By Lindsay Lee.
World War I itself is a huge irony.
The War to end all the War, but caused even more wars, and end up as a war of despair and deep wound.
Everything that happens during the World War I shows the irony of the wars.
We do not know, and can not say for sure, that the intention of every event was truly for what they have meant. But we can infer by looking at the causes and effects for every case, and most of them didn’t turn out the way it supposed to be. For example, the Trench Warfare, one of the most sorrowful event that happened in 1915 shows how absurd it was, and ironic it seems. The armies in Western Front have dug miles of parallel trenches for “protection.” However, this was not protection, but simply they were just getting closer to each other for the fight (since they fought from the trenches).
If you were to step on the “No Man’s Land,” it wouldn’t take you even a second to die. It was the “mine field.”
Even though the narrator narrates as if it was not a big deal, this video shows how soldier worked out there.
They used mustard gas which caused them sore, painfulness and also the Trench Foot, which was an infection that many of the soldiers have got back then due to the frigid, cold weather (yet staying out there all-day-long).
As tension grew upon themselves, they could not think about anything else, but to concentrate 100% on the other side. The soldiers couldn’t let go of their strain–always stay nervous and paranoid–which gave them nothing but took their lives away. So I think the Trench Warfare could be called as the “No Man’s Land”, but also “The Life Takers.” How could they live there, eat there, sleep there, wash there? As one soldier have said, “The men slept in mud, washed in mud, ate mud, and dreamed mud.”
This plan was meant to “protect” themselves, yet it turned out to be another war that only cost a huge lost. Not only did it kill huge number of soldiers, but also gave them mental pain.
So it is worthy to question, “was it really for protection, or was it actually to start another war?”
How tragic, yet ironic was the Warfare …!
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April 25th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Nice post, but the videos were a bit silly for my taste. The student did a good job researching, but wasn’t careful to match his tone with the mood of this horror. Joking about tragedy in a silly way is rarely going to work (though as we’ve seen in Gulliver and Candide, black humor–satire–is a completely different thing).