the battle looking absolutely unreal tiny chrystal clear spread out before us stop but there were men in the tanks and men in those trees where the shells landed and men under those bombs stop the noise was so exaggerated that nothing like it had been heard since the movies stop paragraph we had all been awake and roaming the countryside since five

In the Somme Valley the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.