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Virtually time travel back to 1918. Peering into this room in France is as if you are stepping into a time portal into the early 1900s. The bedroom, which belonged to a French soldier, hasn't been touched since 1918. If you drive three hours southwest of Paris, you'll find Belabre, a quaint French village with a population of fewer than 1,000. That is where you will discover the home of the parents of Hubert Guy Pierre Alphonse Rochereau. When World War I was ravaging Europe, a young Rochereau was deployed to the Belgian battlefield. Sadly, Dragoons' Second Lieutenant Hubert Rochereau...

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. Neither the winners nor the losers of World War I were happy with the formal conclusion to the bloodbath. The traditional criticism of the treaty is that the victorious French and British democracies did not listen to the pleas of leniency from progressive American President Woodrow Wilson. Instead, they added insult to the German injury by blaming Germany for starting the war. The final treaty demanded German reparations for war losses. It also forced Germany to cede territory to its victorious neighbors. The harsh terms of the...

It is not too far-fetched to say that Christian Europe officially died on June 28, 1914. On that day, the heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife were gunned down on the streets of Sarajevo. In modern parlance, we would call the assassin, 19 year-old Serbian radical Gavrilo Princip, a terrorist. His act would lead directly to the outbreak of the Great War a little over a month later. Following is an article that appeared in The Outlook, an important New York-based political and social journal, from a week after the assassinations. It is notable that the...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on French soil, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be in London at a ceremony in Westminster Abby with Queen Elizabeth II. But while the leaders visit the capitals of Germany's wartime enemies, at home there are no national commemorations planned for the centenary of the Nov. 11 armistice that brought an end to the four-year war that killed more than 2 million of its troops and left 4 million wounded. Next week, German parliament is holding a combined commemoration of the 100th anniversary...

The Queen was applauded today in an unprecedented mark of appreciation as she led millions of Britons in remembering the fallen. The monarch laid a wreath on the Cenotaph at the national Remembrance Day service alongside senior Royals, veterans and the Prime Minister despite heightened police checks, just days after officers thwarted an alleged terror plot. The spontaneous smattering of applause, as she left Whitehall in central London, was a rare sound for a remembrance service usually characterised by respectful silence, and may have been in tribute to her fortitude at turning out to the service despite terror fears. Hundreds...

The entrance is a wet hole in the earth little bigger than an animal burrow, obscured by thorny brush in a secluded wood in northeastern France. I’m following Jeff Gusky, a photographer and physician from Texas who has explored dozens of underground spaces like this one. Together we slither through the muddy hole into the darkness below. Soon the passage opens up, and we crawl forward on hands and knees. The glow from our headlamps wavers along the dusty chalk walls of the century-old tunnel, which slopes away from us down into the shadows. After a few hundred feet the...

On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. (…) That deadly summer unfolded 100 years ago, and the world truly was never the same. Civilization was soon engaged in a horrific conflict marred by mechanized warfare previously unimaginable: tanks, subs, battleships, air power, machine guns with names like “the Devil’s paint brush,” and legions of poison gas—the largest-scale use of chemical weapons in history.

We are our brothers’ keepers, and we need to be wise as we plan international policy and personal treatment. Nevertheless, it is idealistic and unreasonable to expect that the insane consequences of our human condition will be eradicated this side of eternity.

Serbia’s government is commissioning a statue to honor Gavrilo Princip, the boy-assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Novosti, Serbia’s largest newspaper, revealed this week. To avoid any speculation about its intended symbolism, the statue will be erected atop the Belgrade Fortress on June 28, the 100th anniversary of Princip’s fateful gunshots, which, conventional wisdom holds, ushered in World War I. “Serbia and the Serbian people are thus righting a wrong committed against Princip, who has never before had a monument dedicated to him,” writes the pro-government paper.

The following photos were taken from 1914-1918 by my great-grandfather Lt. Walter Koessler during his time as a German officer in the first World War. They're part of a collection of over a thousand photos, stereographs and their negatives that my family has been saving for a century. This is an unusually large and complete collection, and I've taken on the task of preserving it and printing it so other people can experience this history too. These photos have never been published before.

This week the dominoes started to fall with Germany declaring war on Russia on August 1. Today the 3rd, Germany declares war on France. Tomorrow Britain will declare war on Germany for violating the Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgium neutrality. A century of technological progress will be turned on its creators. The self-confidence of Europe will be shattered to be replaced by the nihilism and moral decadence that we still live with today. I am currently reading Anna Karenina. In the back of my mind this world so brought to life by Tolstoy will be destroyed within the lifetimes of...

It is the spontaneous gestures that tell the story behind the ceremony, the moments of real emotion that cut through it all to lay bare the thoughts on people’s minds. Today, as Henry Allingham struggled in vain against the infirmities of old age as he attempted to rise to his feet, it told a powerful story of remembrance and loss. Almost everyone knows the name of Henry Allingham now - and Harry Patch and Bill Stone, Britain’s surviving veterans from the First World War. The last living reminders of a generation that sustained such terrible losses, they are the symbols...

  Last female veteran of the First World War dies aged 109 Last updated at 20:19pm on 29.08.08    Gladys Powers, 109, died this month in Canada. She was thought to be the last female veteran from WW1. The last female First World War veteran has died aged 109.British-born Gladys Powers died at her home in British Columbia, Canada, on August 14, the Ministry of Defence said.She was born in Lewisham, south London and joined the Women's Auxiliary Corps aged 15, after fibbing about her age and later served with the Women's RAF.  All but a few of the...

They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, hurling themselves from the trenches before vanishing in a hail of German bullets so thick that it was described by one witness as a "crisscrossed lattice of death". Now, more than 90 years after hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers died and disappeared in the First World War killing fields of northern France, historians believe they have found several mass graves containing the remains of the "lost army". The find is the biggest of its kind since the end of the Great War and may lead to the discovery of 399 soldiers...

Canada's sole surviving WWI vet celebrates 107th birthday By: James Stevenson 570 News (Kitchener, Ontario) July 18, 2007 - 17:52 SPOKANE, Wash. (CP) - Canada's last known surviving veteran of the First World War is celebrating his 107th birthday with a slice of cake and plenty of humble pie. John (Jack) Babcock says the reason he's getting so much attention is not for what he accomplished in the war, but because he is the last one standing. Still, he says, he doesn't mind the visitors - particularly the female ones. Surrounded by family and reporters at his home in...

When the silence fell over Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday morning, it seemed to Canon Frederick Scott, chaplain of the 1st Canadian Division, as if the war had gone to sleep. The silence lasted only a few minutes, perhaps as long as a quarter of an hour. But it seemed so much longer, and was remembered long after the fact because of the cacophony that would follow. Every soldier waiting that April morning for the battle to begin in the ravaged field in northeastern France noted the quiet and an unnatural stillness. Canon Scott, a 55-year-old Anglican minister who just...

The Vimy Flag:"Under the orders of your devoted officers in the coming battle you will advance or fall where you stand facing the enemy. To those who will fall I say 'You will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons. Your name will be revered forever and ever by your grateful country, and God will take you unto Himself'."~ Arthur Currie, Commander, Canadian Corps Special Order before Vimy Ridge, Mar 27, 1917. PM wants Red Ensign to fly at Vimy, sources say Alex Dobrota Toronto...

The New York Times June 18, 2006 Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall By CRAIG S. SMITH CHÂTEL-CHÉHÉRY, France — On Oct. 8, 1918, Cpl. Alvin Cullum York and 16 other American doughboys stumbled upon more than a dozen German soldiers having breakfast in a boggy hollow here. The ensuing firefight ended with the surrender of 132 Germans and won Corporal York a promotion to sergeant, the Congressional Medal of Honor and a place in America's pantheon of war heroes....

Revealed: an unknown soldier of Ypres by Neil Tweedie Eighty-five years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The Great War, the war meant to end all wars, was over. The horrors of the trenches are now passing over the horizon, from living human memory into history. But the battlegrounds of France and Belgium continue to give up their secrets. Yesterday, a few miles north of Ypres, the remains of another nameless British soldier were being unearthed. Not much was left - a few bones,...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. His new book is A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.   FP: Victor Hanson, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.Hanson: Thank you Jamie for having me back.FP: In your new book, you draw some powerful...