Thousands of brave men relive the horrors of war every day, and yet we don’t hear many that speak up about it. Did all soldiers feel the same about keeping quiet about the truth of war and changes they went through? Well into the war, there was a growing dissatisfaction for continuing to fight the war. Groups like the Social Democrats wanted negotiations for peace. Citizens felt an overwhelming pressure to fulfill the needs of their job and satisfy the nation’s urgent demands. But the issues of the countries hadn’t been settled yet which forced them to find a way to keep up the enthusiasm of the workers and stifle internal dissent.

Most oftenly used was propaganda, which glorified the war and made it something worth supporting. This gave the people a false sense of security and hope that the reward was much better than the price they were currently paying. It re-lit that fire of nationalism and pushed many to work on. It humiliated the men who did not fight in the war and called them cowards. Soldiers would normally send letters home to talk to their relatives and ensure their safety but some governments feared that they would say bad things about the war. To combat this, the British Parliament created the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 which allowed superiors to read through the letters and allowed for censorship of them. The soldiers were only able to talk good about the war and their living conditions, when their true experiences were quite the opposite.

Their life in the trenches was horrible, they had to live next to their own dead men, rats, and deal with diseases like trench foot. Morning duties included standing on the fire step to combat the enemy, cleaning out the latrines, and repairing the trenches. Not to mention the hardest part, which was actually going out into “no man’s land” and witnessing hundreds of casualties everyday. Returning back from the war, many were praised for their bravery and honor. The citizens’ expectations for war were much different to the reality that the soldiers experienced which meant that speaking about what they really went through was a sign of weakness and ill-mindedness. All the soldiers could talk about was how many they brutally shot and how riveting their experience on the front lines was because that was all the citizens knew about.