ABSTRACT
Conflict is a hydra whose complex and unpredictable impulses and responses can appear as if from nowhere and lead in multiple directions at once. The world's first globalized industrial conflict almost instantaneously made most previous experiences and understandings of conflict either redundant or seriously devalued in attempts to comprehend how this new kind of war should be waged. Due to acoustic shadowing, where sounds from the same distance could be heard clearly depending on wind direction and air temperature, not everyone in London heard the Somme guns, but walkers on Hampstead Heath could hear the thudding of British shells pounding German lines. Imminent death on the Somme and innocent bucolic strolling in a London park were blasted together at the speed of sound. Places which were once secular spaces became transformed into sacred space by the circumstances surrounding their spatial and symbolic reordering by war and its aftermath.
