Nina Prescott
WWI Letter
AP World History
01-25-15

To whom this may concern, Life in the Great War is not at all what people say it to be. Romantic? Not even. Bombs exploding every minute, decapitating limbs from bodies, bullets speed back and forth, promising certain death, all while the steady rumble of armed tanks rolling across No Man’s Land fill the air. We spend our days hiding in this trench. Every day, we survive on tea and biscuits, but imagine eating with dead bodies’ right under your feet, not to mention the smell of the rot and stench of unclean men and their festering demands of nature. Our boots are always waterlogged and freezing, our feet soaked and rubbed raw. I have only too often seen men endure Trench Foot. These men do not feel a thing in their grotesque figures that they now call their feet, in fact, they go completely and utterly dead. If lucky enough to not have been amputated, and the swelling goes down and show signs of recovery, the real agony begins. Another common torture forced upon us is mustard gas. Not only is it odorless and colorless, it is deadly. The symptoms include swelling, blisters, blindness, external and internal bleeding. Another common side effect of this war is shell-shock. Many men cannot even function right after this; their minds are addled and some may even be considered insane from the barbaric and inhumane experience they have gone through and witnessed. This whole war began with the assassination of Prince Ferdinand