At Chemin des Dames, in the countryside some 130 kilometers northeast of Paris, President Francois Hollande attended the memorial service of the First World War Battle of the Aisne, making him the first French leader to do so in a century.

Ahead of Sunday's memorial, Hollande said: "This centenary must make it possible to fully reintegrate Chemin des Dames into the national memory of the Great War, which for too long has been marginalized and overshadowed by the battles of Verdun, the Somme and the Marne."

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Modern warfare World War I is equated with mass destruction like no other war before it. Highly industrialized nations were able to produce large quantities of weapons, including lethal gas. The German soldiers in this picture are waiting for a poison gas attack, but the flying dove above their heads is a sign that the threat is still far away.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Anonymous death The staggering power of heavy artillery meant that dead bodies were mutilated to an unrecognizable state and people simply vanished somewhere in the middle of a battlefield far from home. The exhibition shows how World War I - with its 10 million casualties - changed the way people grieved loved ones they could not bury.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Erasing nationality The ossuary at the Verdun memorial site in France contains the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers. It is an irony of history: In death, the bones of the former enemies are inseparably connected forever.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Remembering the sons Peter Kollwitz was 18 years old when he fell in battle in Flanders, Belgium, in October 1914. His mother, the German sculptress Käthe Kollwitz, depicted the mourning of her son in her art many times in until her own death in 1945.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Finding a place The grieving parents did not have graves to visit. All they were left with were lists with the names of the fallen. That’s why military cemeteries were built as mourning sites. The picture shows Peter Kollwitz's tombstone of in Vladslo, Belgium.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Missing forever Rudyard Kipling was regarded as the most famous British writer in his day and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. When World War I started, he encouraged his son to go to war - and regretted it for the rest of his life. His son John was announced missing in 1915 and his mortal remains were never found.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving What’s left are the names The picture shows the memorial to the victims of World War I at the Tyne Cot cemetery near Ypres in Belgium. The central memorial stones of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries all have the same phrase written on them: "Their name liveth for evermore." The phrase was chosen by Rudyard Kipling.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving An era of memorials The cult of names, which originated in World War I, became the blueprint for the mourning of millions of people whose lives have since been extinguished. The picture on the left shows the memorial at the so-called reloading point in Warsaw from which trains departed to concentration camps during the Holocaust. The picture on the right shows the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Never forget The names of around 58,000 US soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam War have been engraved in the smoothly polished stone of the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial. The number of Vietnamese casualties of the war, which lasted from 1964 to 1975, amounts to millions.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Mourning starts with certainty During the Argentinean military junta, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, the people in power made tens of thousands of political enemies disappear. The mothers of the victims organized themselves and protested every Thursday in front of the presidential palace on the central Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires - until today. They still demand clarification regarding their children's destinies.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving The massacre of Sebrenica The picture shows an investigation team from the UN war crimes tribunal exhuming dozens of Muslim victims. In 1995, Serbs had killed around 8,000 boys and men and buried their bodies in these mass graves.

Missing Sons: A century of grieving Reclaiming the disappeared Half of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US disappeared without a trace. Bereaved people need a site where they can mourn - just as they did 100 years ago. Author: Birgit Görtz / asb



Catastophic loss

After gathering more than one million men, on April 16, 1917, General Robert Nivelle launched an offensive against Germany at the front between Soissons and Reims. The attack - supposed to be a rapid operation thanks to the use of the first war tanks - turned into a fiasco, causing multiple mutinies.

Read: Witness to history - A First World War POW in France

Under the impression that the Germans had been exhausted by the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme, General Nivelle believed a breakthrough offensive at Chemin des Dames could be completed within 48 hours.

187,000 'poilus' killed

But faced with roads destroyed by shelling, the French troops or "poilus" progressed with difficulty. A warren of caves and tunnels left behind by centuries of quarrying were also used by German troops to shelter and escape the French bombardment.

Some 187,000 French troops, including Senegalese infantrymen died in the battle.

View over the river Aisne in the direction of Berry-au-Bac following WWI

The huge defeat had a disastrous effect on morale, resulting in mutiny across many divisions. Of the 554 death sentences handed to mutineers after the Chemin des Dames, 49 resulted in execution. However, Prime Minister Raymond Poincare (1926-29) later pardoned most of those condemned.

In 1998, in the city of Craonne (Aisne), Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin cleared the men who had mutinied saying they should "reintegrate in today's collective memory."

Day of memorial events

Commemorations on Sunday began at dawn with a 5-kilometer (3-mile) walk across the Plateau de Californie, a few kilometers from the village of Craonne.

It was there, on Hollande's arrival, that the Chanson de Craonne was sung by a choir. Ceremonies continued at the Caverne du Dragon, home to the Chemin des Dames Museum where a sculpture by artist Haïm Kern was also to be unveiled, three years after the original was stolen.

Following a recital of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, a remembrance at the German military cemetery was held in the presence of the German ambassador.

Ahead of a vigil on Sunday night, Hollande was also scheduled to give a speech before unveiling a commemorative plaque.