Battle of the Somme...and Ultrarunning

From this month's Smithsonian Magazine, a photographic essay about WWI.

Image credit: Michael St. Maur Sheil and Smithsonian Magazine

Even today, a century after the start of the Great War, the countryside still bears scars. In this image by Irish landscape photographer Michael St. Maur Sheil at the site of the Battle of the Somme, in northern France, you can trace grass-covered trenches and pockmarks from exploded bombshells. More than a million men were wounded or killed in the battle, the first major British offensive of the war.

Stuff like this just boggles the mind.  Human destruction on the scale of WWI is still incomprehensible to me today, and images like this just fill me with an almost inexpressible void for all the lives affected by mankind's stupidity.

I've blogged before here about my great grandfather, Julius Brinkmann, a common soldier on the Western Front, who happened to wear the uniform of Germany.  You can read more here if you wish.

Ultrarunning offers me some solace to this vast sadness.  You get to pick your antidote.

Where They Lived

I'll conclude my Memorial Day series of posts with the May 2012 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, containing a sad article entitled "Where They Lived."

Author T. A. Frail and photographer Ashley Gilbertson teamed up to document homes where grieving parents have preserved intact the bedrooms of their dead servicemember children.

There's a balance between remembrance and getting over it.  I hope never to have to walk in those shoes and I will never criticize any family's choices on such a personal matter.

My heart goes out to all those thousands of families whose lives have been shattered forever.  May peace be yours.

By the way, the photo above is of the bedroom of Army Pfc. Richard P. Langenbrunner, 19, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Langenbrunner committed suicide on April 17, 2007, in Rustimayah, Iraq.  This bedroom, with its PC and telescope, looks like the kind of bedroom I would have loved as a teenager.  I can't even imagine the kind of wartime stress and hurt that would have caused a 19 year old kid to kill himself.