Twenty years, ten months, and twenty days of “peace”.
And the German people, in particular the soldiers that fought the war, had that screwed feeling which had a great deal with Hitler being so popular. For the life of me, I just cannot see how those idiots (on the winning side) thought WWI would be the war to end all wars, when in fact it just set the stage for the next one. They were arrogant (above all), blind and stupid.
In my later years I’ve come to have compassion for any common soldier of any war, regardless of which side they were on.
There is an article in the Oct/Nov 2018 issue of Canada’s History called “The Last Man”, which discusses the story of a Canadian soldier who died at approximately 10:58AM on November 11 1918. It is an interesting story, as there were conflicting accounts of at what moment precisely he was killed and how (he tried approaching a Belgian nurse who was standing in the doorway of a house when he was shot by a German soldier).
I’m sure there were men killed shortly after the armistice
There is a large are in France that has so many unexploded ordnance from WWI that the French government bought the land and fenced it off from the public except for a narrow hiking path. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of rounds of buried UEX.
A few thoughts.
1) First they try to give you the impression the whole area is barren. Then the lush growth makes it hard to remember a war was fought there.
“What they could not have known then, as they counted the cost, was the damage they had done to the land. “ (from the article)
2) Interesting article on Arsenic and plants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368394/ Been so long since I have read any REAL SCIENCE. In low concentrations, it is a growth stimulator. The mechanism is unknown, like a lot of things in REAL SCIENCE.
There appear to be plants that absorb and process the arsenic, so God has a plan.
3) Arsenic is not created or destroyed. “Arsenic, a metalloid and naturally occurring element, is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust and is found throughout our environment.” Right now it is in the Forest. Maybe a better place than where it was? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4186553/
4) Salvarsan, was hailed as “the arsenic that saved” the world. [4, 5] In 1918 two organic arsenical compounds, Lewisite and Adamsite, vesicant and respiratory irritant agents, were developed by the US Army as chemical warfare weapons but not in time to be used in the war.
Other countries: For example, the Soviet Union produced huge quantities of the material, disposing of approximately twenty thousand tons of it in the Arctic Sea during the late 1940s and ’50s. More recently, a plant specifically designed to incinerate lewisite and mustard gas has become operational at Gorny, Russia.
Interesting history here. We did not use in WWI http://www.historynet.com/weaponry-lewisite-americas-world-war-i-chemical-weapon.htm
This led to a heavy metal antidote, which we still use today.
EVERTHING HAS GOOD POINTS AND BAD POINTS.
Later read
My great-uncle, John Stanley Holmes, who fought with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces was killed two months before the Armistice in France, and is buried there.