On 26 March 1917, in a front-line newspaper, some soldiers drew attention to what they thought to be the greatest reality of the Great War:

The extended image of the octopus is not merely a literary trope: the series of active verbs – blinds, closes, buries – hints at a hallucinatory quality on the level of perception, registering the threat of mud through the sense of touch. It captures the fear and bewilderment of the soldiers when human geography is suddenly changed, a reassuring visual universe is replaced by a mysterious tactile one and human life is at risk. Mud confuses the categories of solid and liquid. Moreover, it clings to the human body, defying its own inert nature and giving the impression of malevolent agency. The image of the octopus with enormous, glutinous tentacles suggests a progressive sense of suffocation: not the searing consciousness of burning in hell-fire, as associated with myths of afterlife, but that of being gradually choked and smothered.