Vauquois - “A Heap of Ruins Stuffed with Dead Men’s Bones.”

Battles of the First World War Podcast

Mike Cunha

History

4.8 • 812 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story of the First World War in the Meuse-Argonne region of France cannot be told without talking about the Butte de Vauquois. So here, in an attempt to do a part-travelogue, part-history episode, I retell the story of this tortured and murdered hill. This scene of terrible mine warfare--where an ancient village and six meters of height were erased from the crest during the war--remains today a stark reminder of the brutal nature of the Great War.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yes, the sewage was still fresh in living, fresh to the graveyard, and in a sense, living too.
0:12.0	Let but the mind dwell on the thought of it, and the smell, here faint, there dense and obsessive, became a permanent feature of the place.
0:25.4	And it was difficult to remain detached where, at one point in the trench wall,
0:30.5	a human hand stuck out, a thin sheath of blood and sticky flesh, the color of black flies, that barely hid the bone beneath,
0:40.4	projecting from a torn coat sleeve.
0:44.0	The hand had been there during the battalion's last stay in the sector, but then it had been
0:49.7	an ordinary hand and of quite a different color, whitish, like a dead and drooping flower.
0:56.8	It was not a large object, but it was horribly suggestive. As one looked, one realized that the
1:04.5	plowshare turning up the mountainous rubbish heap must have struck many such, and it was born in on one that to walk here was like
1:13.6	walking through the dense thickness of a vast pudding concocted of corpses. The place appeared in
1:22.5	the communique as the Buc de Volcois.
2:01.7	Jewel Romain from the novel Verdant, the Prelude. Hey folks, welcome to the battles of the First World War podcast episode S-A-10, Vauqua, a heap of ruins stuffed with dead men's bones.
2:06.7	This episode will be a little different from our usual narrative episodes.
2:11.0	This is a gift for my Patreon supporters to enjoy.
2:14.4	Thank you so much for your continued support.
2:22.8	My hope is that this comes off as a little bit travelogue and a lot of history.
2:29.2	The story of the Meuse-Argon region in the First World War cannot be told without talking about the Butte de Valquois.
2:32.0	Having been there twice now, I wanted to tell you what it was like on that hill
2:37.1	and inside it. The first time I visited the Bout de Valquois, it was the 20th of February, 2016.
2:47.9	My stepson, Lee, and I were on a week-long tour of the Verdun battlefield and its environs.
2:53.8	We really lucked out that week because the Meuse had experienced nothing but rain for weeks prior.
3:00.4	The river itself overflowed its banks to the point where there was flooding and a few roads were underwater,
	...

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