I am also concerned to link Indochinese participation in the war with the "anti-war"and/or anti-colonial movement in Paris and in Indochina. A horrible war by any standards, it was not surprising that many thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians made the supreme sacrifice, or died for France (" mort pour la France)" as written on the epitaphs of those buried in France. While the transformative and emotional experiences of the soldier ( linh tho)-workers in France has been the subject of at least one dedicated study in English (Hill, 2006 2011a 2011b), I am equally concerned with the objective experience of the Indochinese en route to the battlefields, their wartime actions, and intellectual responses. While the lion's share of the "Indochinese" were Vietnamese, Cambodians also made up one battalion. Eventually Indochina would supply some 30 percent of France's colonial forces alongside even larger contingents of Senegalese, Madagascans, and Moroccans and Chinese, in all totaling about half a million. On another level, the article examines the juncture between the worker-soldiers in France and the burgeoning socialist and communist underground in Paris, and back home in Vietnam, as best exemplified by the activities and writings of Ho Chi Minh in the run-up to his now-famous oration at the Versailles Conference.įaced with early setbacks in World War I battles on the Western Front, alongside a massive attrition of manpower, France began to look to its empire and even China as sources of labor alongside soldiers. Besides explaining the battlefield experiences of the Indochinese battalions in the European war – a little studied area – this article seeks to expose the contradictions raised by France's patriotic appeal for "volunteers," versus the domestic anti-colonial movement. Since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry.Alongside even larger numbers of contingents drawn from France's colonial empire, including a large pool of workers sourced from China, successive contingents of "Indochinese" - Vietnamese in addition to Cambodians - were also pressed into both military and labor battalions in World War I battlefields. a couple of poppies from nearby fields decorate a plaque to one French victim of Verdun. not all the memorials honor unknown soldiers. Th erupting shells of a thousand bombardments killed and dug up and mixed and then reinterred the bodies until they intermingled inseparably beneath the mud.
Today in an ossuary near Douaumont, even now smelling of death, rest the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides: skulls, thighs, and - almost indistinguishable - the hobnailed sole of a soldier’s boot. Here the Germans tried to bleed the French army to death. Of all the battle sites along the 350-mile sweep of the Western Front, none has come to symbolize the carnage and futility of World War I’s fighting more than the fields and hills of Verdun.
Here, presents Eisenstaedt’s quietly powerful color pictures from Verdun: images of an idyllic landscape that still bears the scars, and seemingly harbors the ghosts, of “the war to end all wars.” In the spring of 1964, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt-who served as a German artilleryman during World War I and saw action in the terrible fighting at Passchendaele-and correspondent Ken Gouldthorpe traveled to Verdun, in northeastern France, where one of the costliest battles of WWI took place five decades earlier.
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