The Horrific Realities of "Trench Warfare"

The topic of European history has always been of great interest to me, but I have never really had the chance to actually read in-depth accounts of the events that shaped Europe to what it is today. I have always been particularly interested in the topic of the first World War, but never really made any effort into studying the subject. In my high school history class we briefly studied the major events of this conflict, and I knew it was considered one of the ugliest and most brutal wars in history, but never really considered just what this entailed. Like any horrific events that have taken place in our planet's history, it is easy to look at the Great War from a distance without ever actually considering the devastating effects it had on the people that experienced it firsthand. However, this class has given me the opportunity to get a better grasp on what exactly transpired during the years of 1914-1918. Millions of people died and those who survived were left with memories that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Reading "Rites of War" by Eksteins made the topic that we have been discussing the first weeks of class very real to me and left many lasting images in my mind.

For my first blog, I thought I would discuss the specific things that left a mark on me from this article and see what others thought about the brutalities that took place, as well as the other interesting aspects of the war, such as the truces brought up in "Live and Let Live" or the abandonment of the army by many French soldiers. The simple fact of just how low morale was for men in the trenches was made even more apparent to me when reading the descriptions of the awful things that made up life in the trenches. Rats and other vermin, bitter cold and rain, unreliable rations, and a lack of communication between the front lines and the rest of the military made life simply miserable for those in the trenches. The gruesome details of the battlefield made it even more understandable why many people in the trenches just wanted to die. A barren wasteland littered with corpses, where everything smelled of death (a smell which permeated the trenches, even into the soldiers' rations). The blasts of artillery would stir up the earth, strewing corpses and body parts everywhere. I was particularly horrified by the story of a Frenchmen who was buried in dirt and dug himself out to see one of his comrade's torsoes sticking out of the ground nearby, only to find that it was a decomposing corpse when he tried to help him out and ripped off his head. The stories like this detailed in "Rites of War" made real to me a conflict that never really was before.

I could go on and on about the details of the Great War that have been made real to me by reading some of the articles we have the last week. I had no idea the number of innocent women and children that were killed by this war. The idea of the "total war" that Germany enacted was completely foreign to me before reading about it in-depth. Schools, churches, and centuries-old libraries were destroyed without any regard to the effects these actions might have. The combination of new technology and old warfare made for a war that saw many phases (this is another fact that I was not aware of). I am interested to see what details of this conflict we have covered so far stick out to people, and how they parallel this war to events transpiring today.