![]() ![]() Sophie’s Great War Tours stays at Les Jardins du Mess, a lovely modern hotel with fantastic facilities. Anyone that books a private tour with Sophie’s Great War Tours has the services of a full time chauffeur from pick up to drop off. You can either hire a car or book a local tour so that you can easily get around. Once you are in the region, you will need a car to get around. If you are starting from France, it is possible to take a train from Paris to Verdun. If France could no longer fight, Britain too would be unable to continue the fighting and Germany would become victors. The Battle of Verdun, 21 February-15 December 1916, was the German Army’s plan to destroy the French Army, to “bleed her white”. It is what I call a very physical landscape. ![]() What people love about visiting Verdun is that there is so much still to see, and it doesn’t feel like too much has changed in the last 100 years. In the Germans’ nine-hour opening bombardment on 21st February 1916, they sent across 2.5 million artillery shells! While nature tries hard with the help of time to reclaim the landscape, it is understandably irreversibly changed. The statistics that surround the First World War’s longest battle are almost too staggering to believe. They can perhaps be seen most clearly across the battlefields of Verdun. Despite Machen's attempts to prevent it, his story, which was entirely fictional, quickly inspired a popular and strongly believed account of "the Angels of Mons." The Battle of Verdun occurred two years later and there was no association with angelic apparitions, but Rita's nickname does seem to be inspired by the "Angels of Mons" story.The scars of war are left upon the landscapes that we visit on a First or Second World War Tour. ![]() A 1914 newspaper short story about the battle, "The Bowmen," written by horror-story specialist Arthur Machen, told the tale of how during the battle, soldiers on both sides saw "supernatural" medieval archers appearing in the sky and causing the enemy to retreat. It lasted almost a year and an estimated one million men on both sides died, and Mons was the site in Belgium of a battle in 1914 and spawned tales of what many consider an otherworldly miracle.
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