[Trust but Verify]

Dear Lord how appropriate. Damn the French.

[AnAmericanMother]

Here's another, more complicated, view of the sacrifices made for France. It's WWI, and an English viewpoint, but it does give an impression of the scope of the sacrifice - when Helen Turrell stands in the new-made cemetery:

She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.

Rudyard Kipling, The Gardener

How soon they forget . . .