Film-making had progressed quickly from simple experimental images in the late 1890s to more complex stories in the years leading up to the war, with directors like Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith taking the camera out of the theatre and introducing camera angles, close-ups, and moving carriages following the action, with editing to combine scenes into longer narratives.

No one exposed to the misery of trench warfare could hang onto illusions of the heroism and nobility of the struggle they were engaged in. The cold, the mud, and the terror of pointless charges over the top ordered by commanders who had no clue what they were doing and who rarely led their men into the slaughter – all these factors were captured by journalists and then by novelists like the American Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, 1929), the German Erich Maria Remarque