Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Verdun is taken, what a disaster!" warned France's President Raymond Poincaré. "If it is saved, how can we ever forget the price?" In the crudest ten months of World War I, Verdun was saved. But the price was so disastrous - half a million French and German dead - that it has never been forgotten by either nation...
...Over Verdun's ravaged fields one moonlit night last week, a bell tolled mournfully from the vast hilltop monument of Douaumont, where 100,000 nameless skeletons are entombed. French army drums and bugles sounded the solemn Sonnerie aux Morts, France's ancient salute to the fallen. A chorus of clear young voices intoned the German army's somber hymn, Ich hatt' einen Kameraden. Then a torchlit procession of 1,400 young Germans and 700 French youths wound down the damp hillside. The ceremony was part of a movement started by Father Theobald Rieth, a German Jesuit...
...first the German expeditions often met with a flinty reception in areas that had suffered from German brutality in both wars. The movement's stiffest test came in Verdun. For the first time since World War II, the black, red and gold flag of Germany was flown from the town hall, and the band played Deutschlandlied. But the French seemed touched by the occasion...
...what set off the army explosion was an infamous military blunder. After the long-drawn-out bloodbath of Verdun, an ambitious new commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, staked his career on a decisive punch through the German lines which, he implied, would end the war in weeks. The fanfare and prepara-:ions were so grand that the Germans mew all about it in advance. Nivelle knew they knew it, but he went ahead anyway. And from April 16 to May 9, 1917, French troops flung themselves against the Germans' barbed wire, entrenched machine guns and presighted artillery until...
...Each smoke signal cues a clip from a World War I newsreel showing doughboys going over the top to their death. Chabrol thus seems to justify his Landru (to whom he and Sagan are lavishly sympathetic throughout the film) by suggesting that killing is killing, whether it happens at Verdun or in Landru's kitchen...