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First World War battlefield in Verdun still a danger with thousands of exploded shells 100 years on Nearly 100 years since the end of the First World War and there are still areas of France unsafe to be visited because of unexploded shells. Some 300,000 soldiers were killed in the Battle of Verdun between France and Germany from February to December 1916. During the onslaught, around six million shells - including many containing mustard gas - were fired by the opposing sides. One million of those failed to explode. Dozens of unexploded shells are unearthed every day. At the end...

​Exploring the impact of World War One on British, German and French art Marking the 100 years since the end of World War One, Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One looks at how artists responded to the physical and psychological scars left on Europe. Art was used in many ways in the tumultuous period after the end of the war, from documenting its destructive impact, to the building of public memorials and as a social critique. This fascinating and moving exhibition shows how artists reacted to memories of war in many ways. George Grosz and Otto Dix...

At precisely 3.10am, the guns thundered into life and the soldiers rose, lit up cigarettes and followed the booming artillery barrage into battle, their objective a French village named Le Hamel. As dawn loomed it was all over. The village had fallen, casualties were mercifully light (by World War One standards) and victory was complete. In his detailed planning, Australian commander Lieutenant General John Monash calculated this would take 90 minutes. It actually took 93. The Battle of Hamel, fought on July 4, 1918, was a sign of what was to come as allied forces achieved battlefield mastery after three...

It is the whisky-making Scottish island, world famous for its peaty single malts and warm hospitality. But the isle of Islay, in the Inner Hebrides, is now being recognised for an almost forgotten example of huge courage and humanity. A hundred years ago, Islay was on the frontline in the battle at sea during World War One. The island coped with mass casualties from two major troopship disasters just eight months apart. ... Between them, the sinkings of the SS Tuscania in February and HMS Otranto in October, claimed the lives of about 700 men in the last year of...

Warships from Britain, America, France and Germany have gathered over the wreck of a World War One troopship to pay respect to the 700 men who died in two disasters off Islay. More than 200 US soldiers died when the Tuscania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Islay in February in 1918. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43988158

Macron will offer an oak sapling taken from the scene of a key World War One battle, where the Marine Corps repelled a German offensive in the final year of the conflict almost exactly a century ago, the French presidency said on Sunday. The sapling grew close to the so-called “Devil Dog” fountain, a spot that has become legendary within Marines ranks. It is where U.S. soldiers are said to have gathered after the battle, which took place in June 1918 in Belleau Wood, about 100 km (60 miles) northeast of Paris in the Champagne region. It won’t be Macron’s...

NEWBURY, England -- World War I began as most wars do with patriotic fervor and predictions of a quick end. It lasted four years. While the match igniting the "war to end all wars" was lit by the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, formal declarations of war occurred 100 years ago on July 28 (Austria declares war on Serbia) and Aug. 1 (Germany declares war on Russia, and Russia on Germany). Aug. 1, 1914 will be commemorated Sunday at a charity event to benefit current British war veterans at Highclere Castle, the site of the...

An extraordinary collection of patriotic First World War recruitment posters have been unearthed after 100 years stashed under the stairs of a pensioner's Brighton home. In total, 10 morale-boosting posters were found - all of which belonged to an elderly former airport worker now in her 90s. The haul was discovered as part of a house clearance. The colourful posters had been stashed under the stairs of the woman's house for many decades One carries a powerful image of a soldier stood in France reaching out his hand to a fellow Brit in civilian costume, urging him to 'come lad,...

  Our Troops Rock!  Thank you for all you do! For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.   Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ~ Hall of Heroes ~ The Christmas Truce Info from here.             You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench.  It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front. Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over...

What if they called a war and peace broke out instead? That's exactly what happened during the Christmas season of 1914 when the soldiers themselves called a truce and, had it not been for intervention by the higher authorities on both sides, World War I might have ended. Stanley Weintraub does an excellent job of preserving for posterity this remarkable wartime truce in his book  Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, and much of what follows is derived from that valuable source. The truce came as no surprise, Weintraub explains, as there were early indications...

"A complete Boche figure suddenly appeared on the parapet and looked about. This complaint became infectious. It didn't take 'Our Bert' long to be up on the skyline. This was a signal for more Boche anatomy to be disclosed, and this was replied to by all our Alfs and Bills, until, in less time than it takes to tell, half a dozen or so of each of the belligerents were outside the trenches, and were advancing towards each other in no-man's land. "A strange sight, truly!" So writes Bruce Bairnsfather about the Christmas Truce of 1914. This event was an...

LONDON (Reuters) - The last known surviving allied veteran of the Christmas Truce that saw German and British soldiers shake hands between the trenches in World War One died Monday at 109, his parish priest said. Alfred Anderson was the oldest man in Scotland and the last known surviving Scottish veteran of the war. "I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," he was quoted as saying in the Observer newspaper last year, describing the day-long Christmas Truce of 1914, which began spontaneously when German soldiers sang carols in the trenches, and British soldiers responded in English. "All I'd...

During World War I, in the winter of 1914, on the battlefields of Flanders, one of the most unusual events in all of human history took place. The Germans had been in a fierce battle with the British and French. Both sides were dug in, safe in muddy, man-made trenches six to eight feet deep that seemed to stretch forever.

The Christmas Truce By Robin Oliver December 23, 2003 Eighty-nine years ago this Christmas, just eight kilometres from the Flemish city of Ypres, an extraordinary event occurred between German and British troops in the narrow and perilous strip of no-man's land separating their trenches. Here on Christmas Eve on the British side of a muddy landscape, with the bodies of soldiers killed in the first Battle of Ypres two months earlier still lying where they fell, could be heard the sounds of Germans singing. It was thought they had been drinking. Alcohol was barred in the British front lines but...

Editor’s Note: This article was published in The Remnant in 2006 after having first appeared on the Your Guide to 20th Century History website. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author. The original song by John McCutcheon is well worth listening to as you read this incredible story from a day and age not so very far removed from our own but, alas, fading in every way from the consciousness of "grown up" and "enlightened" men who've lost sight of God, Country and even who and what they are anymore-- much less the true meaning of Christmas. MJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=s9coPzDx6tA___________________________Though World...

"We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles ... in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas." British and German soldiers gathered in a dusty field in Afghanistan on Wednesday to play a game of soccer in memory of a Christmas truce spontaneously called between their armies a century ago during World War One. That moment in 1914 - when troops along Europe's Flanders front met after four months killing each...

On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with ‘A Merry Christmas’ on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one…. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench… So wrote a British soldier named Frank Richards, referring to the first Christmas of World War I, one hundred years ago this...

An incredible letter from trenches of the First World War by a soldier describing how he organised the famous 'Christmas Day Truce' has been unearthed and is expected to fetch £20,000 at auction. The eight-page pencilled note was sent by Lance Corporal Willie Loasby of the 2nd Northamptonshire Regiment to his mother on December 27, 1914. The 25-year-old tells how he started shouting to German soldiers who were just 40 yards away in the trenches a few days before Christmas. He explains how he persuaded the enemy not to shoot before bravely walking out into No Man's Land to meet...

German and British soldiers laid down arms in holiday celebration, took up soccer. As darkness crept over British and German trenches on Christmas Eve of 1914, one of history’s most astounding and heart-warming anomalies of warfare spontaneously unfolded. The German and British troops halted their fire and laid down their arms in order to sing to one another, exchange gifts, bury their dead together and according to many recollections, play friendly games of soccer in the no-man’s land that has been strewn with the bodies hours earlier. According to most accounts recorded in diaries and interviews years later, the 1914...

. . . James McIvor has found an instance in the Civil War when the animosity between the Union and Confederate soldiers also lifted, if only for the length of a single song . . . As the opposing forces settled into battle lines near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on December 30, 1862, the bands on each side played an evening concert for their respective comrades. The two concerts continued, unharmoniously enough, until, “as if by common consent,” recalled the Tennesseean, both took up “Home, Sweet Home.” The men on both sides soon joined together in singing the song. When it was...