Short of a general nuclear exchange, it is hard to imagine mankind contriving a way to kill 300,000 young men in the course of one battle.

Germany and France managed to do that in the World War I Battle of Verdun which began 100 years ago, in February 2016, and dragged on till December of 1916.

The number of dead is so enormous as to make it hard to grasp the magnitude of the bloodletting outside the smallish city in northwest France.

French newspapers help humanize the conflict by casting back to the slaughter of 1916 — when they do stories, usually brief and always sad, about young men who died at Verdun.

Such as the piece this weekend in the Midi Libre newspaper on Leopold Gustave Jean Marie Antoine Frontil, a native of the little Languedoc town of Autignac, whose given names almost rival the years of his life.

He was killed at Verdun when he was 19.

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Perhaps that is a low estimate.

What I did not know about the things growing within a couple hundred yards of where we live, here in the south of France … well, it might have been more like a thousand things.

This came to us on something of an accidental journey.

In the previous week, posters went up that seemed to suggest we could “follow in the path of Perpetua” — the Roman Catholic saint who appears to be the patroness of the town.

That sounded to us like a tour of the historical aspects of the community, and we have lots questions about the chateau, and the bigger buildings, and the church and the history of the place, which goes back a thousand years … and, sure, we would like to do that tour.

Instead, the tour went directly up into the rocky hills north of town, and the “trail of Perpetua” was a misunderstanding of intent. This was a nature tour, not a history tour.

And while in the garden of nature I was made to feel like a fool (and not for the first time) in regards to anything that grows in God’s green earth.

Among the fruits and flowers growing wild:

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This is an interesting concept.

A writer who is perhaps Australian, now in New York, who appears to have done mostly business writing over the past few years … has attempted to explain the Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry to readers of The Guardian, one of Britain’s quality newspapers.

The piece has some nice points, and fits into the preferred British style of “every paragraph must be at least 100 words long” and “the author is the final authority on whatever he happens to be writing about”.

However, the author puts forward some impressions of Curry that don’t seem to jibe with the image closer observers of the player have of Golden State’s golden child.

To wit:

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I am a semi-serious Arsenal fan, over these past six years, and the club drives me crazy. I can only wonder how it feels for those who have been cheering on — and wincing at — the club since said fans were in diapers.

Arsenal, would-be contenders for the Premier League championship nobody seems to want, contrived to squander an early lead and lost, 2-1 at home tonight, to Swansea City, who a few minutes ago were looking at a relegation battle.

It was a perfect example of Arsenal’s drift across multiple competitions this season, which finds them playing every third or fourth day and of late not impressing anywhere.

It led Barney Ronay of The Guardian to marvel at “Arsenal’s ability, week in, week out, to look like the best really terrible football team in Europe.”

Let’s get up to date on Arsenal anxiety:

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This must be tough for Major League Soccer clubs and their fans.

The steady drumbeat of failure and defeat in the Concacaf Champions League.

Tonight, it was the LA Galaxy crushed 4-0 by Santos Laguna (after a scoreless first leg in Carson) and DC United going down 3-1 on aggregate to Queretaro after the latter took the first leg 2-0.

MLS fans will be shocked if the Seattle Sounders can survive surrendering two away goals to defending champion Club America in a draw in Seattle … and if Real Salt Lake can overcome a 2-0 deficit in a home game versus UNAM.

So, how long has it been since an MLS team won the local confederation’s top club prize?

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We have made it to the end of the French hunting season, which is a bit of a relief.

More than 1.2 million French citizens had hunting licenses for the five-month 2015-16 season, which ended today (along with February), and we saw more than a few of them out and about on weekends in this part of the Languedoc.

And now we know why people who work outdoors, and especially in fields, wear fluorescent vests of orange or lime green — because several people are killed by hunters in France each season. By accident.

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I pretty much never shout in anger.

Except when I am alone inside a car and in a hurry. In that case, anything is possible. Or even likely.

Even when driving to church.

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Today was the rainiest day I have encountered in France and while cooped up in the rental home I read the whole of Kurt Larson‘s 1999 book Isaac’s Storm.

That is the book that launched Larson on his career of “popular narrative nonfiction”, as the New York Times described it. Or to explain a little, books of real events presented in a style that reminds us of fiction.

Isaac’s Storm recounts what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history — a hurricane that killed about 6,000 people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. (Other U.S. disasters here.)

And as I sat inside the house in southern France, it dawned on me:

France seems almost preternaturally protected from natural disasters.

Consider:

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It was getting to a point where the old joke seemed appropriate.

“If only Sunil Gulati were alive …”

For years, the U.S. had seemed a fellow-traveler in the ranks of regional soccer — let alone having any weight in the global governance of the game.

Trinidad’s profoundly corrupt Jack Warner controlled Concacaf, the regional confederation for North and Central America and the Caribbean. Understandably, being obscured by Warner (in tandem with his American stooge-turned-FBI-informant, Chuck Blazer) left Gulati and U.S. soccer in eclipse.

That may have changed today.

It appears that Gulati and the U.S. delegation were pivotal in getting eventual winner Gianni Infantino from a narrow lead, in the first round of voting, to a 23-vote victory in the second round.

This is important for two reasons:

–It kept Sheikh Salman of Bahrain, who has been dogged by accusations of human rights violations but was the heavy favorite to win the election, from winning the Fifa presidency. The sheikh also comes from the Asian Football Confederation, which never has been known for probity.

–And it thrusts Gulati and U.S. soccer into Infantino’s mind as apparently vital for redirecting first-round votes for Prince Ali of Jordan to the Swiss candidate, who secured the presidency with 115 votes in the second round, to Sheikh Salman’s 88.

This could redound to the favor of U.S. Soccer in several ways.

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This English-language aggregator of news in France sometimes generates lighter items about culture and life for anglophones in La France.

One of them is a list of rural French habits we might pick up while living in small-town France.

One of them, the first … yes, I can see already. This saying “bonjour” to literally everyone with whom you make eye contact. To not say bonjour is a major social faux pas.

The rest?

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