According to some versions, the deserters scavenged corpses for clothing, food and weapons. Part Night of the Living Dead and part War Horse, like all oft-told tales, it had several variants, but the basic kernel warned of scar-faced and fearless deserters banding together from nearly all sides-Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, and Italian (though none from the United States)-and living deep beneath the abandoned trenches and dugouts. The German equivalent was Niemandsland, while the French used the English term le no man’s land.īut it was during the Great War that a legend arose out of the real-life horrors that occurred in this wartime hellhole. 1350, comes from the Middle English, and was “a piece of ground outside the north wall of London, formerly used as a place of execution.” The phrase took on a military connotation as early as 1864, but it became an especially prevalent term during the First World War. In the Oxford English Dictionary, Nomanneslond, ca.
No Man’s Land, said poet Wilfred Owen, was “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.” “Men drowning in shell-holes already filled with decaying flesh, wounded men, beyond help from behind the wire, dying over a number of days, their cries audible, and often unbearable to those in the trenches sappers buried alive beneath its surface," wrote scholar Fran Brearton in her 2000 history The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. It was in No Man's Land that the spontaneous Christmas truce of December 1914 took place and where opposing troops might unofficially agree to safely remove their wounded comrades, or even sunbathe on the first days of spring.īut it could also be the most terrifying of places one that held the greatest danger for combatants. It separated the front lines of the opposing armies and was perhaps the only location where enemy troops could meet without hostility. During World War I, No Man’s Land was both an actual and a metaphorical space.
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