"There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass. Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere." (Private R.A. Colwell, Passchendaele, January 1918).
In WW1, the battles of the Western front concentrated in France and Belgium. For four long years, brutal trench war became normal life for soldiers. "The conditions beggar description, the trenches are flooded and have fallen in. There is no cover either in front, support, or reserve lines, and men are being evacuated with frostbite and exhaustion by the hundred. Today four men were dug out of the mud who had been unable to move for three days. The conditions were so bad that we were unable to see the actual trenches.." -Mr. Wood, trenches in 1916/17 Right: Western front, WW1 France Source: Daily Mail |
The Treaty of Versailles that ended WW1 was signed in Versailles, France, on the 28th of June, 1919. France had lost more than 1.5 million soldiers and never fully recovered before WW2. France would be quickly defeated in WW2, when the Third Reich invaded through Belgium avoiding the Maginot Line, and through new blitzkrieg tactics conquered France in less than six weeks. "The Maginot Line dominated French military thinking in the inter-war years. The Maginot Line was a vast fortification that spread along the French/German border but became a military liability when the Germans attacked France in the spring of 1940 using blitzkrieg – a tactic that completely emasculated the Maginot Line’s purpose." -History Learning Site, 2014 Left: A diagram of the Maginot Line in France Source: Telesaur |