January 23rd, 2026

We had our first proper pop-quiz today and I did fine I think, we had to find a quote from the book that described a character or setting, thus it was open book. Afterwards we had a brief lecture on WWI.

This will sound repetitive as I have written about the First World War in a previous semester, but maybe something new will be said. Besides, WWI is important as it was directly responsible for WWII.

We were shown a picture of the trenches left in Belgium. Around 25,000 miles were dug, they are basically scars left on the earth and can be seen from planes. She also mentioned how people to this day still come across unexploded ammunition and have to call in the bomb squad to deal with it.

The First World War had the most combat deaths ever recorded. Around 10 million soldiers were killed, and many more were left wounded from physical and mental injuries. One million soldiers died during the Battle of Somme (200 000 French, 400 000 British, and 500 000 Germans). On the first day of the battle 57 thousand died. Six million horses were deployed on the Western front and 850 thousand died. The First World War was a mixture of old and new forms of warfare. The lecture part ended by briefly talking about how technological developments were made during the war, like with the HMS Dreadnought. Women, also called Cary girls, took up jobs in munitions factories and other areas where the men worked, although they worked male jobs they did not have the right to vote yet.

the discussion part of the class was about Chapter 3-4 of The Return of the Soldier. we basically had to talk about the characters and settings, what we learned about them. I think I will skip this as it may be uninteresting for people here, but I will say that I clocked the class elements immediately. I read the book while listening to the audiobook on YouTube and noticed that the narrator gives Margaret (the working women) a different accent than Jenny and Kitty (the upper class women).

It is a very interesting book and I would honestly suggest giving it a read, it is quite short, the audiobook is less than 3 hours long so it can be finished fairly quickly. I think I will tell my professor about the book Johnny Got His Gun as it is another WWI tale and it gives such a different vibe compared to All Quiet on the Western Front.