Injuries and Death - First World War Exhibition at the Military Museum
Anatole Havet, a soldier in the 13th Artillery Regiment, was reported missing in 1915 on the Aisne battlefield and later declared "killed in action" on 27 May, 1921. He "died for his country", France. But what was life like for him, what was his firsthand experience of this first major world battle, this terrible war of attrition? How did soldiers deal with the violently different ideologies, the horror of being confined to the trenches, where despite atrocious conditions, a semblance of social life developed, the fear of injury or of being shot and dying... A selection of documents from the Military Museum's collections give us a closer insight into the different realities of this conflict which resulted in nine million deaths and twenty million injured soldiers.