Almost Historical

Any story that is told multiple times changes multiple times. Some details are lost, and other details are added. The more times the same event is recalled, the less accurate the retelling becomes, at least until a “final” version is recorded in a concrete format, such as a biography or letter. However, the emotional response to a traumatic event can also lower the precision of a witness’ account of an incident that’s being questioned. During war, soldiers were faced with life­or­death decisions on a daily basis, and their memories suffered for it. What they could remember, they would often expand on to make themselves seem more heroic, either by embellishing aspects or by completely twisting fact into wowing fiction. Many of the young men going into the war were looking to be glorified and immortalized by the brave acts that they would commit while facing the enemy. It’s difficult to believe that when these soldiers wrote journals, they wrote without considering how they might affect their legacies. Those involved in the war already had an idea of what the Western Front was supposed to be like, implanted into their subconscious by posters and newspapers back home, and it would take weeks of hardship and horrors faced before they would truly abandon this idealistic view of the experience that they had truly signed up for.