Flanders' Fields with Paddy.

[PADDY]

Full pictures of the Belgium trip in the Steamer Trunk (travel section).
http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?t=19914

 

[PADDY]

The famous silhoette photo.

This shows the famous image of Australian troops silhoetted against a water filled shell crater sometime during the third battle of Ypres in 1917.

By pure chance, I took the other photo on my trip to the Ypres Salient 2 weeks ago, as the walking group walked a ridge line (not to be recommended when the bullets are flying, but thankfully very quiet that day!), and it did make me think of the Aussie photo from the Great War.

 

[mikepara]

Wow Paddy, thats just like the famous picture of the Tyneside Irish Brigade advancing at the walk 1st July 1916.

I've just had a quick search but cannot find it.

 

[dhermann1]

The Great War

I've read a couple books on WW I, including Martin Gilbert's book and Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer", and I must say, I have a very hard time with this war. Even tho WW II had five times as many dead, just thinking about the utter grimness and pathos and horror of this ghastly conflict makes me sick at heart. If hell on earth ever existed, it was in the trenches of The Great War.

 

[Edward]

I've read a couple books on WW I, including Martin Gilbert's book and Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer", and I must say, I have a very hard time with this war. Even tho WW II had five times as many dead, just thinking about the utter grimness and pathos and horror of this ghastly conflict makes me sick at heart. If hell on earth ever existed, it was in the trenches of The Great War.

With you on that. I find it damn near impossible to take in just how horrific it must have been, troops who were not much more than kids (or in the case of a great great uncle of mine who doctored his birth certificate to join up and ended up watchnig his mate the same age having his head blown clean off a year later, in the Somme - they were fifteen at the Battle of the Somme - literally kids). man's inhumanity to man and all that.... Cynical I may be, but I can't hlep thinking it probably would all have been over by Christmas had the top brass calling the shots been stuck in the trenches too, not is their cushy offices mile away...