Supposedly the war to end all wars, the First World War to this day invokes true horror in people due to the abject waste of human life, the squalor, danger and fear of the trenches, the first use of gas and other chemical weapons, the influenza epidemic that followed and the political choices after that started the complex road to the start of the Second World War.
At points in the First World War people died at rates that were totally unheard of up to that point in history. During some moments at Verdun as many as eight men a second were being killed, and for the period including Verdun and the Somme, five men a minute died for a period of five months - a figure close to a million dead in areas not much larger than suburban Berlin.
Such conditions created not only abject horror amongst those involved, but also some of the most powerful poetry and war art ever seen. In this thread it would be good to post pictures, poems, art, books, quotes and general discussion about the First World War, and I'll kick off here with a small selection:
Ernest Shackleton, after landing at South Georgia in the South Atlantic in 1916 after two years stuck around Antarctica, asked:
Quote:
'Tell me, when was the war over?'
To a manager at a small British whaling station, and recieved this simple response:
Quote:
'The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.'
Men at the Somme:
French soliders cutting through the wire at Verdun:
Weapons of war soon to be consigned to history by the terrifying power of the Maxim gun, Russian Cavalry:
Suicide in the Trenches By Siegfried Sassoon:
Quote:
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
A painting of gas victims by Constance Oliver:
Last edited by Wamy Einehouse; 03-07-2011 at 01:42 PM.