In my family there's a story about some relatives who lived in a village near Ypres. Their living room had a big iron stove. When the Germans invaded they they hid some jewelry in a hole under that stove, and fled like everybody else.
After the war they returned to the village, wanting to retrieve the jewels. Not only were they unable to locate the stove, or the house. They were unable to locate where the street had been.
Wow, I was just in France last month and visited the Douaumont ossuary near Verdun. The whole area is eerie. The landscape is just as shown in those photos. It looks like a moonscape. Just driving along, you see craters and hills on both sides of the road. Metal still sticking out randomly. Decaying bunkers all around.
The ossuary itself was an incredible place (120,000 buried there). For those of us not from Europe, it was a lesson in the horrors of WWI that was present for the residents of the continent that has no equal in the US.
I think you might underestimate how bloody the American Civil War was, especially since it was 50 years before the improved killing technologies of WW1.
There were more casualties in just this one battle than in the whole Civil War though. And the Battle of the Somme that was being fought at the same time had even more dead in the same timeframe.
These two battles fought in 1916 add up to more dead soldiers than there were participants in the whole Civil War. The combined population of France and Germany in 1916 was also about three times that of the US in 1860, but I think that doesn't make up for the x10 casualties.
That's total killed for all combatants during WW1 though. American casualties during the Civil War were comparable to European countries individually during WW1.
I find it fascinating how prevalent chemical warfare was in WWI, and then it mostly stopped afterwards because everybody realized it really sucked and nobody wanted to trigger another round.
I think it underscores how fortunate the timing of the development of nuclear weapons was not too much later. They were developed just in time to be used in the waning days of WWII, and as such were only used twice in combat, which seems to have been enough to convince everyone to try not to use them again. Imagine if they had been developed before the war, with all the major powers exchanging atom bombs once the fighting started. Or imagine if they had been developed after the war ended by conventional means, and WWIII developed between the US and the USSR because nobody really realized how terrible atomic warfare would be.
The red zone has pretty much been cleared in urban areas. I actually live exactly in it, west of Lille, and all the area is either built up or farmed.
I believe it's mostly in the more sparsely uninhabited Aisne and Ardennes that there are still no-go zones. In the Nord they are less common (though they do exist, like around Vimy).
I think WWI leftover ammunition in the north is actually less a problem today than all the unexploded US and British bombs from WWII (which are usually around city centers).
The red zones can be inhabited but most of the ground is either polluted either completely destroyed. And as the boards said some zones still have armed explosives in them.
I went there once. It's pretty beautiful when you forget it has been caused by a useless and slaughtering war.
I thought it was pretty common knowledge in France that live ammunition for the Great War are still found in this part of the territory and should one find such a device they should immediately contact the Gendarmerie.
I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts. He recently just finished a 6 part series on WWI titled Blueprint for Armageddon. He tries to convey what it was like for the people involved. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
The story and pictures were intriguing, but then at the end: "There’s a true story for you, FOX News." Wat? That's jarringly out of place w.r.t. the rest of the article, and leaves an unpleasant political aftertaste for something that would have been fine without it.
I realize that everything is politics, but bashing FOX News is just a subset of telling the truth. It is political speech in the same sense that mathematics is political speech.
Questioning the value of truth is something people occasionally do, but I generally find their arguments rooted in a cynical worldview at best, and completely unconvincing at worst.
