To be honest, during the Battle of Verdun when the French engineers tasked with keeping the road open for supplies to the front were loosing a thousand men a day!
No French soldier was allowed to serve more than one rotation at Verdun, the conditions were so severe .
For the French, who lost over a million men fighting, to have villages where no one died really is miraculous.

Quote from: OldenBUA on 11 August 2013, 12:13:52 PM
On the other side of the spectrum, there's the monument in Khatyn, in Belarus.

The "Cemetery of Villages" commemorates 186 Belarussian villages that were destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. Each "grave" has the name of the village and an urn containing soil from the location in question.

Nearby, the "Trees of Life" name 433 Belarussian villages that were destroyed during the war years but that were later rebuilt. The loss of one-quarter of the Belarussian population during the war is represented by an eternal flame that is flanked by three birch trees.

That's very interesting, thanks for that.

At the risk of getting into a "my tragedy is worse than yours" contest, there's also the story of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. The Germans killed the inhabitants and destroyed the village, even taking away the rubble and landscaping the area so that there was no indication there had ever been a village there. Hitler had ordered that not only should Lidice die, it's memory should die. When news got out, people all over the world responded - towns and villages were renamed Lidice, people named their daughters Lidice, and in Stoke on Trent, a fund was organised - local miners (Lidice was a mining village) gave one days pay every week, and after the war, the fund was used to pay for the village to be rebuilt.

http://www.russellphillipsbooks.co.uk/lidice-and-the-unearthed-project/