Trenches, barbed wire and the myth of the honourable gentleman

Trenches, barbed wire and the myth of the honourable gentleman

When someone asks whether soldiers take turns digging trenches or whether barbed wire is planted like seeds, it is no joke: it reveals a cultural black hole about how real war actually works. The distance between what cinema has taught us —heroes, codes of honour, duels behind rocks— and the reality of mud, shrapnel and lethal bureaucracy is as wide as no man's land.

The exchange between an enthusiast trying to understand trench warfare and a veteran of military analysis illustrates a recurring problem: the confusion between tactics and strategy. While the former imagines a stone-against-stone duel, the latter recalls that, before the First World War, a certain etiquette existed —gentlemanly conduct, respect for the wounded— but it vanished with the industrialisation of death. Barbed wire is not dug; it is driven into the ground to slow down assaults, and trenches are excavated in shifts covered by covering fire, not during a ceasefire.

But the core issue is not technical, it is about perception. In a context where 2.5 million deaths in Ukraine are mentioned without batting an eye, the naive question of whether the two sides warn each other before digging reveals a divorce between the epic narrative and statistical carnage. War, as Little Hammer reminds us, has no written rules; codes of honour are discarded the moment the survival instinct kicks in.

In the end, the recommendation of a classic book hangs in the air because the interlocutor wants pictures, not concepts. Strategy, after all, does not fit into a diagram of people hiding behind a rock, no matter how hard the cinema insists on simplifying it.

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