The trench - the end

The final scene of the movie "the Trench"

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• ww1
• world
• war
• one
• the
• trench

[cooljoe494]

Ah yes, the "nonchalantly walk to the enemy's trench" tactic. They never knew what hit 'em.

[cipher88101]

@cooljoe494 Yes, a crafty move it is...you see all the whistles confuse them

[LegionaryCohort480]

@punipunipunisher

And please don't tell me they didn't question their orders, every living person will question a command that means suicide, even trained soldiers...

Depending on how reliable this source is, I will believe you about the terrain for now, even though I doubt that no shells actually hit the fields...

[LegionaryCohort480]

@punipunipunisher

Furthermore it seems extremly unlikely that anybody in their right mind orders his troops to march at walking pace, especially if the terrain lets you go faster. Unless you're saying the higher ranking officers were mad, I will not believe anything about walking pace. That's just ridiculous, even more so if you think about the soldiers carrying out the orders. They would have questioned those orders, simply because their lives were unnecessarily endangered...

[LegionaryCohort480]

@punipunipunisher

And this quote is by/from? You do know that the reliability of sources depends heavily on the circumstances and person that produced them...?

It sounds as if it was a soldiers saying this, so I'm guessing he was in cover inside his trench only getting up to shoot. Which means it could have seemed to him as if they were walking, especially because they were coming at him(it's hard to judge the speed of an object going directly towards you)

[punipunipunisher]

@LegionaryCohort480 "The officers were in the front. I noticed one of them walking calmly carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them."

[punipunipunisher]

@LegionaryCohort480 "They advanced in line after line, dressed as if on parade, and not a man shirked going through the heavy barrage, or facing the machine-gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out. I saw the lines which advanced in such admirable order melting away under the fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back."

[punipunipunisher]

@LegionaryCohort480 "The next morning we gunners surveyed the dreadful scene in front of our trench. There was a pair of binoculars in the kit, and, under the brazen light of a hot mid-summer's day, everything revealed itself stark and clear. The terrain was rather like the Sussex downland, with gentle swelling hills, folds and valleys, making it difficult at first to pinpoint all the enemy trenches as they curled and twisted on the slopes." (followed by a description of the masses of dead)

[punipunipunisher]

@LegionaryCohort480 It just really looked like that. No, there was no mud - it was a hot summer day.

And in the film they don't march very far.

[LegionaryCohort480]

@punipunipunisher

Watching the video again, I just realised another thing:

It's extremly ridiculous that the soldiers are walking towards the enemy. Don't tell me they were ordered to do so, even someone with no clue of military tactics would know that that would be suicide. The only reasonable explaination I've heard so far was that the fields were actually torn up and muddied so that the soldiers weren't able to advance any faster because they kept getting stuck in the mud.

[LegionaryCohort480]

@punipunipunisher

Right, assuming that all of what you just said is true, there should still be a lot of craters and everything in the fields. Mind you, artillery back then wasn't exactly accurate, which resulted in many shells hitting the ground too early(or too late) and thus tearing up the fields that the soldiers can be seen marching on.

[punipunipunisher]

@LegionaryCohort480 And it's not "throughout the battle", it's the infamous first two hours of Day 1 (July 1, 1916) when over 20,000 British and French soldiers were killed. There was an intense pre-battle barrage on the German positions, and the mining of them, but not of the British lines.