The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale that was published by Phot. Express. The card, which has a divided back, was printed by Baudinière of Nanterre.
Although commonly referred to during the war as Loos, the full name of the village is Loos-en-Gohelle. The full name proved to be devastatingly prophetic - at the end of the war, not a single building or tree in the town had survived the pounding of enemy artillery.
Abba Eban
"History teaches us that men and
nations behave wisely when they
have exhausted all other alternatives".
This was said during a speech in London UK on 16th. December 1970 by Abba Eban (1915-2002), an Israeli diplomat and writer.
Visé Paris No. 938
The reference to 'Visé Paris' means that the image has been inspected by the military authorities in the French capital and deemed not to be a security risk.
'Visé Paris' signifies that the card was published during or soon after the end of the Great War.
Dud Corner Cemetery and the Loos Memorial
Loos Memorial, which encircles Dud Corner Cemetery, immortalizes the names of the 20,000 soldiers of the British Army who have no known grave.
Most of these soldiers were killed at the Battle of Loos in late 1915. Among them was the only son of the famous writer
Rudyard Kipling. Although initially in favour of the war, the author of The Jungle Book never got over the loss of his son, as can be clearly felt in his Epitaphs of the War wherein he wrote the lines:
“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied“.
The cemetery and memorial are located on the Route de Béthune.
The Use of Artillery in the Great War
Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War. The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.
If the 170m rounds were on average two feet long, and if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres); the line would go round the equator over two and a half times. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.
During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.
Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.
According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:
- Bayonets - less than 1%
- Bullets - 30%
- Artillery and Bombs - 70%
Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.
Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:
"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."
To this day, large quantities of Great War matériel are discovered on a regular basis. Many shells from the Great War were left buried in the mud, and often come to the surface during ploughing and land development.
For example, on the Somme battlefields in 2009 there were 1,025 interventions, unearthing over 6,000 pieces of ammunition weighing 44 tons.
Artillery shells may or may not still be live with explosive or gas, so the bomb disposal squad, of the Civilian Security of the Somme, dispose of them.
The Somme Times
From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:
'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'
