Setting & Background Information

Setting
The Great War

The year is 1918. For four years Europe has been locked in the throes of the Great War, the most devastating conflict in history. Technical innovations in artillery, air power, chemical warfare, and automatic weapons have changed the face of battle. When industrial mass production, universal conscription, and staunch adherence to Napoleonic Era military theory were added to the mix, they created the Western Front: a Hell on Earth where literally millions of soldiers have fed the war's hunger for blood. Far more died on the fields of the Western Front than men: a world was ending. The scale of this new War, and its barbarity, are staggering; at the battle of the Somme, which raged from July to November 1916, the British lost 60,000 soldiers in the first day, and total casualties for the offensive ran over a million men. As historian A.J.P. Taylor put it, "The war ceased to have a purpose and went on for its own sake, as a contest of endurance."

The arrogant optimism that had inflamed the West following the industrial revolution, the idea that progress, technology, and enlightenment had raised Man (white man in particular) to the mastery of the world and a state of near divinity is dead, gassed and shelled into oblivion. The cream of Europe's youth learned first hand just how far civilization could fall.

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Setting & Background Information

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The Great War

The year is 1918. For four years Europe has been locked in the throes of the Great War, the most devastating conflict in history. Technical innovations in artillery, air power, chemical warfare, and automatic weapons have changed the face of battle. When industrial mass production, universal conscription, and staunch adherence to Napoleonic Era military theory were added to the mix, they created the Western Front: a Hell on Earth where literally millions of soldiers have fed the war's hunger for blood.
Far more died on the fields of the of the Western Front than men: a world was ending. The scale of this new War, and its barbarity, are staggering: at the battle of the Somme, which raged from July to November 1916, the British lost 60,000 soldiers in the first day, and total casualties for the offensive ran over a million men. As historian A.J.P. Taylor put it, "The war ceased ti have a purpose and went on for its own sake, as a contest in endurance."
The arrogant optimism that had inflamed the West following the industrial revolution, the idea that progress, technology, and enlightenment had raised Man (white man in particular) to the mastery of the world and a state of new divinity is dead, gassed and shelled into oblivion. The cream of Europe's youth learned first hand just how far civilization could fall.

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive
By 1918, the Allied and Central Powers are still locked in a stalemate in Northeastern France, both sides having long since floundered in a quagmire of trench warfare. The armies of Europe loom on the brink of collapse. A new force has come, however, which will at long last break the deadlock, exhaust the German war machine, and end the war. The Americans have arrived.
In early September, General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing's army had scored a resounding success in Southern France at St. Mihiel, and Pershing hope to follow it up with a daring offensive into the Argonne forest along the Meuse River, an offensive which might crack the Hindenburg Line. The last great American offensive of the war, the Meuse-Argonne, began on September 26. The 77th infantry division was ordered into the Argonne, where it immediately took heavy losses and stalled, gaining only five miles in six days of heavy fighting.
Fighting in the woods was nightmarish: as one soldier recalled: "I found myself... adrift in a blind world of whiteness and noise, groping over something like the surface of the moon... the ground rose into bare pinnacles... or descended into bottomless chasms, half-filled with rusty tangles of wire. It seemed to go on forever."
The terrain was not the worst of it. On October 2nd, Pershing, worried that a stalled drive might cause the French to split up the American army, ordered the 77th, pinned down and exhausted by its push in the Argonne, to advance, even though their left flank was no longer secure. The division moved out, and two of its battalions, commanded by Major Charles Whittlesey and Captain George McMurtry, found a place in history as the famous "Lost Battalion".

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The Lost Battalion (You)
Whittlesey moved out under protest, and soon met stiff resistance. He found that he was cut off and completely surrounded. For five days, the two battalions endured enemy shelling, friendly shelling, the elements, stavation and devastating German assaults. Of the 600 or so men Whittlesey led into the forest, 190 limped out October 7th. You players are part of this luckless outfit, sent out in search of two missing companies, only to go missing yourselves, lost in enemy territory. The enemy, however, is the least of your troubles...


The Soldier's Lot

A soldier's kit was carried with them at all times and could weigh anywhere between 50-80 pounds depending on the season and even more after rain and mud get to it. "Imagine yourself in the pitch dark, after two or three days of wet, cold, and sleeplessness, staggering down a trench, knee-deep in mud, carrying various burdens that almost equal your own body weight." Fatigue proved just as deadly an enemy as the Germans.

Generally an average soldier spend about 100-110 days in the front line or support trenches per year, 120 days in reserve (a day's march from the front), and 165ish days at rest, on leave, in the hospital, or on the march. Allied divisions were shuffled up and down the Western Front regularly resulting in long periods in which a unit would be on the move.

Time spent in the front line trench and reserve trenches was divided into "tours" of one to thirteen days during calm periods, but during battle a unit could stay on the front line for up to fifty days. The tours on the front were the most grueling parts of the soldier's life. Time in the trenches was spent watching the enemy lines, filling in mortar craters, working hard labor moving supplies, or repairing and digging new trenches. There was very little time for sleep and death was always one mistake away.

Unlike Vietnam which has tours of duty, soldiers in the Great War - once they had volunteered or been conscripted - were in it until the end, with the exception of a potential once a year leave.
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