War Wonks
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For the past 3 weeks my family (2 adults, a 16 year old and 2 large dogs) were travelling around Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France in our 1976 VW Campervan. The highlight for me was Verdun - a lot of the famous WWI battlefields have been ploughed out other than a few show trenches etc but at Verdun the French decided to plant forests over much of the battlefield so any walk in those forests is almost overwhelmingly poignant - under the tree cover is a shattered land of craters, trenches and earthworks where 10s of millions shells blasted the land apart and killed so many that some land was more human remains than earth. The ossuary at Douaumont contains the bones of over 130,000 unidentified soldiers which have been found over the subsequent years in that blasted landscape, and they are still finding more. And then there are the destroyed villages, nothing left but shell craters, grassed over with posts showing where the streets were, where the houses were, who lived there. But it was the forest which got me, I have visited a lot of the WWI and WWII sites in Europe, but the forest of Verdun is the only place I have ever truly felt able to come within even a fraction of understanding of what it must have been like.
To summarise something Harry Patch[^] once said, with all wars, eventually you have to talk, so why not talk first before so many people have to die?
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To summarise something Harry Patch[^] once said, with all wars, eventually you have to talk, so why not talk first before so many people have to die?
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All the more reason.
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All the more reason.
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I'd like to visit one of those places, if only to get a grasp of what a battlefield was like at the time. All my grandparents have been involved in WWII. My grandfathers were both captured, one in Algeria (he returned home only in 1946), the other in Italy and then deported to Germany. Funnily, he met my grandmother in a prisony camp. They've been very lucky to come home safe, although deeply changed. What war really changes is not the land, but people.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
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Quote:
The final payments ended up being made on 3 October 2010
Glad thats over ;)
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I'd like to visit one of those places, if only to get a grasp of what a battlefield was like at the time. All my grandparents have been involved in WWII. My grandfathers were both captured, one in Algeria (he returned home only in 1946), the other in Italy and then deported to Germany. Funnily, he met my grandmother in a prisony camp. They've been very lucky to come home safe, although deeply changed. What war really changes is not the land, but people.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
My father was born between the wars, growing up he was used to seeing blokes with limbs missing, blinded, bits of their head missing etc but he said the worst was on warm days when the men he never usually saw would be wheeled out into the street to feel the sun on their faces, men who had had their minds obliterated in various hellish trenches.
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For the past 3 weeks my family (2 adults, a 16 year old and 2 large dogs) were travelling around Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France in our 1976 VW Campervan. The highlight for me was Verdun - a lot of the famous WWI battlefields have been ploughed out other than a few show trenches etc but at Verdun the French decided to plant forests over much of the battlefield so any walk in those forests is almost overwhelmingly poignant - under the tree cover is a shattered land of craters, trenches and earthworks where 10s of millions shells blasted the land apart and killed so many that some land was more human remains than earth. The ossuary at Douaumont contains the bones of over 130,000 unidentified soldiers which have been found over the subsequent years in that blasted landscape, and they are still finding more. And then there are the destroyed villages, nothing left but shell craters, grassed over with posts showing where the streets were, where the houses were, who lived there. But it was the forest which got me, I have visited a lot of the WWI and WWII sites in Europe, but the forest of Verdun is the only place I have ever truly felt able to come within even a fraction of understanding of what it must have been like.
Amongst the most detestable events of WW I was the armistice/peace. Scheduling it for a specific month/day/hour - and continue killing until the last minute. It's a level of insanity that very possibly exceeds the war, itself.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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Amongst the most detestable events of WW I was the armistice/peace. Scheduling it for a specific month/day/hour - and continue killing until the last minute. It's a level of insanity that very possibly exceeds the war, itself.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
I have a letter from a not-so-distant relative who was in the RFC describing how he went on a raid that morning and shot down a German observation balloon. He didn't go after the parachuting observer on his way down though because of the armistice. He also describes the scenes of jubilation among the French and Belgians whom he describes as "much more demonstrative" than the British.
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I'd like to visit one of those places, if only to get a grasp of what a battlefield was like at the time. All my grandparents have been involved in WWII. My grandfathers were both captured, one in Algeria (he returned home only in 1946), the other in Italy and then deported to Germany. Funnily, he met my grandmother in a prisony camp. They've been very lucky to come home safe, although deeply changed. What war really changes is not the land, but people.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
Dario Solera wrote:
What war really changes is not the land, but people.
The land heals over time but the mind doesn't as easily.
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