At the end of my trip to Europe last month, I visited the Museum of the Great War in Somme. The museum is in a castle near the site of the one of the most horrible battles in World War One.
The museum displays the things each soldier carried in the armies in the battle: clothes, mess gear, ammo, weapons, cleaning supplies and much more are displayed lying flat in areas recessed into the floor. The displays have some of the feeling of graves.
As a soldier, I had the same kind of equipment I had to lay out for inspection. All the soldiers in the unit lay out their gear in a very specific pattern to make it easier for the their leaders to inspect the equipment. Anything missing is glaring when forty soldiers all lay out their equipment.
Here are some of the displays from the Great War Museum:
German soldier
French officer uniforms
German uniform items
Machine guns
Machine guns
Medical equipment
Nurse uniform
American Soldier
Just a few miles away was the Red Baron Memorial on the side of a country road.
