Great War attempts to lure young Australian men out of the heaven of the surf and into the hell of the trenches (see our 1915 poster picture) were surely not helped by eyewitness descriptions of war's hellishness like this one. An excerpt from a letter sent home by a soldier, it appeared 100 years ago this week in Sydney's The Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial.
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"Let me give you some general impressions of this astounding conflict," the soldier wrote.
"First and most impressive, the absolutely indescribable ravages of modern artillery fire, not only upon all men, animals, and buildings within its zone, but upon the very face of nature itself. Imagine a broad belt, 10 miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves; in which farms, villages, and cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads, and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by shells and - disfigured by dead horses, cattle, sheep, and goats, scattered in every attitude of repulsive distortion and dismemberment.
"Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines and lines of trenches. In these trenches crouch lines of men, in brown or grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven, hollow-eyed with the continual strain, unable to reply to the everlasting rain of shells hurled at them from three, four, five, or more miles away."
