I am currently working on the third chapter of a book about the 20th century, and so instead of working on a new blog post this month I decided to post an excerpt from the chapter. Enjoy.
Industrialization in the previous decades gave way to numerous weapons of war. Soldiers no longer had only to worry about single fire rifles and cannons. Now was the age of machine guns, grenades, heavy artillery, and chemical weapons. Fighter planes, field radios, submarines, and tanks were all introduced during the Great War. The early years of World War 1 were a clash of new technology and old strategy which led to high casualties on both sides and nothing to show for it. Both sides found themselves losing thousands of men to gain and lose a few yards of space. As the war went on, the armies became more and more adept at using the new machines to extinguish life.
The battlefields of World War 1 were like nothing humanity had ever seen before. Soldiers were packed into trenches on both sides of the battle. These trenches were filled with rats and disease. Water collected at the bottoms and soldiers were constantly freezing and wet with no way to get dry after it rained. Peaking your head out of the top of the trench often resulted in a bullet whizzing by at best and at worst, it piercing your skull. Artillery thundered everywhere and shook the earth. The German soldier and author, Ernst Junger describes what it was like to be bombarded with artillery in the trenches:
“It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit. I think I have found a comparison that captures the situation in which I and all the other soldiers who took part in this war so often found ourselves: you must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung, now it’s cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it’s struck the post, and the splinters are flying — that’s what it’s like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position.”
The hell of the trenches was comforting in comparison to what lay beyond them. The middle of the battlefield was nothing but craters, barbed wire, fire, mangled corpses, and injured soldiers crying out for help—help often being a bullet to end their suffering. Mud was a constant in No Man’s Land, making it a struggle to cross with or without gunfire. Drowning in mud and choking on enemy chemical weapons were standard ways soldiers met the ends of their lives.
Soldier after soldier was mowed down and another was forced to take his spot in the war machine. Junger writes:
“The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place. And now it was our turn.”
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