All Quiet . . .

La Grenouille and I went to stock up on her bread baking flour that she likes to get at an organic farm just a short drive north of where we live. In a village very close to the farm, there was a German military cemetery from World War I. .. It never fails to amaze me in a sobering sort of way that the front lines of that incomprehensibly tragic conflict came so close to Paris. For brief periods Paris was even shelled by long-range guns being fired from the north. I just finished re-reading Erich Maria Remarque's story All Quiet On the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues or A l'Ouest Rien de Nouveau) and its powerful message about the utter idiocy of war. Sites like this cemetery in Lassigny serve as a reminder that the Germans also suffered huge losses during their excursion into France. I wonder how both countries' populations dealt with the terrible task of mourning all the fallen ?
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And speaking of Erich Maria Remarque, just out of curiosity, are any of you familiar with his other books which came after All Quiet On the Western Front ? Did you know that he wrote a sequel to All Quiet about life in Germany in the years just after the war called The Road Back (Der Weg Zurück or Après), as well as several other works, all of which (imho) are excellent, well worth a read . . .
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Hundreds of thousands of men perished over those four years. They fell like Autumn leaves . . . littering the landscape, returning to the soil.

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In this cemetery alone 1777 German soldiers buried, and such sites dot the landscape, for both French and Germans, as well as British, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and others. I even stumbled on an Italian military cemetery yesterday near an area called Le Chemin des Dames.

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There has been alot of talk in the press these days about the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Here, in Lassigny, France, lies the Lieutenant Wilhelm Berlin, in a mass grave . . . and more fallen leaves . . .

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Josef Gabriel had some silent company . . .

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On the lands belonging to the farm where we went to get flour they are still regularly plowing up unexploded ordnance from over 90 years ago . . . Must be slightly unsettling running heavy plows through soil knowing that potentially lethal objects like this still lie buried in the ground . . .

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