Happy Veterans, Remembrance, Armistice day. It is a shame that the war to end all wars did not infact end all wars. So many lives and indeed generations lost thanks to a terrorist assassinating the Archduke. The dominoes would fall as Serbia, Russia and Austro-Hungary posture at each other while the Kaiser gives A&H a blank check to help them and then goes on vacation. Brutal new technologies against old timey tactics would cause the Western, the Alps, and the Macedonian fronts to become a blender for all involved. The Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Colonial fronts would be a different war entirely, causing empires to fall, kings to abdicate, and involve soldiers from all walks of life. Let us not celebrate the war, as the Treaty of Versaille arguable made no one a winner. All the lives were already lost and the stage for the next world war was already being set. Any surviving Empires had to deal with economic, political, and social hardships, and those Empires that didn't survive had it even worse. Yes let us not celebrate the war, but remember the soldiers of all sides who were lumped in to fight a war that could have easily been over at the diplomatic table before a single soldier was mobilized. Lift up a glass for the fallen from that war and all soldiers who fought, helped, were maimed, or died since then. Let us remember their sacrifices, their fears, their courage, and most of all: their lives. Drink for those who already drank their last.
A French boy introduces himself to Indian soldiers who had just arrived in France to fight alongside French and British forces, Marseilles, 30th September 1914
German soldiers marching by somewhere on the Macedonian Front, c. 1916.
Soldiers of an Australian 4th Division field artillery brigade walk on a duckboard track laid across a muddy, shattered battlefield in Chateau Wood, near Hooge, Belgium, on October 29, 1917
German soldiers celebrate Christmas in the field, in December of 1914
Highlanders, soldiers from the United Kingdom, take sandbags up to the front in 1916.
A German dog hospital, treating wounded dispatch dogs coming from the front, ca. 1918.