Mythperceptions

So that's 5 sections of British infantry painted...

I've started working on a barn and farm yard to go with the ruined farmhouse. Which has led to a slight dilemma. Everyone has a mental picture of the first world war looked like, and it is a picture that is perpetuated in documentaries and drama documentaries and dramas. The problem is that when you look at the actual raw footage, particularly from the early and mid-war, which is the period I have decided upon wargaming - ironically because it more closely resembles the popular image - the battlefield looks nothing like the popular image.

The trees have leaves, there are bushes, houses are pretty much intact - except for wooden houses (I saw a marvelous (well may not marvelous, in that sense) picture of German troops in a Polish town, in which all the houses were destroyed, except for the chimney stacks) - on the horizon there is the occasional puff of smoke, but it is hardly the hell that is indoctrinated in schools and pushed by film makers (at which point I could get into the Micheal Gove article, but I will leave that to the Liberal chimpers who are pushing the issue for political reasons). When considering this issue, I find myself coming back to Siegfried Sassoon, who apparently spent the afternoon of the first day of the Somme, lying out in the long grass in front of the parapet sunbathing... long grass? long grass? How dare he challenge the image of mud portrayed in TV dramas and comedy shows..... no wait I said I wouldn't get into the Micheal Gove thing....

Which is all a long winded way of saying I have built a barn to go with the ruined farm house but am very reluctant to go any further in it's ruination than the three holes in the wall I have made so far and posing the doors at an artistic angle.

peace:)