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When I was a student of geology in Freiburg, Southern Germany, I once planned to visit a girl friend. She lived near Mons, in Southern Belgium, a few hundred miles away.  I looked at the map and decided to drive through North-Eastern France over night, an important shortcut so it seemed.

I had planned five hours of drive, but finally it took me more than eleven hours. The road I had chosen ran through areas with some familiar names – Sedan, Verdun, Douaumont, Lille - a road leading right along the western frontline of 1914-1918. In 1978, more than sixty years after WW I, it felt like a haunted, desolate area – empty villages, abandoned houses, hardly any lights on the street, and plenty of potholes on poorly paved roads.

And glancing outside, there were crosses everywhere. The entire landscape was nothing but a huge graveyard.
It told me that wars cast a long shadow – it took countries like Spain more than 140 years to recover from Napoleon’s Iberian wars, and Eastern France is still suffering from the consequences of WW I.

Memories about my weekend trip to Belgium came back to me, when I discovered an old binder with photographs. It belonged to my Grandpa Franz Kessler, who had been working as a railway engineer in pre-WW I Turkey, and then served as artillery observer on the “Western Front.”

Several times I opened and closed the book. Yesterday, though, I overcame my emotional weakness, and scanned the pictures – they are direct, gruesome but also very true. My Grandpa’ eye was relentless. He pictured corpses of fallen soldiers, exploded bunkers, graveyards and destroyed factories, but also amazingly normal scenes of playing children and a bath at the river. Several pictures also show the frontline on aerial pictures taken from either zeppelin or fixed-wing aircraft.

Have a look at my website: Matahari Sky www.flickr.com/photos/matahari.

The thirty-five pictures are organized in a folder called “Western Front 1915-1916.” History is important, particularly if transmitted from one generation to the next – forming a unique, personal and often propaganda-free view into the past.

I never met my Grandpa. Bad luck finally caught up with him when a grenade struck the factory chimney from where he was spying the enemy and directing the organs of death onto the French and British frontlines. Severely wounded on his skull, he retired from the war in 1917. He later died from a brain tumor, in 1935.

After having seen many war reports on the news or even the “History Channel,” I’ve come to the conclusion that war isn’t quite often portrayed by the so-called “embedded journalists” as what it really is – a terrible, unforgiving, grim, bleak episode of murder, torture and death. Those who win the war are those who survive. Some survive even better than others - staying far away from the war, and filling their corrupt pockets with the money of blood. War isn’t Boyz Toyz, wars consist of suffering and death.

May these pictures help to educate the world, and help to avoid warfare as far as it may seem possible!

© 2007 by Franz L Kessler