![]() The figures remain mind-boggling: in France alone, half of all men aged 20 to 32 at the outbreak of war were dead by the time it was over. ![]() ![]() Less lethally, but just as powerfully bringing the scale of the carnage home, Belgian farmers today regularly plough up skeletons of those "missing in action – presumed dead": men who were ordered to shoot and blow each other up men who were willing and men who weren't men who before the war would have had no argument with each other but all dead men, and mostly very young dead men. American journalist Adam Hochschild has created a work that is both striking in contextual intrigue and simple in structure. ![]() (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. In 1991 alone, when France was building a new high-speed rail line, 36 people were killed excavating the track bed. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. Since 1946 more than 630 démineurs have died in the process. ![]() The first substantial point Adam Hochs-child's book makes is that the destructive force of the First World War remains with us: 900 tons of unexploded munitions are still collected from its battlefields each year. ![]()
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