Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] Re: OT: French Empires

Subject: [OM] Re: OT: French Empires
From: Manuel Viet <oly@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:08:51 +0100
Le lundi 12 Mars 2007 02:43, Walt Wayman a écrit :
> I'm a born and bred American Southerner and hillbilly, and I love redneck
> and hillbilly jokes. Some of you need to get over yourselves. It's just in
> fun. Some folks seem to have no sense of humor (humour).

Someday you should come down where I was born  (France, Aisne, Soissons). 
Perhaps there you'd understand the true meaning of the word "war". So many 
bodies were buried in the ground that it's still a major health risk to dig 
the earth with bare hands, or to tend to flowers, because in places it's 
still saturated with tetanus bacterias. Seeing how hysterical americans get 
for a pesky burning flag, I incline to think that they don't have that much a 
sense of humor either.

> And I don't know the exact number of French casualties in WWI, but over
> 600,000 were killed in the War of Northern Invasion over here.

More than 1.300.000 died, and 4.200.000 were physically wounded. To speak only 
of the french. All right, I overestimated my figure. Just add the german 
casualties to the french one, and in a single war our two countries (roughly 
two big US states) lost more people than the whole USA in 200 years 
(2.500.000). Let me mention that 2 of my grand-grand fathers were among them, 
and a third one exhibited what is now known as post-traumatic disorder for 
the rest of his life. It would have been alright i suppose, but it happened 
that both my grand fathers were again hit by the war, both POW and barely 
escaping starvation in germany for 5 years. One of them came back just to 
find out that his whole first family (mother, wife, 2 kids) had been wiped 
out from the face of earth by a bomb. Which is happy for me in a weird way, 
because otherwise he wouldn't have married my grand mother.

I'm no exception, this is the history of *most* french families.

for perspective :
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/casualties_of_war.htm

-- 
Manuel Viet

==============================================
List usage info:     http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies:        olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz