Somme battle...body density map, quite appalling !

[Mossie]

RIP all those brave souls who died on the Western Front.

This body density map was made when the ground was eventually cleared. Bear in mind that this is only one small part of the Western Front and the squares only represent 230 x 230 mtrs !!

http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/ ... Image5.jpg

[lestweforget]

Awful. When I look at the War memorial in the village where I grew up which was even smaller back then , and see the amount of names against the First World War section , it makes my heart bleed. It truly was a lost generation. Dulce et decorum est........

[Sean Curtiss]

I read in a book that so many soldiers died in trenches that sometimes it piled up to 3 to 4 corpses since these couldn’t be buried. The soldiers that remained had to fight standing on top of them. Although real, I can’t conceive an image of horror like that. And this war was to end all wars.

[Anowreck]

Because WW1 was, relatively, rather static, the scars it created on the land are still there to this day. If you ever visit France, to visit the Butte de Vauquois is to get a real feeling, not just of the slaughter, but how close the opposing trenches often were to each other. It is then possible to understand why bodies were only removed when the battle lines moved - which was not very often. The nearby Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery is a beautifully maintained memorial to the Dough-boys who fought in the Argonne, and it is pleasing to record that the German Cemetery in nearby Montfaucon is well, and respectfully maintained.