into heaps of debris. Whole villages, such as * Vaux and Douaumont, Ilaumont, and Fleury, disappeared. The French divisions continually flung into the furnace of battle were consumed with terrible speed In the words of a French military writer, they ‘melted away. . . They vanished like drops of water on a white-hot shovel,’ for as long as the German artillery kept its supremacy the losses of the defence were far heavier than those of the attack. Yet these soldiers maintained their discipline and courage. The nature of their trial may be inferred from the fact that of the 400,000 who died defending Verdun not 100,000 rest under crosses bearing their* names. . . • Less than ten years ago only one house was left standing in the chief street of Verdun, and whole quarters lay in dismal ruin. To-day a new city has arisen from the ashes and fragments left by the storm of war. a monument to the tenacious courage and the dogged industry of a great nation. British aid has also been given to the stricken town and countryside ; the spirit that inspires such help expresses a sentiment deeper than compassion at the sight of material ruin—a profound admiration for that obstinate self-sacrificing resistance of the French peasant soldier which saved Europe in the earlier years of the war.”