When war broke out in 1914, no one could have possibly foreseen what the conflict would be really like. At the time, in the common idiom, war was a glorious business, an exciting adventure that offered the chance to become a man, a modern-day knight who would adorn the pages of great books about heroism and the majesty of empire. Media, as we know it today, simply did not exist. There was no 24-hour news coverage or the steady stream of television images from the front that we are so used to seeing today. For most of the war, coverage and photographic imagery would be tightly controlled and although the publication of the daily casualty figures would be available in black and white every morning, these cold numbers were deliberately kept distant from their visual and visceral reality.
The violence with which this industrial war was prosecuted would have been an extreme shock to the system for the troops that endured the hardships of the front lines. Ideas of glory and adventure were soon consumed by the inordinate quantities of materiel and the sheer magnitude of the firepower that was deployed by both sides. But perhaps the strangest consequence of this new and dreadful type of warfare was to be that men would not be able to live as they had done in previous conflicts. In this war, they would have to live below the surface of the earth, seeking refuge from the modern killing weapons that plied their trade with such ruthless effectiveness. In turn, they would become more animal than man, forever digging themselves deeper into the earth that they were slowly destroying with the new and insidious technologies of modern warfare.