The Origins of the Great War

Primary Source #1

SOURCE: American stereoview card, French artillery

SOURCE: German postcard, WWI (1915)

Primary Source #2

SOURCE: Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front, by Arnold Bennett (1915)

Primary Source #3The British soldier in France and Flanders is not a self-supporting body. He needs support, and a great deal of support. I once saw his day's rations set forth on a tray, and it seemed to me that I could not have consumed them in a week of good appetite. The round of meat is flanked by plenteous bacon, jam, cheese, and bread. In addition there are vegetables, tea, sugar, salt, and condiments, with occasional butter; and once a week come two ounces of tobacco and a box of matches for each ounce. But the formidable item is the meat. And then the British soldier wants more than food; he wants, for instance, fuel, letters, cleanliness; he wants clothing, and all the innumerable instruments and implements of war. He wants regularly, and all the time.

Primary Source #4

SOURCE: American postcard, WWI (1918)

SOURCE: Piles of artillery shells, WWI (no date)

Primary Source #5

SOURCE: Shell-Shock and other Neuropsychiatric Problems (1919)

Primary Source #6Case 341. (Mott, February, 1918)A sergeant, who had been a schoolmaster, was asked to write down his dreams by Captain W. Brown, who had sometimes charge of Mott's cases at the Maudsley Hospital. The first dream was as follows:

"I appeared to be resting on the roadside when a woman (unknown) called to me to see her husband's (a comrade) body which was about to be buried. I went to a field in which was a pit, and near the edge four or five dead bodies. In a hand-cart nearby was a legless body, the head of which was hidden from sight by a slab of stone. . . . On moving the stone I found the body alive, and the head spoke to me, imploring me to see that it was not buried. Burial party arrived, and I was myself about to be buried with legless body when I awoke."

SOURCE: Aerial photograph of shell cratering, WWI (1918)

Primary Source #7

Primary Source #8

SOURCE: Kitchener's Mob: The Adventures of an American in the British Army, by James Norman Hall (1916)

The worst of it was that we could not get away from the sight of the mangled bodies of our comrades. Arms and legs stuck out of the wreckage, and on every side we saw distorted human faces, the faces of men we had known, with whom we had lived and shared hardships and dangers for months past. Those who have never lived through experiences of this sort cannot possibly know the horror of them. It is not in the heat of battle that men lose their reason. Battle frenzy is, perhaps, a temporary madness. The real danger comes when the strain is relaxed. Men look about them and see the bodies of their comrades torn to pieces as though they had been hacked and butchered by fiends. One thinks of the human body as inviolate, a beautiful and sacred thing. The sight of it dismembered or disemboweled, trampled in the bottom of a trench, smeared with blood and filth, is so revolting as to be hardly endurable.

And yet, we had to endure it. We could not escape it. Whichever way we looked, there were the dead. . . .

Primary Source #9

SOURCE: Ad for prosthetics (no date)