John McCrae, 1915

In the silence and darkness of the early October morning, while comfortably settled in our gîte with character near the Western Front, we are hardly able to assimilate all we experienced at Flanders Fields.

Some estimate that the four years of bloody conflict resulted in one million soldiers and civilians dead, missing, or wounded in this theater alone while hardly any ground was gained on either side. We had noticed time and again through the years that the inevitable war memorial in every French town, village, and hamlet lists three or four or five times the number of casualties from the first world war as from the second.

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