:o Bootjack, not bootstrap…
Going to hell but chuckled at this comment: “Upon the discovery of German soldiers, I would assume that the French road workers immediately surrendered.”
In fairness, it’s only the presumed coin purse that they actually say the archaeologists were still trying to identify. The caption on the picture with the bootjack and ammo pouch says “unidentified military items”, which could just mean “nobody told us what these were” rather than “the archaeologists are clueless”.
Old joke:
Why are French streets lined with trees?
So German troops can march in the shade.
<snicker>
Did anybody see the 2 or 3 hour documentary shown last year on the excavation of the trench area? That was also quite interesting.
Though, tbf, in WW1 the French did anything but surrender in a hurry - ~1,400,000 military casualties out of a population of less than 40 million.
Perhaps outweighed in the public perception by the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War and WWII, to say nothing of Algeria and Vietnam.
They note the body of a goat was found also. Presumably for fresh milk. Riiiiight 
It is a fascinating article/discovery. I was always more interested in WW2, still very cool.
Well, winning wars in Vietnam turns out not to be as easy as you think. :dubious:
True. French law forbade sending draftees overseas, so they could defend against a Soviet invasion. So only legionaires, North Africans and professional army went to Indochina (with some being further siphoned off during Korea). So what was our excuse?
Assuming it is the same ruler as shown in the picture of “a large hammer” the divisions are 5mm each which makes the object even smaller.
Sorry to pile on, but my favorite was always:
Q:How many troops does it take to defend Paris?
A:No one knows, it has never been tried…
(d&r)
Except that, as noted above, they tried pretty damned hard in the conflict this thread is all about.
…and, IIRC, the only time the USA were called upon to defend Washington DC they made a complete arse of it, so people who live in glass houses and all that…
Word. They tried hard in WWII as well. Everybody else who was defeated by the Germans gets described as brave, plucky, stalwart and so on. The French get branded as cowardly and saddled with demeaning nicknames like “surrender monkey.” Generally, I am proud of my American heritage, but when I hear one of my countrymen blurt out such idiocy, I am ashamed. The whole “freedom fries” incident of a few years back made me want to hide my face. The French have never lacked for courage. Their military leadership has not always been all that one might desire, but the same is true for other countries including the USA. We’ve had some four star retards leading the troops over the last couple hundred years.
I broadly agree, but I’m pretty sure “freedom fries” had nothing to do with “French = cowardly” and everything to do with “French = not doing their part in the ‘War on Terror.’” Please note: I think that was stupid, too, but I think it’s important to keep the motivations of idiocy straight.
As I recall the rhetoric at the time, the implication was that the French were declining to do their part due to their (well established by history) cowardice. Was it not at that time that the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” calumny was first heard?
I hear that you can buy surplus French Army rifles now. They’ve never been fired, and only dropped once.
The thing that strikes me most about the photos is the sheer scale of the trench, shored up by timbers the size of railway sleepers. And then I remember that there were usually three such lines on each side, all the way along the 700km+ front. Truly a mammoth bit of engineering.
Yes, the sheer scale of WW1 does your head in. I was explaining to some kids at my school about the Thiepval Memorial, which is huge and plastered with names on all sides… which are for the dead of one section of the Western Front, and only those who aren’t buried in a cemetery somewhere. These aren’t all the dead or anything like it - just the dead-and-never-found from within a few miles of the memorial site. Again, we have a poster with postage-stamp sized photos of soldiers of the time - I did a quick count and estimated about 400 faces on the poster - so I told the kids that a hundred of those posters aren’t nearly enough to show the British casualties alone from the first day of the Battle of the Somme. 
150 posters maybe to get to 63,000 casualties. And of course there were german casualties as well… it is absolutely staggering.
(Not ignoring French or other combatants…)