All quiet on the Western Front ...

….

Yet, nearly 100 years ago, these same serene scenes played host to some of the bloodiest and most violent battles of World War One in which 10 million soldiers died.

British photographer Michael St Maur Sheil has spent the last few years taking hauntingly poignant pictures of some of the most notorious battlefields of the Great War as they are today.

Messines-Wijtschate Ridge from about 400m west of Le Rossignol Farm. At 03.10am on June 7th, 1917 the British exploded 19 mines packed with a total of 450 tons of HE under the German lines along the Messines-Wijtschate Ridge. It was the largest man-made explosion prior to the nuclear era and it is estimated that it killed 10,000 men in a matter of seconds. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Aerial bombardment: The scarred landscape of Beaumont Hamel on the Somme with trenches, shell crater and wire pickets. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Shell shock: The Lochnagar Crater, La Boisselle, Somme, France. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Eerie relic: British observation post near Hebuterne, south of Dunkirk built in 1917 and overlooking Gommecourt Wood. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Rifle ammunition clips in the Pocket. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Scars of battle: The pockmarked landscape of The Ouvrage du Thiamont battlefield close to Verdun, still bearing the testimony of the savage ferocity of the fighting. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

This rocky spur, about 500m long and 1000m high with three sides sloping down steeply into the Weiss valley below was heavily fortified by the Germans and attacked furiously by the French in 1915 Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Molleville Farm was a key position in the German defences on the Hieghts of Meuse on the right wing of the American attack at Meuse-Argonne. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

German memorial in Machault. This is on site of vanished German cemetery laid out near Fellazarett Nr. 8 Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Monument: This is probably the last soldiers battlefield burial site memorial left intact on the Western Front with the soldier's equipment, including the rusty helmet, left on the grave along with a plaque that reads 'Grave of Edouard Ivaldi, Cpl 7/RI killed 30 April 1917,' which was placed there by his father Jean in 1919. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Monument: Grave of French soldier Edouard Ivaldi in Champagne. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Looking south over Hanebeek from German positions, an unexploded shell lies amidst the mud of Passchendaele Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

The fighting in this area took place on August 15th to 21st, 1914. After the battle the Germans buried the dead of both sides where they fell and marked them with crosses which were replaced in 1916 by the German NCO Ludwig Gebhardt. Today some 41 of these memorials are still on the upper slopes of the hill in Saint Die des Vosges. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Graveyard at the original site of the village of Fey en Haye on the outskirts of the Bois le Pretre woods. The village was destroyed during the Great War due to its location between French and German lines, in an area of heavy fighting. The village was rebuilt after the war in 1918 close to the site of the original settlement. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Mittel Rehfelsen is a rocky outcrop which was tunneled and fortified by the Germans Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Tyne Cot cemetery, Zonnebeke, Ypres Salient battlefields, Belgium Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

On October 24th, 1917 Austro-German forces launched attack across the River Isonzo, above, on the Austro-Italian front Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Field gun in Belleau Wood. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil 

Pamart Casement - Verdun. This Pamart Casement - a pre-fabricated machine gun cupola - was installed at the Fort de Tavannes after the fighting in 1916. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil 

Ruins: The gateway of Chaetau de Soupir - which was badly destroyed during the war and subsequently demolished in 1917 - served as a casualty clearing station. The village was cleared by the Brigade of Guards on September 14th, 1914. Around that time some heavy fighting took place at the farm of La Cour de Soupir, near the head of the valley north-west of the village. Dressing Stations were established at Chaetau de Soupir and at the farm. The village was in German hands again between November 2nd and 6th, 1914. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Haunting: The Fort de Douaument - a defence near Verdun, France which saw one million casualties in the Great War. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Destroyed observation post at the Ouvrage de Thiaumont is witness to the sheer fury of German artillery fire - the cupola was 10in thick and weighed seven tons before it was blown apart. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

London Irish Rifles, the Loos football: This is the football wich the LIR kicked across No Mans Land on September 25th, 1915 as they attacked the German positions in the town of Loos. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Metal detection:The Somme battlefield today where farmers are still finding shells and war debris known as the 'Iron harvest'. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Unexploded shells uncovered by ploughing near Munich Trench Cemetery awaiting collection by the Bomb Squad. British writer Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki, was killed by a German snipper in 1916 just to the west of this site. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Battle of Belleau Wood: Looking eastwards towards Belleau Wood across le champ Lever from the Lucy le Bocage road. The 3/5 USMC attacked across this field towards the wood on June 6th, 1918 and is where Floyd Gibbons was shot. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Obliterated: Original site of the village of Butte de Vaquois which was destroyed between Feb 1915 and Feb 1918. American forces captured the hill on Sept 26 1918. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Trench footprint: The still pockmarked landscape of Beaumont Hamel on the Somme where the Newfoundland Regiment were decimated by German machine guns. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

View from Cavernes des Dragons southwards over La Vallee Foulon fields towards French positions in Chemin des Dames Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

The compass belonged to a Lt Eric Black, aged 24, who was an undergraduate at Keble College Oxford and commissioned into the Lincolnshire Regiment. On May 9th, 1915 they attacked a position known as Rouges Bancs. Black was making his way back from the front line in the evening when he disappeared in the area of this field. The compass was found by the local Mr Fournier in 1992. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Laid to rest: German cemetery on the battlefield of Tete des Faux - the highest point on the Western Front. 10 million soldiers died in the conflict almost 100 years ago. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Beaumont Hamel British cemetery seen from Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, the German front line fortification on the Somme, with its 492 graves. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Fog of war: Mike St Maur Sheil's picture of a misty winter morning on the Somme - looking towards Lutyens Thiepval memorial in Picardie, France. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

The cemetery at St Symphorien was established by the German Army during the First World War as a final resting place for British and German servicemen killed at the Battle of Mons. Almost unique in its mixture of German and Commonwealth graves - respectively 229 and 284 servicemen buried or commemorated - it includes those of George Ellison of the Royal Irish Lancers and George Price of the Canadian Infantry, who were both killed on November 11th, 1918 and are believed to be the last Commonwealth combat casualties of the war in Europe. More than one hundred soldiers buried at St Symphorien remain unidentified. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Mists of time: Flooded fields on the Yser plain in Belgian where battle one raged. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Crossfire: German cemetery at Le Linge near the Weiss valley which was attacked by the French in 1915. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Killing fields: An image of rich farmland at the Somme showing how the battlefields of the Great War still shape today's landscape. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Reflected glory: A peaceful pond is what remains today of the craters made by massive mines on the Messines Ridge near Ypres. Picture: Michael St Maur Sheil

Historical reality …

The big bang, the detonation of buried British mines that formed the Lochnagar crater. The blast was heard 160 miles away in London in 1917

Near Ypres, Belgium

Passchendaele, Belgium

Flanders, Belgium

Hill of Combres, St. Mihiel Sector, north of Hattonchatel and Vigneulles.

Flanders, Belgium

Ypres in West Flanders

Gommecourt Chateau, France

Battlefield in the Marne between Souain and Perthes

The Somme Front

The grounds of Fort de la Pompelle, near Reims

After battle near Inverness Copse

Trench at Massiges, northeastern France

Lens, France

Old reserve trench near the Somme River, on the western front, in France

Lens, France

 The River Somme

Forges-les-Eaux

Beaumont Hamel

Beaumont-Hamel Station

Delville Wood near Longueval, Somme

Near Ypres 

Saint-Jean-sur-Tourbe on the Champagne front, eastern France.

Ten thousand men were killed within seconds when the British exploded 19 mines under German lines during the Battle of Messines in Belgium. Picture Michael St. Maur Sheil

end

'Dance Me to the End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song — it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity."

Leonard Cohen

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violinDance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely inLift me like an olive branch and be my homeward doveDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are goneLet me feel you moving like they do in BabylonShow me slowly what I only know the limits ofDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of loveDance me to the wedding now, dance me on and onDance me very tenderly and dance me very longWe're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us aboveDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be bornDance me through the curtains that our kisses have outwornRaise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is tornDance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violinDance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely inTouch me with your naked hand or touch me with your gloveDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of love

cast Scarred by war: Battlefield landscapes from First World War 100 years on

images and text credit   www. www.smithsonianmag.com www.dailymail.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk www.westernfrontphotography.com www.theatlantic.com/ www.bbc.com centenaire.org        Music Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End of Love

      created o.e.

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