1918 VAPTU - Video Art Project The Unimaginable - 1918

1918 Video Art Project The Unimaginable - 04:55 This short film tells a story about a long gone history. In a apparently untouched landscape. You need to find the unimaginable there. And then you come to the opposite, deeply sunk in snow and frozen surfaces. Almost the reality of then: “This beauty, has a thin skin. Scratch the land, and imagine, if you can, what lies buried beneath today”.Try to imagine the River Meuse… A valley aims the river from France in the south, through Belgium and the Netherlands, to the North Sea. Its people tied together by the Meuse… connected by riverbeds and rail beds, deer paths, old trails, country roads, and highways great and small. Drive off the beaten path in the tracks of those who came by yesterday… Through soft hammocks of summer meadows, now winter-dusted, a stark desert with cold dunes of fresh snow. This beauty, has a thin skin. Scratch the land, and imagine, if you can, what lies buried beneath today. The valley is a border between Empires, the land itself, a barrier, where great armies of flesh and bone came together, were broken and bled. More than nine million dead, the earth and wood no protection from the maelstrom of steel and lead. Unimaginable, how they died… blown to bits and maimed by mortars, bombs and grenades. Unimaginable…soldiers harvested too young, by the thousands mowed down by machine guns. Unimaginable… the terrible sight and sound of approaching tanks through the haze. Unimaginable… the grim horror, of trenches full of dead soldiers drowned in their own lungs destroyed by poison gas. Unimaginable… the diseases - typhus, malaria, influenza. Unimaginable… the madness of men, when this war ended, to think it would never come again. Unimaginable… the madness of men.