In Europe

the wooden walls of which were hung with weapons and reminded one of the Wild West,’ Ernst Jünger wrote. ‘I would drink a cup of tea, smoke and read, while my steward fussed with the little wood stove spreading the aroma of toast.’
    Corporal Barthas reported that the French shelters close to Vermelles sometimes resembled little villas. Even along the front lines,‘sparks, flames and smoke’ rose up day and night ‘from the hundreds of little chimneys’. In the war museum at Péronne, one can see a British officer's complete set of ‘field’ tea-service accoutrements, pleasingly arranged in a wickerbasket. Beside it lies a German accordion with a makeshift songbook written by one M. Erdmeier,
Allerhand Schützgrabengestanzl
. Other Germans planted garden plots with rhododendron, snowdrops and
Parole-uhren
, little windmills that milled away the hours. The Belgians formed ‘families’, with a ‘father’ who referred to his bunkmate as his
wuf
, wife.
    In the British trenches a special newspaper was distributed, the blackly humorous
Wipers Times
, published by a writer and printer who had found an old printing press in a ruin. The 8 September, 1917 edition shows an elderly British soldier, still in the trenches. The caption reads: ‘He stroked his hoary snow-white beard / And gazed with eyes now long since bleared …’ Another sketch shows ‘The Trenches, in the year 1950’. All this bears witness to the unbearable suspicion that was taking hold of more and more soldiers: that no solution would ever be found to this deadlock.
    Perhaps it was courage born of desperation, the urge to move at any price, that led again and again to mass suicide attacks. Passchendaele, a wet and muddy hamlet not far from Ypres, was renamed Passion Dale by the British, because it had to be attacked again and again. Estimates are that some 60,000 men, a quarter of all those who died, drowned in the treacherous bogs around the handful of houses. They sank into the mud, disappeared into the thousands of holes and craters left by the artillery shells. ‘See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backwards a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.’
    Meanwhile, the nineteenth century's final traces of innocence were disappearing fast. The Belgian Army had entered the war with uniforms that looked as though they came from a school play: shakos, clogs, capotes, felt caps, rucksacks made of dog skins, huge blue coats that absorbed all the water of Ypres. The Scottish Highland Regiment vehemently insisted on wearing their kilts, until it turned out that mustard gas could have a disastrous effect on intimate body parts. The German lancers wore huge, shiny eagles on their hats, and leather helmets you could push a bullet through with your thumb. The French proudly wore their red uniformcaps, blue coats and red trousers. No one had ever thought about camouflage or other practical matters: these were uniforms of honour and rank. Early in 1915, steel helmets and grey and khaki uniforms began appearing at the front, the pragmatic forms of the new century. The British toy manufacturer Meccano followed the technical developments closely. Examples can be seen today in London's Imperial War Museum: model 713, a machine gun mounted on a tripod; model 6.42, a complete battleship, and model 710: the Aeroscope, a kind of tall crane used to view the front from on high.
    But, as is usually the case, it took a long time for all these new technological developments to win a place in the imaginations of the generals, politicians and others. The magnitude of the killing between 1914–18 was due largely to the persistent combination of old strategies with ultra-modern technologies. At first, almost no one understood that such modernities as the machine gun, poison gas, the airplane and later the tank called for an entirely new way of waging war. The common foot soldier at the front was often the first to become aware of this technical mismatch. He found himself having been sent to war with antiquated equipment, he found himself withstanding a mustard-gas attack with only a urine-drenched rag held over his mouth and nose, he saw his comrades during a bayonet attack being mowed down by newfangled machine guns, and his bitterness grew.
    A British