The French Ministry of Defence has a public database of soldiers who died on duty during the 1st World War. I just found the entry for this officer:
http://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/en/ark:/4069...
The most interesting part is the Images link (with an eye): it will show you a scan of the official death certificate from 1918.
There are 1.3 millions soldiers in this database. 3 of them from my family.
It surprised me to see that many of the british data sources are of the "visit the official archive or buy digital access" kind. Also, judging from a few samples at http://www.naval-military-press.com/cd-rom/, most of it is Windows only, and not priced for impulse buyers (for example 220 pounds for a database of all British who died)
It's amazing that one of the first allies of the U.S. revolution and one of the staunchest supporters of the U.S. both militarily and politically - since the inception of the United States - is seen by most Americans as "cowards who never fight" and are the butt of jokes.
That isn't true in the part of the US I live in. We recognize the contribution of the French. Maybe ignorant people here don't know this, but then there are a lot of those everywhere.
Under Napoleon, France had an empire that ruled over most of Europe, exceeding even Germany's later attempt at same. To describe France as a country that surrenders easily is to declare yourself ignorant of history.
France was well prepared for a war with Germany, but what they weren't prepared for was the new tactics Germany had developed. Aircraft and tanks were a revolution in combat, they'd never been used on that scale before. France was the first country to get a lesson in how difficult it can be to defend against a well coordinated assault.
It's worth noting that France's army at the opening of World War II was vastly beyond the capability of America's. It was well trained, well equipped, heavily fortified along the border, and expecting Germany to make a move.
Well I read the article, but at the same time if the article's whole point is about how unchanged this room is and how we should see it I expect a gallery of images showing off the room.
This has great historical value. Someone should come there with high resolution cameras and make a 360° street-view like panorama. I would love to see this room and learn how people lived then.
I doubt it's typical or even genuinely untouched. Maybe he was a tidy-freak, or maybe he tidied it specially before going to the war. But it's surely not a typical person's room. That takes away some of the historical interestingness.
The room appears to be filled with a lot of interesting personal effects, but it's hardly "unchanged." Looks more like a museum exhibit than a room someone would actually live in.
Yeah, but along the way you'd lose an ephemeral something. You'd stop having a single place in space frozen in time, and start having a collection of artifacts in a museum. Artifacts from the first World War are not so scarce as a room unchanged for a century.
In Oslo there's a museum called Norsk Folkemuseum [1] (Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) that includes 160 buildings that were dismantled and moved - some of them from other parts of the country.
Ranging from a stave church built ca. 1212 [2] that was moved to the present location in the 1880's, to a collection of five buildings built in the 1800's in an old part of Oslo that were moved to the museum when that part of Oslo was re-developed in the 1960's.
I visited the Getty Museum this summer and found the displayed rooms of European apartments quite great and interesting, as I was fascinated by the Napoleon III ones at the Louvre.
