It is too late to evoke this business which occurred two months ago at the time when was going to appear our preceding bulletin? Distressed during 48 hours, being unaware of which were the authors and the mobiles of this act, the Old ones of 1914"18 and Verdun in their great majority, deeply anxious and were disturbed.

This gesture was strange in what it inevitably had of clandestine, but by the reason, by the respect of the coffin, it was not a profanation like wrote some.
But this disorder became emotion after the declaration of that which asserted the responsibility for it; it acted for him: "of a question of honor and an act of faith…" Thus this man, pertaining to a generation younger than ours, which did not know anything of the pioneering days of Verdun and almost anything of that tragic of 1940, intended to carry out the wish of our Head,

Lesson can be for the groins, which. did not know to impose their desire on the government.

Profanations of coffins, alas, one finds some in our history: the Revolution dispersed in the Seine the bones of our Kings.

This act deserves even less the qualifier "of odious" employee per Mr. Pierre Messmer. Not, odious… it is to have let die this old man saver of the country, in a bottom of pit, with small fire, during six years and to have refused to him so far the burial which it asked.

For the hour, deaths of Douaumont always await their Head and do not understand that this wish is still in authority.

And we have any reason to believe that if Hubert Massol and his friends had achieved their goal, these deaths at the bottom of their tomb had murmured: "Cheer and thank you".

 

A.M., un de "Ceux de Verdun"

article published in:

the Voice of the Marshal n° 7 - avril/mai 1973