I’ve seen movies and newsreels about World War I. They didn’t cover it as thoroughly in my schools, because America didn’t have a leading role in it, and because the entire stupid, avoidable mess was a Continental clusterfuck that killed millions and settled nothing but the teams for the next world war. But what they did show me I remembered. Miles and miles of trenches. A smoke-haunted no-man’s-land strung with muddy, rusty barbed wire and lined with machine guns and marksmen. There was a pall of smoke that turned the sun into a dully glowing orb. But the movies couldn’t cover all the senses.
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