Sunday, October 28, 2007

Battlefield Orders


http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/wwi/wwi.html

If only this poster told everything.....






If only that poster really said what was happening. That would be the day. But as all of us over here know, it is far worst. The question is not how much we will get paid, or what we will do when we get home, it is mealy weather or not we will live through the day. When we are at home the weapons that are used day to day to kill your friends and even you are not discussed, it is only “Are YOU going to serve for your country? Are YOU going to make the right decision?” Well let me tell you the second you see a gas grenade flying at you and killing your friends, you will wonder. Or even if all the men you have been with scene you have got here are killed by a machine gun. This has happened to me, and far worse. I have seen tanks roll over people, flamethrowers thrown at hundreds of people and killing all of them. The only question I continue to ask myself is why and how am I still alive? But what do you do when your best friend wonders into no man’s land, the land that is not claimed by either side, but is probably the most dangerous area? You can’t go in after him. NO. That is far too dangerous, and two lives can’t be risked for one. And yet the question still remains in everyone’s mind of how to deal with a gas victim. Gas poisoning is BY FAR the worst of all things that can happen to one person. The sight of seeing your friend cough up his lungs because his gas mask was not tight enough can bring tears to anyone’s eyes. The main gases that people tend to use are chlorine, phosgene, a mix of the two and mustard gasses, chlorine causes bronchitis with gradual suffocation, phosgene causes inflammation in the lungs and eventually death. There is one man though, above all rest that every one admires the Red Baron. He is a German ace, Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, skilled in shooting airplanes, and shot down over 80, ironically he was shot down himself. At one point in time Germany had a plan that personally was not sufficient, the Schlieffen Plan. The goal of it was to attack France piece by piece, therefore immobilizing them, but it was never carried out. Many of the men that are currently over here are not aware of the real reason for the fighting. When the Archduke was assassinated it formed the last straw between neighboring areas, breaking out into the First World War, which I am currently fighting in. Though I have been here for some time now I can only tell you I have seen one woman. Here name in Helen Burrey and she is a nurse who while she was here was concerned with accurately describing everything she saw. The concept of “Pal battalions” was one that was not very good because it required men form villages that were easily wiped out, and was basically a waste of life.






Dispite the fact i have not had time to do a more accurate drawing this is a brief drawing of a typical trench that i would work in.

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