Just two years after the end of the Great War, a group of French mourners led by the President

of France approached a large concrete shelter sighted over a trench where Puelloos

French soldiers have died in 1916. What was the story of the Trench of Bainitz?

On a cold December day in 1920, a crowd, including the President of France, gathered in that barren, desolate

landscape close to the city of Verdun. Verdun, the symbol of France's struggle in the Great War,

the longest battle of the Great War with 300 days and 300 nights of combat, and more than 770,000

French and German casualties there in 1916.

Just a few short years after the end of the war,

the landscape at Verdun had yet to recover.

The people who stood there on that December day could see the valleys and the ravines.

But on that December day, in the winter months,

it was quite apparent that the moonscape that Verdun once had been was pretty much still there.

As far as the eye could see, there were shell craters.

And parts of the Verdun battlefield, perhaps as many as a thousand shells fell for every square meter. It was certainly one

of the most devastating and devastated battlefields of the Great War and the experience of men on both

sides who went through it and survived. They were never quite the same after Verdun. But here on this

smashed almost alien landscape in 1920, this was not just the

meeting of a president and his people to remember the whole battle. They were coming together to

remember a specific episode of that battle, which somehow came to symbolise the sacrifice there at Verdun in 1916. They were coming to

inaugurate a modernist concrete structure that stood like a beacon in that landscape, stood before them

as they arrived in their cars, walked through the concrete entrance in the trench-like approach to where the shelter was.

And that shelter covered the grave of French soldiers who had fallen on this battlefield in June of 1916.

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