"These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed."
- Wilfred Owen, Mental Cases.
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I am a bit of a history buff, and no historical event holds more interest to me than the First World War. Few instances in history illustrate with such horrific clarity how the masses are made to suffer and die for the political, economic, and military elites' callousness, hubris, and greed. And of all the suffering that the war wrought, the most striking to me is what at that time was known as shell shock (the term PTSD was not yet coined), an affliction born from the horrors of mechanized, industrialized warfare.
The black and white footage of traumatized soldiers, their bodies twisted and broken and their faces frozen and contorted with horror, are some of the most haunting images to have come out from the Great War, and they lay bare the lie of war as a noble, heroic endeavor.
I drew this series back in 2018 for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. It took a great deal of time and much research to make, and I still feel very proud of it.