Surviving Hell On Earth Was A Lesson In Perspective. At The Time It Sucked, But It Turned Out To Be

[Sofia Gilcrease]

The intense and mechanical destruction of Belgium and Northern France in the First World War created a new and terrifying landscape that had hitherto only ever been imagined or seen in medieval visions of hell: one of mud and death unlike anything ever seen before. Saunders describes the landscape of the Western Front as an artefact, the product of human activity and not a natural process (Saunders 2004: 6). The resultant Mudscape became the landscape in which the war was fought and lived and a major part of the material culture of the war. A multi-disciplinary study of this material culture makes it possible both to understand the war in greater detail and to see the depth to which mud affected the conflict and the way it was fought. Almost every painting, photograph, poem, diary or book about the First World War involves mud. It is as much a part of the war as artillery or trenches, barbed wire or machine guns, hopelessness or heroism. Yet mud as material culture from the war does not exist for modern day observers, except in the literature and imagery of the time. One can visit museums and see tanks, guns, bullets, uniforms and so on. It is even possible to visit old trenches on the battlegrounds of Europe and beyond, but there are no museums of mud. It is not possible to see the mud as it was lived in and fought in and died in. the old battlefields are today either still off limits to the public or largely returned to farmland and rebuilt to their former towns and villages. Therefore the role of mud in the Great War is often overlooked, taken for granted and not fully understood.

Surviving Hell on Earth was a Lesson in Perspective. At the Time It Sucked, but It Turned Out to Be

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