I often wonder if as many men and women would have volunteered for the war if they had known what they were up against beforehand. Deductive reasoning tends to tell us they would have been more reluctant, but the pressures from their countries were so intense that many may not have had much of a choice but to enlist. Volunteers entered the war in order to please their families and peers at home; entering was equated with pride, bravery and selflessness. Messages were given similar to those introduced by Anarchists of the late nineteenth century, making volunteers for the war "...men of courage willing not only to speak but to act, pure characters who prefer prison, exile or death to a life that contradicts their principles, bold natures who know that in order to win one must dare" (Tuchman 32). And not only were citizens expected to enlist, but were intended to prepare to die for their country: "It will be more beautiful and wonderful to live forever among the heroes on a war memorial in a church than to die an empty death in bed, nameless..." (Bond 76). Women, as well as the men, were to "...go on doing [their] bit, because England [was] proud of her brave daughters" (Smith 31). But as thousands lined up to show their respect and honor for their country, possibly with their very lives, others already involved in the battles discovered that war wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

stopped filling himself with water for days" (Horne 183). Probably the vilest condition that was faced was in being forced to live among the dead. The sheer number of corpses was enormous and often there was not enough space, time or manpower to properly bury all those that had died. "You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs and half-bodies, just as they had been shoveled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party" (Horne 176). Women also had to cope with injured or deceased men every day and often had to see their own colleagues die as well. Images of "shelves of mangled bodies...filthy smells of gangrenous wounds...shell-ragged, shell-shocked men...men shrieking like wild beasts" came to be a bit too common for both men and women. As if these intolerable living conditions weren't bad enough, participants in the war had to learn to deal with the fact that they had become numbers to the country they were fighting for.

Those living long enough to observe the specific technicalities of the war effort, soon realized that humans were being disregarded just as fast as they had been embraced. The dead were simply replaced with younger men while another new and eager volunteer substituted for a woman who had taken leave. One can only imagine the feeling of unimportance, the feeling of being a piece of machinery only to be replaced by a better or newer model. One soldier so aptly illustrates these feelings: "In the middle of combat, one is little more than a wave in the sea...a stroke of the brush lost in the painting..." (Horne 168). Everyone was dealt with the same way, making it almost impossible to stand out as an individual when even the dead were "...to be made numbers in a row of muddy earth mounds in a bare tract of hastily fenced-off ground" (Smith 116). Although the physical conditions were alone enough to make one go crazy, the emotional and psychologic

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Approximate Word count = 2242
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)