http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090209.WBBooksblog20090209134630/WBStory/WBBooksblog
Above is the link to the article about the winners winnings and below is an expert from the book.
The link on which this expert exists is at the bottom of the page.
An excerpt from Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918 (Vol. II)
Those who could not see themselves as already dead, or their fate as sealed, had a harder time dealing with the lethal randomness of the war. Private George Bell, who served four years at the front before he stopped a bullet in the last months of the war, described his own sense of fatalism: “I had adjusted myself to the abnormal conditions under which we were living, one in which we were likely to meet death at any moment.” In a desperate bid to grasp life, soldiers embrace death. But death was not inevitable, regardless of the odds. And despite the deterministic attitudes that enabled men to carry out their duties, most trench soldiers hoped that a shell or bullet did not indeed seek them out. A popular tune among those in khaki, “The Bells of Hell Ring for You, but Not for Me,” summed up their perspective nicely. As part of this bravado, many men made light of their fears, often by renaming weapons of war with slang, and even referring to the dead as having “gone west” or having been “napooed.” Joking about the dead was a defence mechanism for the soldiers, and psychiatrists would have had the whole of the army on their couches if anyone had cared to investigate.
Trivializing and scoffing at death, normalizing the abnormal — all played their part in helping soldiers to cope. Such measures acted as a defence against death. It was hard for the men not to embrace this ghoulishness when they inhabited open graveyards: Corpses not only lay in No Man’s Land but jutted out from the trench walls. Front-line soldiers could be callous, even cruel to the unknown dead. “The boys used the shin bones as racks for their gas masks and canteens, and one of them made a point of combing and arranging the blond hair of a head,” wrote Gunner Ernest Black. Engaging in such gallows humour was another means of psychological survival. Charles Roy Grose of the 102nd Battalion, a farmer from Rossland, British Columbia, told the story of one hand that jutted from a communication wall: “Men used to walk by and joke, ‘Well, old timer, you are in a good place there.” Louis Keene described another grimly surreal image: “One man had the misfortune to be buried in such a way that the bald part of the head showed. It had been there a long time and was sun-dried. Tommy used him to strike his matches on. A corpse in a trench is quite a feature, and is looked for when the men come back again to the same trench.”
However, the constant presence of death was clearly not always a joking matter. The stench of rotting flesh assaulted the nostrils of men entering the front lines and could not easily be scoffed away. Private Frank Hasse of the 49th Battalion described the smell as “gut-emptying.” The reek of death came from No Man’s Land, filled as it was with corpses reduced to a cheese-like consistency by the elements. But the smell of decay also wafted out from the trench walls, where the dead had been interred.
Soldiers stood on corpses, stabbed shovels and pick axes through the dissolving remains, even slept next to them. They necessarily grew callous to the dead, and sometimes even to their comrades who were killed. Lieutenant J.S. Williams remarked rather casually in a letter home: “My batman had his head blown off. It’s extraordinary, really, what one can stand when one’s put to the test. Now, before I came here I had never seen a dead person in my life before, and yet I do not seem to feel badly about it.”
From Shock Troops, by Tim Cook. Copyright Tim Cook, 2008. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada)
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