Shortly after we started work on emptying the house to sell it, we managed to give away the beds (that's an awesome story for another day) that were blocking access to one of the crawl spaces that we knew was chock full but we didn't know of what. We pulled out an old trunk that had the full kit of my grandpa's from the war. It had his gas mask, uniform, boots, duffel bag -- and a couple of giant shells. We seriously wondered if we needed to call the bomb squad. But my brother in law did a bit of reading online about how to determine whether the shells were empty and safe and figured they were fine. Since then we've schlepped the trunk over to my sister's house and so far so good...
I remember thinking about what it must have meant to my grandpa to keep his full uniform and even the gas mask. Back then, people didn't throw stuff away as easily as we do now but it's not like he saved them to use them. My uncle tells me that until the very end of his life, when he had dementia and was being cared for in an assisted living place, my grandpa hardly talked about the war, at least with his family. From assisted living is where he told my uncle a heart breaking story from the war. He said that one day towards the very end of the war, having already walked maybe hundreds of miles over the previous months (presumably in the boots we found in the trunk), my grandfather was so exhausted he could hardly take another step. There was a man they all called Johnny Appleseed because he was really tall and from Wisconsin and had a big adam's apple. He came along and put his arm around my grandpa, propping him up for the remaining few miles until they were allowed to camp for the night. Before collapsing in his tent, just before falling asleep, my grandpa thought that first thing in the morning he would find Johnny Appleseed and thank him properly. But that wasn't to be because in the morning he discovered that Johnny Appleseed had been killed in shelling over night.
I suppose some people probably want to just forget everything about going to war. My grandfather seemed to want ways to remember. Not only did he save everything he had during the war, he sent home an enormous number of postcards, asking his siblings to save them for his return, and he also sought out photographs -- we have letters from four sources who he wrote to after the war, seeking battlefield photos.
He also was active in the foreign legion when he came home from the war and he returned with the huge foreign legion expedition back to the battlefields a decade later. He carefully saved everything he could from that trip as well, including the full (fat) daily issues of Stars and Stripes from the expedition, the daily bulletin on the ship over, and stickers on his luggage.