re: #158 experiencedtraveller

I have never seen your Doctor Who example. But it well documented how trench warfare in WWI reverbated throughout the culture and arts of Europe and the USA up to WWII.

One of the best first hand accounts of trench warfare I have read is Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. The casualties were just enormous and constant.

The Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes (both the book and the BBC/PBS series) went into detail about the effect the Great War had on the arts in the interwar period. The entire Futurist school was essentially a reaction to the destruction of the trench campaign, as was Dada. Hughes pointed out that when an entire generation was virtually annihilated in the trenches, part of that apocalypse were highly intelligent men who would almost certainly have been leaders and trendsetters in politics, science and the arts, had they lived.

What’s amazing (in an appalling way) is how clueless the high commands on both sides were going in. From Vicksburg, Petersburg, and Richmond in the American Civil War, to Paris in 1871, Ladysmith and Pretoria in the Boer War and Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War, they had plenty of examples of what could happen, and should have anticipated the possibility of static siege warfare developing and either avoided it, or at least better prepared to cope with it. They did neither. (The average man-in-the-street might be forgiven for this, but planning staffs are paid to think about these things, and apparently just didn’t bother.)

The most appalling part is that in 1939, the French, British, etc., were prepared to do the same thing all over again, and just accept the casualties. Other than the obvious mistake of trying to refight the previous war when the enemy has no intention of repeating a strategy that ended in their defeat the first time around, there’s no guarantee that after three or four more years of the 1915-17 style of war, that the Allies wouldn’t have faced even worse problems than the troop mutinies at the front in the winter of 1916-17.

cheers

eon