![Fey - en Haye: St Mihiel Salient Church-yard of old village of Fey-en-Haye on the outskirts of Bois le Pretre.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-02.jpg?quality=85&w=2400)
Today the grass has grown back. A sense of quiet comes through in the images. But a century ago, these landscapes were part of the Western Front of World War I — the reality of which TIME would later describe, in a review of a history of the war, as “hundreds of thousands of young men existing like stupefied moles in the badly shored-up gutters of mud and decaying flesh that zigzagged their way across France.”
When the U.S. entered World War I almost exactly a century ago, on April 6, 1917, the “doughboys” who went to fight encountered that terrible scene. In honor of that centennial, the National WWI Museum and Memorial is featuring a new exhibit of the photographs of Michael St Maur Sheil, who began his work capturing the modern look of World War I battlefields in 2005. The exhibition has been traveling the world since the 2014 centennial of the war’s onset.
Though it is hard to imagine just how different these landscapes looked 100 years ago, it’s clear from the images that the bloody battles left their mark. That’s an unsurprising fact given the epoch-defining scale of the fight.
For example, when President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 helped to dedicate a series of monuments to those who had given their lives during the conflict, one memorial of which was located at Montfaucon, TIME noted that the memorial was well and expensively earned. “There took place the biggest battle in U. S. History,” the magazine explained. “There was lost the Lost Battalion. There the Tennessee Conscientious Objector Alvin York captured 132 Germans. There, in 47 days of storming into the face of the Hindenburg Line about 123,000 Americans were killed or wounded. Some 900,000 others, nearly as many as the Confederacy mustered in four years, came through unscathed to live to tell the tale of the final break-through to Sedan and draw their bonuses.”
“The Western Front that the American forces saw when they arrived and until they returned home was scenes of environmental degradation, obliterated villages, vast cemeteries, and continuing massive destruction,” the museum explains. “Much of the landscape of the Western Front looked like an uninhabited planet very foreign to them.”
The exhibition Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace: The Doughboys 1917 – 1918 opens on Friday at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., and will be on view through Aug. 20, 2017.
![Fields of Battle Ruined abbey and Gobservation bunker. Montfaucon d'Argonne](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-01.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Fey - en Haye: St Mihiel Salient Church-yard of old village of Fey-en-Haye on the outskirts of Bois le Pretre.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-02.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Cpl Stowers MoH. American 371RI Memorial above Bussy Farm. where Cpl. Freddie Stowers won MoH 371 Inf 93 Div. Sept. 28, 1918.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-03.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Iron Harvest Unexploded shells uncovered by ploughing near Munich Trench Cemetery awaiting collection by the Bomb Squad.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-04.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Oise - Aisne American Cemetery U.S. Aisne Marne Cemetery.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-05.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![German hospital German hospital cut into the side of a hill with a massive protective concrete frontage near Binarville. Argonne.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-06.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![The Lost Battalion American 30.06 caliber unfired rifle clips in the Meuse Argonne “Pocket” where the so-called “Lost Battalion” fought its gallant action.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-07.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![German artillery bunker near Woinville German gun position dugout near Woinville made of cast concrete in the U.S. sector of the St. Mihiel battle.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-08.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![German "potato masher" grenades Relic German stick grenade in the U.S. action areas in the Champagne region.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-09.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Newfoundland Park Aerial view of the Newfoundland Memorial Park, Beaumont Hamel, Somme region](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170303-wwi-battlefields-10.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Welcome to the Noah Lyles Olympics
- Melinda French Gates Is Going It Alone
- What to Do if You Can’t Afford Your Medications
- How to Buy Groceries Without Breaking the Bank
- Sienna Miller Is the Reason to Watch Horizon
- Why So Many Bitcoin Mining Companies Are Pivoting to AI
- The 15 Best Movies to Watch on a Plane
- Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time
Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com