Fighting World War One - War of the Trenches

Main Point - World War One was a horrific experience that many soldiers on both sides saw a largely pointless.

Source # 1 - Video on the Development of Trench Warfare - click here

Source # 2 - Graph of Battlefield deaths by Type of Weapon.

Source # 3- Interactive Diagram of a World War One Trench - click here

Biography - Eric Maria Remarque - Erich Maria Remarque was drafted into the German Army in 1916. Remarque served in a military engineering unit building and repairing fortification on the frontline. He was wounded in an artillery attack in July 1917 and spent most of the rest of the war in a military hospital recovering from his wounds. The war ended a few days before Remarque returned to active service in 1918. In 1928, Remarque wrote “All Quiet on the Western Front” based on his own wartime experiences. The simple and blunt language underlined the horrific reality of war described in the book. In the introduction to the book, Remarque wrote, “I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have survived shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Source # 4 - Video Clip of the opening scene to the movie All Quiet On the Western Front that shows German and French soldiers fighting in the trenches - click here

Source # 5 - Infographic on the Battle of the Somme

Biography - Otto Dix - Otto Dix was caught up in the excitement of the war and volunteered to serve in the German army. Dix commanded a machine gun unit on the Western Front and fought against the British in the Battle of the Somme. Dix was wounded several times in the war; the last time was in August 1918 when he was nearly killed from being shot in the neck. A medic was able to stop the bleeding and saved his life. The war ended while Dix was recovering in the hospital. During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he chronicled his experience. After the war, Dix was haunted by the brutality of war and he had a recurring nightmare of crawling crawled through bombed out houses. He tried to capture this in his paintings of desolate battle fields that were carved with military trenches and strewn with bodies. Dix’s painting showed soldiers as mutilated, wounded, suffering or going mad. In 1924, Dix published fifty of his pictures in a book called “The War”.

Source # 7 - Drawings Drawing of Soldiers During an Attack by Otto Dix

Source # 8 - Video about the use of poison gas - click here

Biography - Wilfred Owen - Wilfred Owen joined the British Army in 1915. After military training, he was sent to fight on the Western Front as an officer. In the fighting, Owen suffered several traumatic brain injuries from falling into a shell hole and by being blown high in the air by an explosion. He was diagnosed with “shell-shock” (the term used at the time for post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD) and was sent back to Britain to recover at the Craiglockhart War Hospital. It was during this time that Owen wrote most the poems for which he is now remembered were written during this time period. The poem, Dulce et Decorum est" is one of Owen’s most famous poems. The title is in Latin and means, “It is sweet and honorable”. During World War One, many people in England who supported the war used this saying to describe the young men killed in the war. Owen said that this view of the war was a lie. In the poem he described how dying in war was horrific and meaningless. Owen was killed in battle on November 4, 1918 –exactly one week before the Armistice ended the fighting in the war.

Source # 8 - Excerpt from Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Battle of Somme - On-line Game