Most new arrivals [to the Western Front] were shocked by the sheer emptiness of the landscape. The writer Reginald Farrer, looking over a parapet during a visit to the front in 1916, admitted:
It seemed quite unthinkable that there was another trench over there a few yards away just like our own… Not even the shells made that brooding watchfulness more easy to grasp: they only made it more grotesque. For everything was so paralysed in calm, so unnaturally innocent and bland and balmy. You simply could not take it in.
Second Lieutenant P. J. Campbell had a gunner’s eye for the ground.
I learnt the names of every wood and all the villages, I knew the contours of the hills and the shapes of the lakes in the valley. To see so much and to see nothing. We might have been the only men alive, my two signalers and I. And yet I knew there were thousands of hidden men in front of me… but no one moved, everyone was waiting for the safety of darkness.
And for infantry officer Charles Carrington the wire defined hostility. ‘This side of our wire everything is familiar and every man a friend,’ he wrote:
Over there, beyond the wire, is the unknown, the uncanny, there are the people about whom you accumulate scraps of irrelevant information but whose real life you can never penetrate, the people who will shoot you dead.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Earth and Wire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 271-72. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Reginald Farrer The Void of War (London 1918) p. 113.
Campbell Cannon’s Mouth pp. 218-19.
Carrington Soldier p. 87.
Further Reading:
[Charles Edmund Carrington / Charles Edmonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carrington_(British_Army_officer)
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