The BBC has posted a collection of poignant photographs showing some of the 6,000 personal artifacts that were recovered from WWI mass graves in Fromelles, France.

More than 6,000 artefacts were recovered with the bodies of 250 Australian and British World War I soldiers at Pheasant Wood in the French village of Fromelles. they include this Bible page with passages underlined.

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Testing has shown that the “remains” of Joan of Arc, kept in Chinon, France, are a mummified cat leg bone and a human rib, both dating back to the 6th-3rd century B.C.

A few years ago, Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France, and his team first determined that the bottle contained an approximately 4-inch-long human rib covered with a black coating. It also housed part of a cat femur covered with the same coating, three fragments of “charcoal” and “a brownish textile scrap” about the same length as the rib.

Charlier said some historians then speculated that a cat, perhaps symbolizing the devil, was thrown onto Joan of Arc’s funeral pyre.

Carbon dating, however, found that the objects predate the French heroine’s lifetime by many centuries.

The “textile scrap” is likely a mummy wrapping, since “the chemical composition of the coatings was comparable with that of embalming products, such as those used by the old Egyptians,” the researchers concluded.

The dark coating contained a mix of bitumen, wood resins, gypsum and other chemicals. Pine pollen was also identified, probably from pine resin, commonly used during Egyptian embalming.

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A neo-Gothic 19th-century church that dominates the town of Gesté, France, is to be torn down due to it’s size, condition, and budget concerns. It was built on the ruins of a 16th-century church that was destroyed in the French Revolution.

Although the church, dedicated to St. Peter, is arguably the sole architectural jewel in this town of 2,400 people, the town has decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one that will be far cheaper to keep up.

Erected in stages to accommodate 900 people, the formidable stone building has stood sadly empty since 2006. Completing the picture of dereliction, it is surrounded by a wire fence to protect visitors from the very real threat of crumbling stonework.

“Because of its size and complexity it will always be costly to maintain,” said Jean-Pierre Léger, 61, a retired engineer who is Gesté’s part-time mayor. “It is a victim of its considerable size. It is too big.”

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The bodies of over 400 troops buried in a mass grave in Northern France will get the heroe’s burial they deserve.

Twelve men from the Cameron Highlanders, with 15 soldiers with Scottish connections, are among the 400 Australian and British troops exhumed from their World War I resting place in a five-month operation, which ended in September.

They will now, in February, be given an individual service and burial with full military honours in marked, but unnamed graves, in a new £1.5million cemetery.

A memorial to the fallen heroes will be unveiled on July 19, the 94th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, in which more than 7,000 British and Australian troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in a disastrous 24 hours.

The bodies of the fallen were taken by the Germans to sites behind their lines and buried in pits. These were discovered in the 1920s during official post-war burial campaigns, leading to their re-interment by the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

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Check out this awesome collection of blueprints and photographs showing the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

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