Growing up I read alot as a kid about the British in WWI and the battles at Ypres/Passchendaele, the Somme and so on. The French I knew were doing their thing somewhere, and were taking appalling casualties, but I didn't really know much of the detail. Well, a lot of them were at Verdun. Now it is an enormous national monument - something like 9 or 12 villages were destroyed, and there was so much unexploded ordinance about they didn't bother to try to rebuild the area for miles around. They built an enormous, sombre ossuary at the top of the hill to hold the remains of 130,000 unidentified French "polius" (it means "unshaved") and mourned their losses. (All through France - every village and town - you will see sad little monuments to WWI losses.
... read more
