… "No Man's Land" Between World War I's Trenches.
"During World War I, No Man's Land was both an actual and a metaphorical space. It separated the front lines of the opposing armies and was perhaps the only location where enemy troops could meet without hostility. It was in No Man's Land that the spontaneous Christmas truce of December 1914 took place and where opposing troops might unofficially agree to safely remove their wounded comrades, or even sunbathe on the first days of spring.
But it could also be the most terrifying of places; one that held the greatest danger for combatants. "Men drowning in shell-holes already filled with decaying flesh, wounded men, beyond help from behind the wire, dying over a number of days, their cries audible, and often unbearable to those in the trenches; sappers buried alive beneath its surface," wrote scholar Fran Brearton in her 2000 history The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley. No Man's Land, said poet Wilfred Owen, was "like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness."
In the Oxford English Dictionary, Nomanneslond, ca. 1350, comes from the Middle English, and was "a piece of ground outside the north wall of London, formerly used as a place of execution." The phrase took on a military connotation as early as 1864, but it became an especially prevalent term during the First World War. The German equivalent was Niemandsland, while the French used the English term le no man's land…"
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Armand
's first experience with 1:4800 scale naval models.
