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France marks centenary of Battle of Verdun with message of reconciliation

France marked the centenary of the World War I Battle of Verdun on Sunday, exactly 100 years after the first shots were fired in a 10-month engagement that saw 300,000 French and German soldiers killed and as many wounded, both physically and psychologically. The battle, like the war, is still the subject of controversy - a symbol of French resistance to invasion for some, of the waste of war to others.

French troops attack at the battle of Verdun
French troops attack at the battle of Verdun AFP archives
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A reenactment of the start of the battle in the forest of Caures took place at dawn, to be followed by a mass at an ossuary containing the remains of both the French and German dead.

Although German leaders were not invited to the commemoration ceremonies until 1984, when Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand joined hands in a gesture of peace in the heart of Europe, the centenary will focus on bringing the peoples together.

A group of German and French schoolchildren were invited to watch Sunday's reenactment and 4,000 young people from both countries will attend a ceremony led by François Hollande and Angela Merkel on 29 May.

"I'm a symbol of reconciliation - my parents were German, all my family is in Germany," Colonel Henri Schwindt, who heads an organisation committed to the memory of the battle, told RFI ahead of the ceremony. "But I'm now French. And I'm president of an organisation that supervises disadvantaged people in preserving the battlefield site, the fort and the destroyed villages. Sometimes we find shells, particularly when maintenance work is done."

Thirty million shells are estimated to have been fired in a battle for a small piece of land that ended with neither side making significant headway.

Scwindt found himself in hot water with Verdun mayor Arsène Lux five years ago after he told a television documentary that "there were many dead for not very much", words that Lux judged an insult to the memory of the fallen.

"The admirable attitude of the poilu [slang for a French soldier] of Verdun was 'The battle of Verdun was the battle for France'," Lux told him in a letter that was soon made public.

The last poilu died in 2008.

Some 10 million combatants died in World War I - 1.9 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, one million from the Austro-Hungarian empire and 760,000 British - with a further 20 million wounded.

 

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