Verdun, battle

The contract signed between April 19 and 28,1916—the enormous reliance on explosives at the Battle of Verdun gave it a telling background—... 

Even with a vintage of 40 years (or more), mustard contents can remain highly toxic. In the 1950s an accidental burst from an old mustard shell from World War I killed two children, while severely injuring several others. Even as recently as 1990, after handling a mustard shell left over from the war at Verdun, an elderly Frenchman suffered serious burns on his hands and arms. As a tribute to those who fought and died in the first major cauldron of chemicals in battle, a museum was built in 1998 near Poelkapelle, Belgium, that displays trench warfare re-creations and artifacts from the battlefields of Ypres. 

While Americans greeted the Deutschland with fascination, Europeans faced off that summer of 1916 in the trenches at Somme and Verdun, large battles in France that cost more than two million casualties and fully... 

---