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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2xh63Jk:
I had saved this photo, which my mother texted to me from France the day before yesterday or so, because I wanted to post an illustration of how goddamn adorable my parents are, but @dolly-bassett just posted about visiting this site and I suppose it does warrant a much more serious caption.
Adorable little old folks aside, this is a very somber site. It’s the Carriére Wellington, which is a museum related to WWI: in the chalk soil, since medieval times there had been tunnels dug to quarry the chalk, and during the War, British sappers connected the tunnels to blow up a huge mine during the Battle of Arras in 1917.
My parents are currently overseas on a long-anticipated once-in-a-lifetime trip to visit WWI battle sites– they’re focusing on sites relevant to American units, as my mother is finishing a book documenting the experiences, insofar as she can verify them, of every man from our local town who served. They’ve participated in a number of wreath-laying ceremonies. Dad has his own investment in it; he served for many years in the 42nd Infantry Division [National Guard], which was formed in order to fight in WWI. (My sister, meanwhile, served for a long time in the 3rd Infantry Division [regular Army], and at the gate of any base they staffed, their standard greeting was “Rock of the Marne,” which was the Division’s catchphrase– they were first blooded there, at the 2nd Battle of the Marne, in 1918, and awarded the nickname for their refusal to retreat.)
(Maybe the US should have stayed out of it, and maybe WWII would have been averted. You could argue that either way, but you can’t deny that, clearly, a lot of our modern military and status as a world superpower kind of grew out of that intervention. Maybe we should have intervened earlier. Nobody ever writes that AU, they’re too busy saving the Confederacy or letting the Nazis win. Has anyone written an AU where the Americans stayed isolationist? Hook me up.)
Today my parents took a side trip to Verdun, which, no, was not a site American units notably participated in, but is important to see. About a million people died there, about a hundred years ago. Humbling to consider.
I had saved this photo, which my mother texted to me from France the day before yesterday or so, because I wanted to post an illustration of how goddamn adorable my parents are, but @dolly-bassett just posted about visiting this site and I suppose it does warrant a much more serious caption.
Adorable little old folks aside, this is a very somber site. It’s the Carriére Wellington, which is a museum related to WWI: in the chalk soil, since medieval times there had been tunnels dug to quarry the chalk, and during the War, British sappers connected the tunnels to blow up a huge mine during the Battle of Arras in 1917.
My parents are currently overseas on a long-anticipated once-in-a-lifetime trip to visit WWI battle sites– they’re focusing on sites relevant to American units, as my mother is finishing a book documenting the experiences, insofar as she can verify them, of every man from our local town who served. They’ve participated in a number of wreath-laying ceremonies. Dad has his own investment in it; he served for many years in the 42nd Infantry Division [National Guard], which was formed in order to fight in WWI. (My sister, meanwhile, served for a long time in the 3rd Infantry Division [regular Army], and at the gate of any base they staffed, their standard greeting was “Rock of the Marne,” which was the Division’s catchphrase– they were first blooded there, at the 2nd Battle of the Marne, in 1918, and awarded the nickname for their refusal to retreat.)
(Maybe the US should have stayed out of it, and maybe WWII would have been averted. You could argue that either way, but you can’t deny that, clearly, a lot of our modern military and status as a world superpower kind of grew out of that intervention. Maybe we should have intervened earlier. Nobody ever writes that AU, they’re too busy saving the Confederacy or letting the Nazis win. Has anyone written an AU where the Americans stayed isolationist? Hook me up.)
Today my parents took a side trip to Verdun, which, no, was not a site American units notably participated in, but is important to see. About a million people died there, about a hundred years ago. Humbling to consider.
