Ils ne passeront pas!

Verdun
Where the flower of French youth
Was crushed
Where the German Empire crashed
Into the wall
Of French resolve
Who had promised
To let none pass

A long, unnatural, violent dream
From which no one would wake
21 February–18 December 1916
300,ooo dead
A landscape no longer beautiful
Even if made perfect
The blood red
Would make the fields
Less than pristine

A 9 month battle
Tearing two empires
From the safety
Of the world afire



Verdun is done
And forgotten
Except by the monuments
Historians with their books
And the dead
Who haunt the fields

BELLEAU WOOD

In the Belleau Wood an angel sobs
Surrounded by trees and wildlife
She sits at a shrine
Remembering the lives
No longer here already gone
The legacies that faded
Around some point of anger
Broken trees and bodies tossed
Into the air
In a battle fought by tribes
Over land and emotions
Over anger without reason
At such a cost
The trees were shattered
Lives were scattered
In a war like others
In the end what matters
Nothing now,
To the bodies buried
Under trees and moss
But for the trees still standing
And the soldier families
They remember the lost

Account of the battle
The battlefield today