War Diaries Talk

Back and forth

  • El_Lion by El_Lion

    I'm just tagging some pages from a cavalry regiment. At the moment (in the diary) they are moving a lot. But the movements aren't "straight" as I would have expected them to. I followed their path on Google Maps (to get the names of the towns right) and it dawned on me that in fact, they were going back and forth and after a long day of "unit movement" sometimes ended up at almost the same place they had been the night before. Seems so sadly useless, a waste of energy, effort, time. As that war was. As probably every war is.
    😃 ---- end of filosofical five minutes ---- 😃

    Posted

  • simonedi by simonedi moderator

    They might have been chasing reports of enemy activity or pointless orders not mentioned in the diary but certainly needless running about is also a strong candidate. But i would have to agree about the waste of energy, imagine if the production involved in all that amunition, weaponry and so on had been channeled into something more constructive rather than laying waste to vast areas

    Posted

  • El_Lion by El_Lion

    I've been to Verdun years ago. I was at the war museum and heard a veteran talking about how they lost a meter of ground, gained it, lost it again...with an incredible amount of casualties. A grave yard full of white crosses, as far as the eye could see and next to it a graveyard dome erected over the mass grave of thousands and thousands of unidentified soldiers. I saw a stone indicating "ici fut Fleury" (here was Fleury), a whole town eradicated from the map by the war. The landscape was very green but all the forests grew after the war, there wasn't a single green bit after the bombing and trench digging. When a storm went through a few years earlier and uprooted trees, the forest workers found skeletons. Some even with their dog tags on, so those could get identified, after like 60 or 70 years. Working in those forests is a very dangerous task, they told us, they have no idea what kind of and how many explosives are still laying there.
    Gosh, I still remember after all those years how heartbreaking this all was!
    But that's what Operation War Diary is for, right? To remember, to not forget.

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