As one soldier wrote to his wife in November 1916: 'Everyone pretends that the war will end soon, that the longed-for peace will arrive, but that is only to keep their spirits up. People are so worn out and destroyed, they have suffered so much, that's all they can do to stop their hearts from breaking and to keep themselves from losing their mind.. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I don't understand the mood of the men and it only seems to me like this because I myself am exhausted and have come to realize in the past few days that I may lose my own mind in all this chaos.. Liulya, I have written all this to you so that you may understand what sort of a man you love.
Orlando Figes
war wwi
The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, drove himself insane after years of trying to reconcile his romantic view of the peasants with the ugly reality of human relations which he was forced to observe in the countryside. Many of the 'realist' writers of the 1860s, who described the darker side of the countryside, ended up as alcoholics. There was a general sense of angst among the liberal educated classes whenever the hard facts of peasant life disturbed their idealized image of it.
reality
Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
military
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