Different Perspectives of War

In our recent session we discussed the different perspectives of WW1. Today, we know more about the war than children at the time did. They called it the Great War because, of course, they did not know that this war would be followed by another, which would mean that it would later be known as WW1.

We discussed our modern impression of the war. We know that it was horrible, deadly and grim, that lots of people died, and that people were fighting in terrible conditions. This is in sharp contrast with the impression of war the children of the time were given.

We imagined we were children from 1917 meeting children from today and exchanging impressions of the war. We also imagined we had been children during WW1 and had gone on to fight in WW2 and that, sometime in the 1970s, we had come across books from our childhood presenting war as a great adventure. We tried to imagine how we would have felt then, with knowledge of these two wars.

From these imaginings we developed some writing which you can read here.