JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This striking photo shows the shell casings for one day’s worth of bombardment by the U.K., at a position somewhere in France, 1916. I reckon that there are 3,000 105mm shell casings in this photo, which for one day’s work is a lot. Throughout the course of the war it has been estimated that there were about 1.75 billion artillery shells fired, which makes this pile about .0000001% of the total; another way of looking at this number is that it would take about 580,000 of these piles to equal the 1.75 billion figure. It is a vast number, and vast numbers are hard to understand in a daily language.
[Image source: RarehistoricalPhotos.com http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/shells-creeping-bombardment-on-german-lines-1916/]