Free Republic

Between July and November of 1917, one of the greatest disasters of the Great War unfolded near the Belgian town of Ypres, where the British and their allies fought the Germans for control of some ridges running through Flanders. Better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, hundreds of thousands of men occupied trenches, dugouts and underground tunnels on the front lines. Among the British forces there were many seasoned infantrymen who could claim to have seen all the technological terrors so far gathered together on World War I battlefields—machine gun fire, poison gas, strafing and bombing by aircraft. But for...

Demetrius Perricos, who is leading one of the U.N. inspection teams in Iraq, said Wednesday his team of international arms experts secured about a dozen Iraqi artillery shells containing the mustard liquid agent.

First World War bomb kills two construction site workers 100 years after it was fired at Belgian battlefield • Armament was disturbed and exploded evacuation works at the site • Killed two and injured two, all construction workers working in the area • This area of Belgium is rife with unexploded bombs from the Great War • It is the former Flanders battleground where many shells were fired A First World War bomb killed two construction site workers when it exploded 100 years after being fired at a Belgian battlefield. The bomb had laid dormant for a century at an...

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,...