The Germans have World War I cemeteries in France, also. They’re very somber places. I can understand why many Europeans questioned their entire civilization after the horrors of the Great War.
My daughter and I visited 14 battlefields across northern France and Belgium last August: From Mte St Michel on the west coast over through Normandy (1944), Crecy, Agincourt, Paris, Waterloo, Dunkirk, Sommes (Fromme-Ypres) area, Battle of the Bulge, Verdun.
Even the museums showing the British losses in Belgium and the still-shell-torn woods and hills around Verdun are sobering, unsettling to read and walk through.
WW1 was the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the human race. The wholesale slaughter of an entire generation of men, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the disastrous Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Great Britain that redrew the map of the Middle East and the rise of the House of Saud gave us Hitler and Islamic Terrorism. I have no sympathy for Europe.
One thing I noticed even then was that the Germans constructed their memorials simply but effectively (the loser rarely has the resources to memorialize on a heroic scale), and they did seem oppressively solemn. (The tunnel in Fort Douaumont where the remains of those killed in the accidental explosion are forever walled-in is a compact example.)
Mr. niteowl77