Late during the summer of 1914, train stations all over Europe echoed with the sound of leather boots and the smashing of weapons as millions of enthusiastic young soldiers, like me, assembled for the most glorious conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. In my eyes, pride and honour is all I care about. It has become a competition with the excitement of a wonderful adventure and knowledge. Within weeks however, horror and endless death was brought due to dangerous new machines which scattered corpses and wreckage. This new Great War is called World War 1. Starting in Southern Europe, the war, in time, spread into a global issue. The conflict took place mostly in Belgium and France. The new technology was machine guns, airplanes, tanks, chemical warfare, and grenades. Because of technological advancements at this time in history warfare was changed because the much more efficient weapons made it much easier to kill the enemy and eliminated chivalry. Because of these new advancements such as tanks, machine guns and lethal gasses such as mustard gas casualties were much higher and trench warfare was introduced to keep soldiers safe while not in combat due to the ability to kill enemies from long distances. We were soon realized that the Germans were not the only enemy. The winter of 1916 was the worst for me. Living in trenches was caused nearly as many deaths as the fighting. We only had two blankets each and had to sleep as close as possible to one another just to survive, but not it all changed. Reinforcements from the Allied powers came and my trench was one of the most fortunate. This past winter was so cold that soldiers became blocks of ice, and we would wake up after a few hours sleep to find our eyelids frozen shut. My feet once swelled to three times their normal size because I was standing for a week in water up to my knees, but we had no choice, we had to continue. I’m currently fighting in the Somme, but currently the shooting stopped. This place was named after the river flowing here. Some describe it as “a place so terrible that a raving lunatic could never have imagined it”. Here is my second area I fight in. In one day alone our army lost 60,000 soldiers.
You see the last part of this letter consist on telling you that I love you. You can be afraid for me, that the enemy will snipe me or something, but don’t forget that God exists and that I pray every day for him to keep me alive. When my time comes it will come, and no bullet can change that. Thus have no fear I’m just around the corner. See you after the War, I’m fighting till the very end for what I know as I fact is right.
L’v U! From your little Slaoui, Mohamed Slaoui
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