Hardship and tedium alternated with spasms of indescribable violence on the western front. Enlisted men rotated in and out of position, at best spending two weeks at base, two weeks in reserve positions, and two weeks in the trenches on the frontlines. They had little leave time to visit loved ones at home, though they exchanged literally billions of letters and postcards with friends and family. At the front, mud and vermin, bad food, damp and cold, and wretched living quarters were the norm. Soldiers spent most of their time repairing rough trenches and dugouts and standing watch for an enemy they rarely saw.

During periods of combat, modern weapons like mustard gas, the machine gun, and long-range artillery resulted in horrific destruction. Units were often decimated in poorly planned frontal assaults, and comrades could rarely retrieve the wounded and dead from no-man’s land between the lines. Bodies, mangled by high explosives, were ground into the mud and disappeared, or became part of the earthworks themselves. A British soldier described the appalling effects: “The last I saw of him was two arms straining madly at the ground, blood pouring from his mouth while legs and body sank into a shellhole filled with water.”*

The statistics tell a no less staggering story. More than 8 million combatants on all sides died during the war, and some 21 million were wounded. One historian estimates that fully half of all dead soldiers went either missing or unidentified; the tidy rows of crosses in military cemeteries mask a horrible reality. For these dead, Woodrow Wilson’s words rang true: World War I was indeed “the war to end all wars.” Things were less clear for the survivors. The maimed veteran — traumatized by “shell shock” or missing limbs or facial features — became an inescapable element of postwar life and culture.

*Quoted in Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 180.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS