Case Study: The First World War

Primary Source Study The First World War was thought to be the war that would end all wars. Approximately 17,860,000 Europeans died, deaths belonging to both military personnel and civilians. The First World War differentiated itself from other wars not just by the grand scale of death rates, but also through the introduction of a new battle strategy and technologies. The innovative battle strategy that resulted in the development of new technologies was trench warfare. Trench warfare was a relatively immobile tactic that consisted of armies digging trenches opposite each other with a large expanse of land in between called no man’s land. Essentially it was the immobile and long distance characteristics of trench warfare that led to the …show more content…
Firstly, Clifford Vincent found escape through romantic love with his finance Iris Dutton. In a letter written to Iris Dutton on September 1, 1917, Vincent said: “I was very sorry not to have written to you yesterday, but will do my best to make up for it. I was very glad in receive your letter just now. It did me very much good indeed”. Vincent’s apology for not writing her the day before indicates that the two exchange letters nearly every day. Combining this with his statement that receiving her letter had done him good-potentially emotionally and mentally-one can infer that the two were quite in love. Furthermore, by writing nearly every day and her letter uplifting his emotional and/or mental state, it is likely that Vincent used their exchange of letters as a way to escape the world around him. In other worlds, Vincent used his love for Dutton, and her reciprocated love, to escape the war surrounding him. The notion of soldier using love as an escape in war is presented by Ville Kivimäki, a professor at the University of Tampere: “In the midst of the filthiness on the front, everything good and worthy in life was deposited with morally elevated, faithful women back home, who thus upheld the meaningfulness of soldiers ' lives and rose above their personal qualities to become emotionally recharged symbols of purity”. Many soldiers escaped the horrors of war by day dreaming about the women they loved back home. The soldiers then used the over glorified visions of the women-whether it was their wife, girlfriend, mother or sister-to persuade themselves to keep fighting, to keep acting like a machine, dehumanized and impersonal, capable of killing other men with similar visions as well as risk death themselves. Similarly, soldiers sought escape through religious love. In the same letter Clifford Vincent wrote to Iris Dutton, he said: “You are lonely and loneliness ever breeds