ABSTRACT
In 1915, at the height of the entrenched stalemate on the Western Front, the leading toy manufacturer in Britain brought a new product to market. The “Exploding Trench” was around 30 centimeters long, made from wood and cardboard, and painted muddy green; half a dozen toy soldiers were lined up in the cut and when the flag that stood at one end was struck – preferably with a missile from a toy cannon – it activated a mechanism that fired a cap and released a spring causing the soldiers to be thrown up into the air “in all directions” as if by the force of an explosion (Games and Toys, July 1915: 101). The line drawing in the advertisement demonstrates the “before and after”; the tiny figures catapulted upwards appear to be wearing Pickelhauben, because no British child surely could have contemplated inflicting this upon anything other than the loathed German army. The label on the box stated: “Very Interesting, No Danger.” While that may have been so – it was unlikely that the child could have been physically harmed by the toy – the public reception was at odds with the reassurances on the packaging and the product had to be withdrawn shortly afterwards. The interest that the object generated was deemed to be, if not dangerous, then certainly undesirable. The “Exploding Trench” crossed an invisible line between what it was acceptable for children to know of war and mimic in their play and what, because of its over-explicit referencing of the forms that warfare took on the Western Front, was not. The revulsion that the toy elicited and the outrage that caused it to be removed from the shelves and catalogues came, it can be assumed, from adults rather than the children for whom it was designed – the reactions and responses of the target audience are not known.
