From Wilfred Owen's correspondance to his mother Susan Owen, January 19, 1917: "No Man's Land is pock-marked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer... No Man's Land under snow is like the face of the moon chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness."

When my mother was a little girl she made a Monopoly set (because they couldn't afford to buy one - ironic piece of work that) but while reconstructing it from memory goofed on the spacing and ended up with more spaces on the board than there were properties. These, she dubbed No Man's Land. They could not be bought and incurred no bonus or penalty, which by the end of the game is actually quite nice.