Quoted Text
@ Kevin,
i think your crossing the lines in the terms of how much you go into depicting wounds,
there serval guide lines i have when addin dead and wounded, and im sure many would agree with them and as a soldier myself i feel it wrong to add:
1. burned or charred remains
2. wounds that are too detailed
3. dismembered remains (being cut in two by a Mg42 for example)
4. excess of gore
i agree that we must show war for what it is, but we must draw the line somewhere, we honour the fallen by not having them in peices on grounds even if that was the sort of end meet them
hope you see my point
shane
Hi Shane. Just a comment maybe a bit off topic, but it made me think when I heard it. I just watched a documentary on the last day of WWI which was about the deaths that occurred from like 5:10 AM when the Armistice was signed until 11 AM when the fighting officially stopped. At the end of the film they went to a facility in Britain where many of the severely wounded were sent to convalesce. The curator took the film people into a file room and showed him (and consequently the audience) a series of photos of one of the most horrible facial wounds I have ever seen or imagined, The pictures covered 4 years until 1922 when the soldier was finally "repaired". The curator said -and I can't quote exactly, but this is close- in war we glorify the dead but pay little or no attention to the wounded [like this man]. we do so at our peril because this is also the true cost of war.
And how true it is!
Just another point: war is ugly and all sides do terrible things, some more frequently and on a greater scale than others. It seems to me that modeling WWII German military vehicles and soldiers is the most popular subject modelers build. But, we don't need a history lesson to remind us of what the Nazis did. (to my German friends, I am a German immigrant here in the US. My home town is Frankfurt and my German last name was Edelmann. My Grandparents, my mother, her sister and brother all lived through the war. My Grandfather was a civilian who worked on the railroads assigned to the Eastern Front because he ran afoul of the Nazis. Their house was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid) As modelers I think we disconnect, at least I do, the political and social philosophy that was Nazism from the military aspect of the German soldiers. The machines and men we model were made and trained to kill and to destroy the enemy. There is no way to sanitize that fact. Even though we may not hold that in the front of our minds, that truth remains. If someone wants to speak that truth through his/her creations, so be it.