In the second most disastrous Western war in history, WW1 (the first being the second one twenty years later), a British plane dropped a load of bombs on the military camp at Wetteren in then occupied Belgium in late 1918.
80 years after the war ended, Maité Roël, a young Belgian girl, accidentally stepped on one of those unexploded bombs while taking a tour of the Wetteren site. She explains the horror she experienced that day.
"We went on a scout camping expedition to Wetteren and I remember now that it was an old military camp," Maité recalls very slowly. She has tiny dreadlocks that hang down her slim face and a silver ring in her nose – not the usual face of a First World War victim. "It was July 6th, 1992. I knew nothing about war. I remember we all built a fire using bricks round the outside and the other kids starting throwing logs on it. I was tired and so I went a few metres from the fire so I could sleep. Then there was a sudden explosion – I woke up and saw sparks from the explosion. Everyone was running and shouting and I tried to get up and I couldn't. Everyone was looking at me and I looked down – and I saw that my left leg was hanging by a piece of skin."
10 years and 29 operations later, she is still struggling with it.
The doctors took skin and muscles and arteries from thighs and back and ribs to reconstruct her left leg – and saved it after 29 operations in which Maité spent two years in hospital, all of them on morphine. For the next 10 years she was addicted, desperate to detoxicate but still finding the pain unbearable. Maité now has only one artery in each leg. The birth of her child, Damon, and the love of his father, Kurt, helped her, she says, admitting with a smile that she still needs cannabis and alcohol to survive the pain but has been without morphine for a year and five months.
Millions of soldiers during that war experienced similar results in a conflict that witnessed the emergence of modern technologies like airplanes and poison gas.
Despite the fact that World War 1 was hailed as the "Great War," "a war to end all wars," and a war for "democracy," it led directly to the rise and popularity of fascist and communist movements in Europe, destroyed democratic governments all across Europe, and set the stage for the unspeakable carnage and growth of state power during World War 2.
Nearly a century after WW1, there are still victims of that holocaust. This should be a reminder that the casualties of war do not end when the emperors sign a "peace" note; there are the battered men returning home, the broken widows, the taxes, the debt, the crumbled infrastructure, and the continuous loss of personal liberty as the government grows and grows. The outright barbarism of modern war must be opposed even more fervently, as the terrors of mustard gas have nothing on the indiscriminate killing machines that nearly every modern government has at its disposal.
War always has unintended and bloody consequences, and the militarism of the US leadership (be it Bush, Reagan, Clinton, or Obama) can only lead to more and more mountains of skulls.
Comments
Sad story. How long will those old bombs still be a danger to innocent life? Will the ones produced and dropped now still be killing and maiming 100 years from now?
Ironic that the article ends as a cautionary tale about American leadership and aggression when America had little or nothing to do with the unfortunate maiming of the young Belgian woman.
She wears dreadlocks and a ring through her nose....apparently she is suffering the outcome of the so-called Great War in more ways than one.
World War I just like its successor, the Big One, was a conflict fought solely and exclusively to make the entire world safe for jew rot....in 1935, Smedley Darlington Butler, a soldier with a conscience, wrote a book whose entire thesis was its title: WAR IS A RACKET....he proved beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that the ONLY way to stop all war in these modern times is to take the profit out of it. But nobody in America listened then any more than they do now.
Have any of you who have read the above article ever thought to ask how much of an whopping profit the so called "federal reserve bank" has made off the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Do you really think that jew boy Ben Bernanke gives a rat's ass on an eight penny nail about the suffering and maiming and wreckage of Iraq and other places and the millions of
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