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Senseless waste of life.
Also went to see the Shrouds of the Somme in London on Saturday - very poignant. Well worth visiting.
Yes. If you were a "Tommy" you had a 12% chance of being a casualty in WW1. If you were an officer this rose to 17%. Nearly 200 British generals became casualties during the conflict. The "Chateau General" a la General Melchitt are largely a myth. A "Tommy" had a higher chance of being killed in the Crimean War than WW1.
The early parts of the war were blighted by old strategies and tactics coming up against new weaponry, massive scale - and perhaps most important - problems of communication. Rather than these being static for four years; tactics, communications and weaponry changed dramatically at a fast pace. By the end of the war "over the top" attacks closely behind very accurate curtain artillery barrages were hugely successful and led to the smashing of the German Western Front.
You don't have to dig deep to find evidence in the history of officers than cared deeply for their men, of rapid advancements and changes in tactics and equipment. WW1 was a horrible senseless conflict, but it was by no means a war of "lions led by donkeys" as the largely discredited myth has it.
Broke my bloody heart.
My 10 and 12 year old boys thought it was fiction .. a good eye opener
I find it hard to judge harshly the ruling classes and heads of the military who allowed this to happen. And I don't think it's entirely fair to feel pity for the regular people who died based on some notion that they were duped into laying down their lives or cynically tricked into signing up of whatever.
These things need to be seen in context. In 1914, you only had to go back 40-odd years to the last war where Germany laid siege to Paris. Well within living memory. The Boer war was only 14 years back. Even the Napoleonic Wars were only 100 years earlier. The century had seen imperialism from all European powers. The scramble for Africa, the Great Game etc produced a system where war was inevitable, but were themselves consequences of a world where people believed that it was their moral obligation to stand up for their country, the concepts embodied in the idea of a "state". There was the notion that nations were in natural competition with each other, scientific concepts such as eugenics that obviously post-ww2 are considered evil and thought of as being Nazi ideals, but at the time were quite normal, everyday beliefs, and were used as moral justification for, say, the colonization of Africa, and a belief in the superiority of some cultures over others. Notions of class were firmly embedded in society.
War itself, in that context, was seen as just another option to achieve national aims. Sure, it wasn't great and people died so you couldn't be callous about it, but there was nobility in war, honour, justice and even a sense that war was fair play. The institutions of the state - government, church, military, were much more closely entwined (which means that 100 years after the end of the war, we can stand in the street and be a bit confused about why the church gets to piggy-back remembrance)
So, when Germany got a bit too big for its boots, and it looked like we'd need to go and help stop them for our own national interest, well, let's have a war! Get it all out in the open, best side wins, gets it over with. And of course people wanted to sign up. It was their moral duty. They didn't want to die, but the feeling of insignificance of individual human lives when compared to the importance of the institutions being defended was I think found through most parts of society. And those institutions weren't just embodied in a remote, rich ruling class. They were embodied by their parents, their brothers and sisters, their home town. They went to defend that.
And so the First World War saw that world and its values flounder and die in the fields of Northern Europe, when it came face to face with the technological advances in killing power.
Without that war, I don't think we'd be where we are today. Because afterward war wasn't another card in the deck to be played when opportune. It was failure, horror, a last resort. And I think, without it, we wouldn't have began to place more value on individual human lives when compared to the value of the state, so now we're in a place where we might well tell Theresa May to shove it long before we'd lay down our lives for her government. Where we have a natural cynicism and distrust of power in whatever form. Where we began to believe that co-operation between nations was mutually beneficial.
That doesn't mean that the youth of today are more cowardly or of weaker moral fiber. It doesn't mean that the youth of 1914 were poor duped fools going to die for rich men. It's just that, in no small part due to the war itself, our two worlds are so different that there's no fair comparison.
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I was very surprised by the overwhelming respect shown by our soldiers for their German opponents and it was reassuring to see much footage towards the end of the film of Allied and German troops seemingly getting along and helping each other.
It may seem to be a strange thing to say but it appeared to me that towards the end, the biggest enemy was the war itself and the combatants were in a sort of brotherhood against the war.
It was also clear that the war started as a style of war from the previous century to end up in warfare that reflected many of the attributes of the second world war.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0brzkzx/they-shall-not-grow-old?suggid=b0brzkzx
Quite funny and concerning at the same time...