re: #36 Shiplord Kirel

Speaking of Verdun, the thing that made it so hellish, and an icon of horror and inhumanity, is the small size of the battle area, only about 6.2 square kilometers. You can easily see the whole thing from the small rise where the Ossuary of Douamont was built to hold the remains of the dead after the war. Something over half a million German and French soldiers were killed in that tiny area in the space of a few months. The vast majority were never identified. Since the area was a giant cemetery, and useless for any other purpose, the French government planted it with trees and allowed it to return to nature. The French Forest Service manages it. To this day its rangers find human bones in the forest literally every couple of days on average. They are taken to the ossuary, examined, and placed in one of its numerous crypts.

There’s still something like 100,000 officially listed as missing; no doubt that accounts for the skeletal remains that turn up so frequently. A grim contemporary reminder of one of the bloodiest battlefields in European history.