Europe's landscape is still scared by World War I. Many photographs are shown in this article of abandoned battlefields that reveal the trenches scars. It has been at least a century since the Great War, yet the country is still buried with scars. In this image by Irish landscape photographer Michael St. Maur Sheil, you can trace grass-covered trenches and pockmarks from exploded bombshells. Millions of men were injured or even killed right in this very spot, which was the first major British offensive of the war. Artists take these photographs to document the legacy that was left on that battlefield. Sheil was very famous for photographs such as these. He includes seventy-nine contemporary photographs of World War I battlefields and has them on display in Paris along the wrought-iron fence of Luxembourg Gardens.

People often forget that the world doesn't reset after a major war. World War I was one of the most destructive wars in Europe's long history, not only in terms of human casualties, but also in terms of physical destruction. The heavy use of trench warfare left an everlasting mark on the landscape. Soldiers dug trenches that were miles long and use them for protection from enemy fire. Any observer can see that bullets do not turn corners and that a soldier can hide within the trench and be impervious to gunfire. There is one major weakness in this tactic that explains the dips in the landscape surrounding the trenches. In order to reach the enemy soldiers, bomb and mortar attacks were very effective. The everlasting geographical scaring of the land tells the history of what took place in an area, from wars in Europe to glacial movement in Alaska. The landscape never forgets.

This particular landscape shows trenches and the remains of bombed out fields where one million British soldiers where either killed or wounded by the Germans. I cannot fathom the heartache and loss that these families must have experienced and in some cases still are. How many future leaders or scientists or Nobel Peace Prize winners were killed here? How might the world be a better place but for the butchering of these soldiers? Multiply that though by the hundreds of wars fought throughout civilization. We could be so far advanced as a society, instead we chose and continue to choose wars that contain costs we can't even quantify. I'd like to see cancer cells being destroyed, not people, housing being built instead of propaganda, education instead of anarchy. No more scars, let's build beautiful monuments to society, like peace.