It was a public holiday on Monday but luckily most tourist sites were open. We were in Verdun, the main city on this part of the Meuse and at the heart of the terrible events of 1916 when 300,000 men died in the area and hundreds of thousands more were wounded or went missing.
Our first visit was to Verdun Citadel, a giant underground maze of tunnels about 10 mins walk from the boat which was centrally placed on the main quay in Verdun near all the action.
When we got to the Citadel and bought our tickets we discovered that the ambient temperature was only 7C. We were dressed in tee-shirts and shorts so we decided to go back to the boat and dress more warmly and returned after lunch when we were the only people there. You catch an electric train type thing like the ones which would carry you around the Ghost House at a fairground. It was an excellent tour for the two of us, in English, with holographic images, great narrative and we just sat back and enjoyed being transported around the tunnels in the pitch black, and from time to time stopping to be presented with a film or sound track explaining some aspect of the Citadel like the memorial to the dead of Verdun.
Afterwards we walked back home via the moat that surrounds the Citadel (now empty) and visited the Memorial and Crypt where the names of the dead and missing in the Battle of Verdun are kept. It has amazing presence and a sombre approach along the Avenue de Victoire with fountains going along the middle of the road.
In the evening we got out the Cobb BBQ and roasted a chicken and sat watching the crowds wandering up and down the quay on the warm and sunny evening. The weather has been fantastic all week (until now) with temps in the high 20s and brilliant sunshine all day.
On Tuesday we had an easy morning doing some odd jobs on the boat and in the afternoon took a bus trip up to Fort Douamont and the main battlefield site. Fort Douamont was the greatest fort ever built in France but the days of fixed engagements were over soon after it was built and the French all but abandoned it allowing the Germans to take it without a struggle. It then took the French 300 brutal days to recapture it and both sides 150,000 men dead or missing. It is built on the top of the highest point of the Meuse Valley and in reality is a series of tunnels dug into the hillside.
They were damp, cold, dark and would have been hell on earth for the men serving there as millions of shells were flung at it by both sides. The tour was in French which our linguistic skills couldn’t keep up with, so armed with an English brochure we wandered around seeing the kitchens, toilets and dormitories where thousands of men lived and died.
Then it was onto the Ossuary of Douamont where most of the dead are buried from both sides. In the Ossuary are kept piles of bones as no-one knows who they are French or German, only where they were found. It is a chilling sight. Outside are the endless graves of those who could be identified.
That evening again in the hot evening air, we dined out at a restaurant 50m from the boat and for less than 20 Euros each had a great 3 course meal.
The next day it was time to move on and we cruised 40km up the valley to the town of St Mihiel where another great battle of the Verdun war was fought, this time mainly by the Americans who finally rescued the town in 1918. We saw another beautiful Abbey Cathedral and on the way back bought some stunning apricots and white asparagus. Expensive but about the best we had ever tasted (other than the lovely asparagus we had had in Baiersdorf last year). France is like that. Food built to a quality rather than a price!
For the past few days we had been on manual locks worked by attractive French University students, but from now on we were back on automatic locks where our ‘telecommanders’ worked the locks. It was our last day on the Meuse. We had travelled on it for over 16 days and over 450km with 70 odd locks. We turned out from it onto the Canal Marne au Rhin, and headed through a long tunnel and down 12 locks in 12 km to the town of Toul in the heart of Lorraine famous for its quiches. It has the most beautiful cathedral of St Etienne.
I had noticed that the barometer was going down all the time even though the weather was still lovely and eventually twigged that we had been climbing all the time away from sea level and were now 230m high. I recalibrated the barometer and that bought things back in kilter. Saturday was a drizzly day so we decided to stay on our berth and took things easy with some emails, reading and baking muffins. The weather improved the next day, though still not up to the standard of the last week, and so we set sail this time on another major river – The River Moselle – downstream to Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. We had arranged to go through the first lock with a Dutchman and we were running late. He asked us to go in first and so we did but unfortunately forgot to take the radar arch down and then we heard it – zouchhhh. The satellite dish cover was torn and the arch was thrown down. We were quite despondent. It was raining by now so we quickly covered the dish and carried on to Nancy through rain and 8 locks. When we got to the port I undid the dish cover and tried the TV and got a signal. Whewww! It was just a smashed cover. We patched up the cover with duct tape and covered it with plastic and all works fine now. We will get another cover when we get to Germany as they are made there. We won’t make that mistake again!
We had finally crossed from the Valley of the Meuse to the Valley of the Moselle through 70 locks and 4 tunnels.
Next week we explore Nancy and head East to Alsace and Strasbourg and our date with the mighty Rhine.
