The Trenches Explained

It could be argued that trench warfare birthed modernity. It took everything that was thought about war; the valour and romance and glory, and reduced it to the grim and grimy and gut-shot shit that it was; like reality. Nevertheless, the propaganda machines back home kept printing colourful, eye-catching, necessary posters to keep the faith and romance of war alive. If that wasn't what they intended, at least that's what happened.

I say that it birthed modernity because of the dissilusionment that people seemed to feel for the first time. Darwin had recently committed deicide, but that was just a snowflake in the cultural avalanche. Everywhere the lines between good and evil were being reconsidered, blurred, or redrawn and in the middle of all of that came hopelessness and the fear that it didn't mean anything.

Eliot, Yeats, Hemingway, all saw it firsthand and relayed the sense of impending nothingness to the world, who taciturnly agreed with them. The result over the past one hundred years has been a semi-curious, often apathetic investigation of hopelessness and despair. Most of the time we try to ignore it, but when it surfaces it's hideous and powerful.

We're still in the trenches, but we aren't sure who the enemy is any more. Sometimes we wonder if it even matters. We spend a lot of time trying to pretend that nothing is very important any more, and media has made that very easy. We're our own propoganda. We're entertaining ourselves to death.