Trench Warfare Source Analysis

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Source C can be considered useful to a historian studying the nature of trench warfare as it summarises modern discoveries into the living conditions within the trenches as well as the battle conditions on the front. It is a secondary source from the Daily Mail Online and written by Graham Smith, published on the 10th of February 1012. Being a secondary source and published in 2012 would mean that it was written with hindsight from the war resulting in a substantial lack of bias being so far removed from the war. Smith would have also had a plethora of both primary and secondary sources about trench warfare to compare their article to thus conveying the reliability of the source. However it is an online article from the Daily Mail, which suggests that there is a highly …show more content…
This would mean that the source lacks historical background and in conjunction with the possibility with little to none peer reviewing, it makes the source fairly unreliable for a historian studying the nature of trench warfare. Also the perspective of a journalist wouldn’t increase the usefulness of the source for a historian, as it provides information already available elsewhere in the historical discourse by a person will little to no historian background. Though Source C is unreliable in terms of how it was written and researched, its content is reliable as it presents information that corroborates with the historical discourse of the nature of trench warfare making it highly useful for historians. It is known that the state of the terrain during trench warfare was usually muddy which led to a hazardous and arduous battleground and this is conveyed in “the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them”. This portrays the swamp-like grounds that soldiers fought on due to usually wet