Sarah Zama's Blog, page 17

Youth (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

That experience of the front defines the youths that took part in WWI. Their souls, their behaviours, the way they saw the future, everything was heavily impacted. Among the many things they had in common was the inability to express their war experience.

X Hour (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

November 11, 1918, 11:00am. The Great War ends. Europe and the entire world involved in that cataclysmic war may finally dream of homecoming, and living a normal life again. They soon discovered there was no going back.

Women (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

The role and the expectation of women had already started to change at the end of the 19th century. WWI hugely accelerated that process. With men away at war, women took up most of the work of men in all fields, and not all of them were ready to renounce it when men returned from the war.

Veterans (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

Veterans needed to be reinserted into civilian life, be offered new opportunities, and very often, they needed to be demobilised in the soul, as well as the ways of life. It was not an easy path. But they were in such great numbers after the war that no political party could ignore them.

Unexpected (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

"Over by Christmas". It's what everybody thought when the war broke out in August 1914. It was not to be. Unexpectedly, the armies came to a stalemate on the fields of Flanders. Unexpectedly, the war turned into the destruction of lives, towns, landscapes, wildlife on an industrial scale. Unexpectedly, it was going to be four hard, terrible years before it was over.

Trenches (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

Trench life defined the life of millions of men in that war. It was also its great failure, the reason why armies came to a stalemate, turning a war that was supposed to last a few months into a four-year-long terrible butchery.

Shell Shock (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

Before WWI, the concept that trauma could damage a person's mind and emotions was practically inexistent. Even with its many shortcomings, the high number of servicemen and women who suffered from what was called shell shock allowed a new concept to emerge: that wounds could be other than physical.

Radio (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

Although the radio (or as it was initially called, the wireless) was invented at the end of the 19th century, it found its first significant use during WWI. Radio transmission was still very unreliable, and on the battlefields, soldiers preferred other forms of communication. Yet its wartime employment ushered in the larger peacetime use.

Quest (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

For us, who know what the Great War was, it’s difficult to understand the enthusiasm the declaration of war caused in 1914. But for the young generation and the middle class all across Europe, war was like a quest. The opportunity to create the world they were dreaming of.

Psychology (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021)

Psychiatry virtually didn't exist as a medical speciality before WWI, but the terrible emotional shocks that soldiers suffered on the battlefields allowed this science to evolve at a great speed and help many men and women.