All Destroyed on the Western Front

World War I was the first war with a significant aerial component, so it’s appropriate that its astonishing aftermath is viewed from the sky.

World War I was the first war with a significant aerial component, so it’s appropriate that its astonishing aftermath is viewed from the sky:

In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border.

The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways, and yet what is perhaps most moving is not the scenes of devastation, but the sight of the people below, picking up again the threads of their old lives among the shattered ruins of what had once been homes, with the resilience of a people whom history had long accustomed to the miseries of war.

And today people pretend we have a climate crisis.