ABSTRACT
The Great War of 1914-18 was recognized at the time as ‘the war of matériel’ – a dramatic example of a world transformed by and constituted of its material culture (Miller 1985: 204-5). If objects make people just as people make objects (see for example Pels 1998: 101), then the defining objects of the First World War were the millions of artillery shells made in munitions factories across Europe and the United States from 1914 to 1918 and fired in huge quantities particularly along the Western Front. More shells were fired in the battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 than in the whole of the Boer War (Gilbert 1994: 132). The dead and injured accumulated in vast numbers, forcing us perhaps to agree with Allain Bernède (1997: 91) that, ‘the front … [was] … nothing but the continuation of the factory’. Shell production, warfare and death had been industrialized.
