Gentlemen, thank you very much for your kind, encouraging words!
Edo, I think your mörser looks awesome, I love that Buntfarben Camouflage!
I managed to add more plaster to the base
Meanwhile I went on with the groundwork. There's still much to do. Some details on the ground need to be painted as are the two French infantrymen. And some other details are still missing. But that's how it should look like in the end:
I'd like to add some words about the question of "taste" regarding this diorama. I neither will discuss 'Taste' in general nor getting political, but I know that many modellers avoid to portray death and atrocity in their works. Please think about that however you want, but do not think that I'd be respectless or I would think showing these things on a diorama would be "cool" or so!
The sad truth is that death, suffer and pain are not only part of warfare but its very essence. And for me, I decided not to avoid portraying these things, just to the contrary. I am not here to glorify war, I want a world without any war. But I am interested in military history, WW1 in particular, and if I model these events I cannot exclude their very essence. That would be like just telling a little part of the whole story. Cheering, laughting soldiers playing with a kitty or playing cards are not my cup of tea, those things are not the true story of war.
The title for this diorama "Hein kaputt" (abbreviation of a typical German name + "out of order", dead) was a comment a French soldier gave when the French offensives stopped the German successes in 1916 and he had captured a German trench. It is the title of a chapter in German Werths book "Verdun. Die Schlacht und ihr Mythos" which was published in 1979 and is the first modern historical account in German language about the battle of Verdun. Since then many other (and better) books have been written, but this book was the first work I had read about Verdun 1916 over 20 years ago and it impressed me that much that the history of that battle still strikes me.
More pics of the dio will follow when it's finished.
Thank you!
Borsos