By Selwyn Duke

The scene was the dreaded “no man’s land” separating dank and dreary
trenches during WWI. It was, as the name implies, a forbidding place,
one which modern weaponry had transformed into a moonscape on which
even stout-hearted warriors feared to tread.

The conflict waged there was dubbed “the War to End All Wars,” but it
was merely one that changed war forever. Gone were the days of the bold
cavalry charge, as a fearsome new weapon, the machine gun, made such
tactics suicidal. Other fearsome weapons would also be introduced, such
as the tank, the bomber and mustard gas. And certain terms were
originated to describe the horrors wreaked by these new technologies,
such as Anzac soup, which was water in a shell-hole contaminated with a
corpse; and basket case, which originally described a quadruple-limb
amputee.

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