Two British ex-pats and I drove from Prague in November to visit the Ypres Salient, scene of relentless fighting from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 right through until its end in 1918. The British, Commonwealth, French and German armies sustained a million casualties in a patch of waterlogged countryside barely 20km by 10km. Half of these were fatal, and half of those vanished, with no known grave. Winston Groom described the Salient as: 'A gigantic corpse factory'.
The unimaginable scale of loss of life and the deprivation suffered by the soldiers on both sides were futile. The Germans failed to capture Ypres and the British/French failed to break out in the generals' pipe-dream of a rapid advance to Antwerp and the coast. It was the unthinking persistence of the British high command, who worked from maps and never witnessed the battlefield, which led to widespread disillusion with modern warfare and a determination on the part of many influential British and French citizens to avoid a repetition - at almost any cost. This in turn led to the dangerous policy of appeasement in the 1930s.
If artefacts from Ancient Egypt appeal to you - and I assume they do - one of the great pleasures of travelling in Europe and North America is the opportunity to see collections in galleries and museums wherever you go. Nearly every major city has a permanent Egyptian exhibition, some reflecting national involvement in exploration and discovery, others reflecting individual collectors' activities in the 19th and 20th centuries.