All quiet on the Western Front.....
 

....as haunting images of the Great War's battlefields are revealed before Remembrance Day.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...lefields.html#

Note: Thursday, Nov 10 2011

RIP to all the brave men from both sides who lost their lives during the conflict.

And those are some very haunting pics, hard to imagine what they would have looked like nearly 100 years ago.

The before and after pictures of Fort Douaumont near Verdun gives one a sobering glimpse.

http://www.strangecosmos.com/images/content/135663.jpg

Good post this one, thanks. In today's hussle bussle life it's easy to over look what men went through in the 14/18 war. I often google map these places and I am humbled by the French and their refusal to plow these land marks under, I'm not sure the British would have been able to muster that level of respect.

I read an interesting little article on an Amazon review where a man describes the first world war as a european civil war, he even went as far as describe WW2 as the same, a civil war.

I find this point of view very interesting because of the fact that Britian was in 1914 and uptil the 50s, still teaching school children about their Saxon heritage. How quick we all are to put aside who we all are for war.

I have a excellent series on DVD about WWI, called "The Great War", which was originally broadcast in the 70's on the BBC. Of all the episodes, the worst has to be the one on the British dug in around Ypres/Passchendale where there were no trenches to speak of, but a landscape of shell holes filled with water/corpses/etc.

On friday I will paying my respects at my towns war memorial -we shall never forget.

I get a little resentful when I view footafe of the Somme....that is where my grandfather was buried alive in an explosion.

Thanfully he was rescued but he was stone deaf after that for the remainder of his life.

So sorry to hear, was he in the army or a civilian?

Durham Light Infantry iirc...would need to check with my mother (he was her father).

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valour led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honour of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

Ah I see, If I remember correctly Durham was quite a famous regiment right?

The name sounds very very familiar in any case

Good post, some interesting photos there.

I remember seeing this series, the horrendous images made there mark on all who watched. There where no imbedded news teams in those day's, the first a person new about tragedy was by telegram.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham_Light_Infantry

http://www.1914-1918.net/dli.htm