100 years later: Returning to World War I's Western Front in France 

By Mary Winston Nicklin
via the STARS and STRIPES newspaper web site

A century has passed since the battles that baptized the U.S. military into the horrors of modern industrialized warfare. Nearly three years after the guns of August opened the First World War, the first doughboys in Gen. John J. Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces - young, enthusiastic and prone to breaking into song - arrived on French shores to join the weary Allied Forces.

The United States' entry into the war would turn the tide. Numbering just 200,000 - including the National Guard - at the beginning, the soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces in France would total 1,894,000 by the time the armistice was signed. Not only did the Great War create the modern American military, but it was also a catalyst for the civil and women's rights movements, and it carved up empires on the modern world map.

The "War to End All Wars" claimed an estimated 40 million military and civilian lives - of which nearly 117,000 were American - and left behind apocalyptic devastation. "Over There" - in the parlance of the famous George M. Cohan song - France was an unimaginable hellscape: trees like charred matchsticks jutting from bombed-out craters, miles of trenches, body parts blown into trees or lost in the mud. In this ghoulish wasteland, the scale of physical and psychological suffering was unprecedented. Fifty percent of the dead have no known graves.

"I have a rendezvous with death," begins the famous poem by Alan Seeger, who died at the Battle of the Somme while volunteering in the French Foreign Legion.

Entire villages were wiped off the map and never rebuilt. Names like the Somme and Verdun - site of the war's longest battle and one of the costliest battles in human history - are eternal symbols of the sacrifice. Following the war, what was called the Red Zone, a swath of 460 acres across the Western Front, was declared off-limits for habitation. The annual "iron harvest" unearths tons of shrapnel, guns and grenades. Unexploded ordnance is still a danger to farmers plowing their fields. Reminders are everywhere in France; the tiniest rural villages have monuments to the war dead.

Read the entire article on the STARS and STRIPES web site here:

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