Mud and Rain By Siegfried Sassoon

This is a poem by British Poet Siegfried Sassoon about the Battle of Paschendale.

Mud and Rain

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood.
Why should jolly soldier-boys complain?
God made these before the roofless Flood -
Mud and rain.

Mangling cramps and bullets through the brain,
Jesus never guessed them when He died.
Jesus had a purpose for His pain,
Ay, like abject beasts we shed our blood,
Often asking if we die in vain.
Gloom conceals us in a soaking sack --
Mud and rain.

World War I in Colour - War is pointless.

Footage of troops fighting in the trenches of WWI. More like this to follow.

World War I was the first modern global military conflict which took place in Europe between 1914 to 1918. Archaic military tactics met modern industrialised warfare for the first time, resulting casualties on a previously unimaginable scale. Men rotted in the mud, then were sent to face massed machine gun fire, modern artillary, tanks and chemical weapons. Approximately 16 million soldiers and civilians died and countless others were physically maimed or mentally scarred by the horrors of trench warfare.
Music: Clint Mansell - The Last Man

via sconicbomb 

And here is a video that shows the human toll of trench warfare. Warning this video is disturbing.

Otto Dix - War Images

Otto Dix (1891-1969) via Encyclopedia of Irish & World Art

The German painter and printmaker Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was one of the greatest and most powerful representatives of the post-war satirical style of German Expressionism, which flourished during the 1920s in Berlin, Dresden, Mannheim and other major cities. The target for Dix's satirical, often brutal style of expressionism was the horror of war, of which he had first-hand experience, and the decadent depravities of the post-war Weimar Republic. A member of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) school, Dix was banned by the Nazis who classified his art as degenerate. Acknowledged as one of the greatest post-war expressionist painters, his 1920s paintings are regarded as some of the finest anti-war pictures of modern art.

Read more here.

The Trench

Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas - 1924

Machine Gunner Advancing

Meal Time in the Trenches - 1923/24

Trenches - 1917

Flandern - 1934