The Horror, The Horror... Of Trench Warfare!
Where It All Began...(For Me.)
My fascination in the horror that is the trench warfare of The Great War stems back to our family holidays from my childhood. My parents were very fond of holidaying in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend where we spent many summer vacations, enjoying the wonderful beach, the charming town and the historic countryside of Flanders.
Of particular interest to my father - being a military history buff - was the battlefield locations which pepper Belgium, with sites dedicated the two world wars which were waged over this small country. With the important and famous town of Ypres ('Wipers' to the Tommies) a short car journey from the coast and the nearby preserved battlefields of World War 1, I got a my first taste of this dark period in European history by actually visiting the 'trenches' themselves.
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| Above: The preserved and reconstructed German trench system at Bayernwald (Bayern Wood). |
Back in the 1960s there were several 'trench' sites dotted around - many little more than ad hoc areas of fields owned by local farmers who made a nice little side-line out of the curious tourists who came to see the multitude of World War 1 items that were still being unearthed every time a field was ploughed up! (In fact, at that time the British Army's Bomb Disposal Unit was still very active in Belgium as unexploded shells were a common hazard for the Belgian farmer.)
Some of these alfresco 'museums' were little more than lengths of shallow muddy ditches - about shoulder height - which were the vestiges of the original much deeper trench dugouts and were usually adjoined to a ramshackle hut where the more interesting artifacts where 'preserved' for view.
A few Francs would allow you to potter around a ramshackle collection of rusted and broken weaponry that had been found in the field, while inside the 'museum' there was even sometimes a series of slide view machines which - for a 'cent' (Centimes) - showed you some rather graphic period photographs of the trenches in their original state.
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| Above: Sanctuary Wood, located about two miles east of Ypres and is the location my father took me to when I was a lad. Credit: www.ww1battlefields.co.uk |
It was a mark of the 'liberal' time that these slideshows were NOT censored and, as I said, some of the photos were quite explicit in nature, especially for a young boy...
BUT, and this is very important, this untarnished view of the horror of trench warfare was quite deliberate and was perfectly in line with the prevailing attitude of my grandfather and father's generations that World War 1 should be The War to End All War. They wanted their children to appreciate the misery and carnage of this apocalyptic conflagration so that it would never be repeated again.
People today do not grasp the literalness of this phrase and it's meaning has become blurred over time. But if you are to understand the real dread of the Great War and the it's bearing on what - historically - happened afterward then it is crucial that this phrase - The War to End All Wars - should be clearly understood... It was NOT - in the modern parlance - just a 'meme' to loosely describe a metaphorical notion, but it was a very precise and heartfelt warning for the next generation.
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| Above: Remnants of The Great War! Not all the munitions that are found by local farmers and builders are spent, like those above... Some are very much live even today! Credit: www.ww1battlefields.co.uk |
The Great War in Popular Culture
Moving on from a historical grounding, my next peek into the nightmarish nature of the Great War was in films and television. Intent to passing his father's generational fear of trench warfare down to his son, my father introduced me to one of his favourite films from when he was a youngster - 1930s classic 'All Quiet on the Western Front'...
Again, for a youngster, this movie still had enough power to instil in me an appreciation of the horrific nature of total war. (The introductory picture in this post - see top - is a shot pulled from this film. The disembodied hands on the wire is a hugely powerful image for the period.)
Perhaps not so jarring - but still in it's way an attempt to relay the dreadful circumstances of trench warfare - was the next piece of screen 'horror' that still remains with me until today, and that was an episode of Dr.Who (from 1975) called 'Genesis of the Daleks'.
Here the Doctor (Tom Baker) finds himself on the planet of Skaro, where a generations-long war between the Thals and the Kaleds has left the planet inhospitable and barren...
More recently there was something of a resurgence in the interest in melding the nightmarish aspects of the historical WW1 trenches with stories of the weird and uncanny in the form of horror movies. Undoubtedly, taking an already unfathomably terrifying environment and infusing it with the unexplainable and primeval fears of our imagination can result in giving us an inkling of the unnerving torture that was the lives of the soldiers who fought in the battlefields of Flanders...
DEATHWATCH (2002)
TRENCH 11 (2011)
When Things Got Really 'Weird'...
As you can see, I had already established a link between the physical and mental horrors of The War to End All Wars and a notion of how it also was connected to more primal and supernatural fears inherent to man. Indeed, there was a great many myths and legends of a 'spooky' nature which grew up around the First World War...
But, quite aside from 'ghost stories' what stayed with me the most was what the told to me by my father about the firm convictions held by his father's generation about the how terrifying the experiences were of this war and the effects that they had on his society's psyche. Today it is hard to understand level of fear that was ingrained in my grandfather's generation and that when they described the Great War as 'the war to end all wars' they wholeheartedly and sincerely meant it, as they could not conceive that after such an apocalyptic event that anyone would ever want to see another war!
I cannot relate to you the sheer terror of the idea of another war like The Great War instilled in my Grandfather. But, he made sure that it's dreadfulness was passed - firstly - down to his son as a fearful warning, and then down to me by my father and that it filled me - in turn - with a palpable dread.
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| Above: World War One: Death of the Reaper – Combined Negative Image by Frank Hurley (1917) – CC – Creative Commons. |
This lingering and unsettling terror of the almost indescribable and unimaginable - for, who could understand the true nightmare that was the Great war except those immediately effected by it - greatly influenced my appreciation of what is really horrifying. So, when I later was introduced to the work of H. P. Lovecraft and his 'cosmic horror' I sensed that this fear of thing so horrific that they might break the minds of men was exactly the sort of inexplicable horror that my Grandfather attempted to pass down to my father and me.
This later resulted in my composing a short story on this theme - about an encounter in no man's land - that I produced a sketch for...
Which Brings Us To 'Trench Tales' & 'Trench Crusade'
All this brings up to the main subject of this post (and subsequent posts in this series), my current mini project which focuses on modelling characters from the tabletop game 'TRENCH CRUSADE'.
It is something of a spooky coincidence in itself that this game came to my attention not long after I had seen some previews online of a similarly themes computer game called 'TRENCH TALES'.
I had just been looking for a new co-op horror shooter game - having just completed 'Zombie Army 4' - when Trench Tales video clips started to surface. The game takes a 'weird war' approach to the First World War, introducing ghostly spirits - perhaps spirits of deceased soldiers or possibly demonic entities - as the protagonist which you must battle...
Now while this style of game - merging realistic looking historic military warfare with a supernatural twist - is right up my street, the downside is that this was an early preview of the game which - sadly - is some time off full release yet. 😒
But, as it happens, which trawling the internet for information on this game I quite by change came across the similarly named 'Trench Crusade'.
Now, this is not a computer game but a tabletop wargame with competitive skirmish gameplay similar to the very popular Warhammer 40k game. You assemble a 'warband' in the form of a collection of miniature figures to fight against another team on a board which represents the trenches...
I had been wondering for a while now whether I was still up to painting very small miniature figures so the idea of dabbling with this game was very appealing. Obviously, I have a LOT of other projects going on at the moment, but I felt that making and painting a small number of these figures couldn't do any harm! 😜 (When will I ever learn?)
One of the most attractive aspects of getting involved in making some of the models for Trench Crusade was that - ironically - the game's official miniature have not yet been released. Their 32mm scale models are part of the Kickstarter campaign included in the game's launch and while the basic rules are available for people to play test the miniatures are not... BUT...
Above: The official Trench Crusade line of figures.
Such is the overwhelming popularity and interest in Trench Crusade that a large number of players have taken to making their own models in order to try out the game. In the main, this has meant people kit bashing their own figures using readily available 28mm miniature or buying 32mm 'proxy' figures to stand in for the official games factions.
They got me at 'kit bash'!
I love the idea of building my own miniatures particularly as the odd mixture of WW1 and medieval parts to crate a sort of Frankenstein figure really appealed to my warped love of the alternative reality 'weird war' aesthetic.
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| Above: An already completed Trench Crusade 'warband' collection (New Antiock faction) made by Simon Slater. |
So, I bought myself a small collection of cheap plastic sprues from the likes of WARGAME ATLANTIC's WW1 French and and an assortment of medieval knight parts in 28mm and off I went...
It didn't take long to put together my very first figure - in the style (garnered from the rules) of a New Antioch Lieutenant - and I had a great time chopping and fitting together bits and pieces until I ended up with something I was happy with...
And off we go down yet another rabbit hole of a hobby!
As I said, I'm going to try really had to make this a 'limited project' - certainly until I have cleared some of my other ongoing jobs - but it is devilishly tempting to find out whether I still can paint down to this small scale???
IN THE NEXT PART: I will find out if this mini project is a dead end as I crack out the paint brushes.
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