How did anyone survive hellish trench warfare like this for years on end without going utterly insane?

How did anyone survive hellish trench warfare like this for years on end without going utterly insane?

youtube.com/watch?v=k4Pd527GN48

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ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5137781/
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Rotation, and a lot did go insane.

Also daily ration of alcohol it's remarkable how much can a man survive if he's buzzed. I recall reading that one officer said that without rum ration we would have lost the war.

For the last eight days the soup carriers are not returning. They leave in the evening in the darkest of the night and it's over, they melt like sugar in coffee. Not a man returned. They were all killed, absolutely all, every time, every day, with no exception. We don't go anymore. We are hungry. We are thirsty. We see over there a dead laying on the ground, rotten and full of flies, but whose belt is still holding canteens and balls of bread held by an iron thread. We wait. For the bombing to calm. We crawl to him. We detach from his body the balls of bread. We take the canteens that are full. Some have been pierced by bullets. The bread is flabby. One just has to cut away the part touching his body. That's what we do all day. This has been going on for twenty-five days. For a long time, there are no more of these pantry-corpses. We eat whatever. I chew the strap of a water tank. Around the evening a buddy came with a rat. Once skinned, its flesh is white like paper. [...]

We hear them hit the body blocking the door. Even though he was bled like a pig with his open carotid, he keeps bleeding with each wound he receives after his death. For more than ten days none of us has had a rifle, nor ammunitions, nor knife, nor bayonet. But more and more, we have this terrible, never ending need, tearing at us. Particularly since we tried to swallow little balls of dirt to calm our hunger, and also because this night it rained and because we had not drunk for four days we also licked the rain water filtering through the logs and also coming from outside dripping along the corpse blocking the door. We go in our hand. It's a dysentery flowing through our fingers. We can't throw that outside. The ones in the back wipe their hands against the dirt near them, the three closest to the door wipe themselves against the dead's clothes. That's how we realize that we are doing blood. Thick blood, absolutely ruby colored. Beautiful.
- Jean Giono

tyruiop.org/giono.html

Nobody would go through that and come out completely sane.

Or perhaps after going home to their neat little rows of terraced houses, cups of tea, sausages and pickled cabbage, the world of trivial problems, emotional repression, old men thinking it couldn't have been that bad and young children wanting to be soldiers just like them, that they were the only truly sane ones.

That psychological trauma probably played a major role in motivating so many veterans to become fascists, communists, or others movements seeking to radically change society and government to forms never seen before. I've heard it said that Western civilization died in the trenches.

I wonder what happened to all the monster rats when the dying stopped.

It is hard to think about what those men went through.. absolute hell.

what the fuck

There were rotations. Soldiers usually spent around 2 weeks at the front before being rotated to the rear or other quieter fronts. But a lot still did go crazy, and a few men were executed for “cowardice” (shellshock). Some cases were so bad that they resembled neurological disorders.

>years on end
They spent more time out of the trenches than in them in most cases

some trenches were comfy

/pol/ will never admit it but neoliberalism was forged in the trenches also, people came home with a hole to fill fuelling the roaring 20s

monarchism failed to unite europe with familial connections

fascism failed to unite it by force

the communist utopia just failed in general

only neoliberalism succeeded, breGzit is meaningless, people are still going to want to buy BMWs and go on trips to holland to smoke weed, in the end what unites people is the Chad neoliberal who invites everyone to his parties and makes sure everyon has a good time, it sucks that your qt crush would rather suck his dick than be your waifu but that is just her choice

So it's best in the way that it gets Klonopin-chomping wagies to dull their senses?

It was more social democracy/Keynsian embedded liberalism. Neoliberalism didn't emerge until the dismantling of the Bretton-Woods system/embedded liberalism in the 70s and 80s. See Karl Polanyi, the collapse of the Concert of Europe and subsequent destabilization was in large part due to unrestrained liberalism.

You're dead right about the failures of those other systems that /pol/lacks refuse to acknowledgem

>Klonopin-chomping wagies
the state cannot uplift them spiritually and give their lives meaning and can't do much materially compared to a neoliberal capitalist economy

perfection would actually be inflexible judeo-anglo rationalist classical liberalism, this would create a society of ubermensch, however the earth is a huge place, it was difficult for the anglo to educate northern england let alone india, let alone germany, though lord help me they tried, the anglo is still just a human and could not hope to accomplish such a gargantuan task

so the neoliberal compromise was made, every nation would get its own kitsch version of the anglo original, imperfect yet functioning the same, and it worked, there are macky Ds in Moscow and Beijing, something you could not have dreamed of 40 years ago, they won, basically, even frothing at the mouth durka durkas will be brought to heel soon

The current unrestrained capitalist world order will fail just as the old absolutist/nationalist systems did before it.

>>Chad neoliberal who invites everyone to his parties and makes sure everyon has a good time, it sucks that your qt crush would rather suck his dick than be your waifu but that is just her choice
This is both a poorly disguised example of arguing with holes and a state of affairs that can only last while everyone is reasonably prosperous. An increasingly large number of people are not prosperous anymore, and if dramatic steps to curtail the excesses of neoliberalism are not taken, the "stacies" of the modern world will be force into the self-same roles that previous generations of women were. Either wife and mother, or whore.

Confirmed. In Robert Graves' memoirs of the war he admitted to drinking a bottle of whisky a day just to keep going.

Makes me wonder how being constantly drunk during traumatic experiences affects PTSD development.

The Earth died in those trenches

My Grandfather was an Aussie WW1 Veteran, he always managed to keep a lid on his problems but I remember one occasion when I was a child walking to his home from school. I found him weeping in his back shed with a rifle in his mouth, he pulled himself together when he saw me but it just makes me wonder how much he struggled in private. He never talked about the war and burned his uniform and sold his medals. Luckily we were able to find out what medals were awarded to him through archives.

What were they awarded for?

He received the 1914-15 Star for sure, my Grandmother remembered two others however there's nothing about the other two online.

Great grandfather was a Basque fighting for France. Lost a lung in the first gas attack in the war, said he survived because he could still chew a chocolate ration while waiting for the medics.

After the war, he decided not to become a priest. It wasn't because he'd lost faith in God. It was because he'd lost faith in humanity. God's sacrifice was, to him, wasted on us all. We weren't worth saving in his mind.

> WWI War Neurosis
Those shell shock scenes are exaggerated when not altogether fake. The doctor who recorded them did so for publicity.

Where PTSD and combat fatigue is concerned, it's actually better to be under a consistent level of stress and exposure to danger that it is to rapidly shift between mental states. That's why bomber crews in WW2 had such high rates of it despite averaging only 10 minutes of actual combat per mission.

What makes you think they aren't crazy inside

It looks a lot worse when there's sinister music playing.

Soldiers were rotated out often.
Also not every battle was like Verdun or the Somme.

>The doctor who recorded them did so for publicity.
Proof?

I have original strategical maps and aerial photographs with that hill on it. I always wanted to scan everything and post it on /k/ but I dont like them anymore.

>Although initially motivated to make use of a novel medium to illustrate lectures, Hurst was alert to the wider appeal of the motion picture and saw an opportunity to position himself in the postwar medical hierarchy. Some “before treatment” shots were reenacted for the camera. [...] Claims made of “cures” in the film and associated publications by Hurst were challenged by other doctors treating shell shock. The absence of follow-up data and evidence from war pension files suggested that Hurst may have overstated the effectiveness of his methods.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5137781/

Neoliberalism is an economic doctrine you dildo. Economists didn't experience the trenches.

Except when on leave, they spent all their time on the front. Being at rest on the rear meant sleeping in semi abandoned villages at the limit of artillery reach, something like heaven but psychologically you were still on the front.

>I always wanted to scan everything and post it on /k/
Post them on Veeky Forums instead, it's more on topic.