The chief effect of two years of bombardment and trench-to-trench fighting across no man's land was to have created a zone of devastation of immense length, more than 400 miles between the North Sea and Switzerland, but of narrow depth: defoliation for a mile or two on each side of no man's land, heavy destruction of buildings for a mile or two more, scattered demolition beyond that. At Verdun, on the Somme and in the Ypres salient whole villages had disappeared, leaving a smear of brick-dust or pile of stones on the upturned soil. Ypres and Albert, sizeable small towns, were in ruins, Arras and Noyon badly damaged, the city of Rheims had suffered heavy destruction and so had villages up and down the line. Beyond the range of the heavy artillery, 10,000 yards at most, town and countryside lay untouched.
The transition from normality to the place of death was abrupt, all the more so because prosperity reigned in the "rear area"; the armies had brought money, and shops, cafes and restaurants flourished, at least on the Allied side of the line. In the zone of German occupation, the military government ran an austere economic regime, driving the coal mines, cloth mills and iron works at full speed, requisitioning labour for land and industry and commandeering agricultural produce for export to the Reich. For the women of the north, lost for news of husbands and sons away at the war on the wrong side of the line, managing by themselves, the war brought hard years.1 Only a few miles distant, in the French "Zone of the Armies," a war economy boomed. Outside the ribbon of destruction, the roads were full of traffic, long lines of horsed and motor transport going to and fro, and in the fields, ploughed by farmers right up to the line where shells fell, new towns of tents and hutments had sprung up to accommodate the millions who went up and down, almost as if on factory shift, to the trenches. Four days in the front line, four in support, four at rest; on their days off, young officers, like John Glubb, might take a horse and ride "down old neglected rides, while all round my head was a dazzling bower of light emerald green. Underfoot crunched the beech nuts, while the ground was everywhere carpeted with anemones and cowslips. Pulling up and sitting quietly on my horse in the heart of the forest, it was impossible to catch a sound of the outside world, except the jingling of my own bit and the murmuring of the trees."
~ From The First World War by John Keegan, p. 310