A New Year's Day Drive

Thinking that not many people would be out on the road on New Year's Day, we set off this morning with a picnic lunch for a ride to Thionville and Verdun. Our first destination was Yutz, a town outside of Thionville, which is north of Metz. Although named after the latin word for justice, Yutz means something else in Yiddish - a stupid, clueless person. So, we had to go check it out.

We didn't spend much time in Thionville and headed southwest towards Verdun. We passed through the town of Hayange, which I referred to as France's Pittsburgh (when we got home I found out that Hayenge has many factories manufacturing sheet steel and rails for the TGV). As it was a cold day, we headed on small roads towards the battlegrounds of Verdun, where the German and French armies fought from February 21 to December of 1916. Indeed, Verdun was the longest and most devastating battle of World War I - 250,000 killed and almost twice that number wounded.

We stopped at battlements and forts, at the Douaumont Ossuary and at the Trench of the Bayonets. Memorials not only commemorate the dead; they remind us of the futility of war.

Noticing that there was an American cemetery in the area, we followed the signs and eventually got to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. It's the largest American cemetery in Europe, with over 14,000 graves of soldiers who died in a battle right before the end of World War I.