Des ANDELYS VERDUN

The idea and wish to write this book was triggered by the centennial commemoration of World War I end, on November 11, 2018. 

In the family archives I had come across a set of documents, mainly notebooks, workbooks, textbooks belonging to Uncle Henri when he was a cadet at the preparatory Military academy, as well letters he had written from the front between 1915 and 1916, year of his death at the Battle of Verdun. 

After reading these deeply moving posthumous testimonies of this young hero for whom love and devotion to his country was the primary passion, I felt that his story, similar to the story of so many others of his fellow combatants, had to be told, could not be allowed to sink into oblivion, into the "black death of oblivion".

It was not easy task, because I possessed only sparse, incomplete, disparate documents and had to reconstruct the story in its chronological order by cross-checking, juxtaposing texts. In this endeavor I was fortunate enough to come across the history of the 68th Infantry Regiment where Henri was incorporated and which retraces all the daily actions of this unit.

This modest book, among many others much more important and scholarly, tries only to pay homage, the more so for personal reasons, to these heroic soldiers who fought in hellish conditions and made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause which they believed worthy of their sacrifice: freedom.