[As a country, the US has moved from being a reluctant, late
entrant into World War 1 to being the premier merchant of death in
weapons sales and premier militarist nation, engaged in a perpetual
state of war waged from an empire of military bases.]
[[link removed]]

NOVEMBER 11: REMEMBERING THE TRAGEDY AND LEGACY OF WORLD WAR 1  
[[link removed]]


 

H Patricia Hynes
November 11, 2019
xxxxxx [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ As a country, the US has moved from being a reluctant, late entrant
into World War 1 to being the premier merchant of death in weapons
sales and premier militarist nation, engaged in a perpetual state of
war waged from an empire of military bases. _

A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench
during the Battle of the Somme. The date is believed to be July 1,
1916, the first day on the Somme., Royal Engineers No 1 Printing
Company

 

_Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day, November
11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that
people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace –“ the crowd
was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of
horror.” (1)_

World War 1 was the first industrial war: poison gases, flamethrowers,
aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensified the scale of
war wreckage and war dead, setting the norm for 20th and 21st century
wars.  By government policy, British war dead were not sent home lest
the public turn against the war.  Instead they were buried in vast
graveyards near battle sites in France and Belgium.  Even today
Belgian and French farmers plowing fields in places of intense,
interminable fighting and mass death on the Western Front unearth an
estimated ½ million pounds of war debris and soldiers’ bones each
year.  (During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Pentagon policy
prohibited media coverage of US war dead arriving at Dover Air Base in
Delaware until the ban was lifted, with conditions, in 2015.  Many
regarded the ban, like the Word War 1 British policy, as hiding the
human cost of war that could turn the public against the war.)

From the unyielding ugliness and butchery of World War I emerged
soldier poets, notable among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen,
whose unsparing style and content separated them from the tradition of
glorifying war. These soldier poets, living in a trench war fraught
with dead bodies and rats that fattened on them and with rear guard
commanders who sent battalions of teenage boys into the slaughter of
machine gun fire, rebuked their country’s war-mongering politicians
and industrial profiteers.   (Likewise today, the majority of
veterans of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – _in stark contrast to
politicians of both parties_ – agree that the wars they fought
wasted human lives and achieved no human progress.)

World War I soldiers had only each other in the face of death – a
reality incarnated in the 1914 Christmas truce spontaneously initiated
by British, French and German soldiers facing each other in
trenches.   Soldiers on both sides lay down their weapons, crossed
over barbed wire and shell holes and greeted each other with their
Christmas gifts of food, beer, champagne and schnapps.  Together they
buried corpses of the fallen that lay in the narrow no-man's land
between them, played soccer with tin cans and straw-filled sandbags
for balls, sang carols, took photos, and exchanged mementos and
addresses.

_THE GERMAN VETERAN VOICE_

The unique comradeship of war lingered also with Erich Maria
Remarkque, who enlisted at 19 in the World War I German army.  He,
too, admits bitterly that a sense of ideal and almost romance of war,
propagated by the state’s total propaganda campaign, turned high
school boys into willing recruits for slaughter.  Some ten years
after the war’s end, he published his first (and what some consider
the greatest) anti-war novel, _All Quiet on the Western Front_.  In
perhaps the most incisive moment of Remarkque’s novel, a young
German soldier gazes upon a young French soldier he has killed and
ponders their common humanity, with words that undercut the war’s
hard-bitten hatred and national chauvinism.   “Why do they never
tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just
as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the
same dying and the same agony.“

_WAR PROFITEERS_

War profiteering in World War I was mammoth:  The gunpowder giant
DuPont saw its fortunes increase nearly 10-fold during the World War I
and wartime profits of General Chemical Company soared by 1,400
percent.  Leather, bootmaking, garment and metals industries;
airplane, engine and ship builders – all the outfitters of armed
conflict – enjoyed immense profit.

Of the estimated $52 billion cost of World War I, industry war
profiteers pocketed nearly one third.  More than 21,000 new American
millionaires and billionaires emerged from the human ashes of the war,
while the federal government was mired in post-war debt – a debt
paid for by working people’s taxes.

Little has changed with regard to war greed except that war industry
profits have grown exponentially together with the national budget for
the military.  Today spending on military defense greatly exceeds the
total spending for our real national security needs, namely education,
transportation, housing and community development, diplomacy,
environment, science and energy, and health and human services.  As a
country, the US has moved from being a reluctant, late entrant into
World War 1 to being the premier merchant of death in weapons sales
and premier militarist nation, engaged in a perpetual state of war
waged from an empire of military bases.

_TOLL OF WAR_

World War I, ultimately, was an immense and complex setback for
democracy.   In his acclaimed book of this war, _To End All _Wars,
Adam Hochschild collates the direct and collateral death, injury,
enmities, and poisonous legacies of this total war.

* 40 million solders and civilians were casualties of that war.
* Elevated rates of suicide followed the war.
* 400,000 African laborers, forced to carry war supplies by Britain,
died from disease and from being worked to death.
* Total, industrial war seasoned warring countries for conducting
atrocities in future wars. Both sides used chemical warfare, which
foreshadowed Agent Orange in Vietnam; the British blockaded Germany to
starve the country into submission; cities were bombed, which would be
replicated and augmented to extreme levels in World War II,
culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Treaty of Versailles was forged by the Allies and signed by a
reluctant Germany on June 28, 1919.  It established the reduction of
German territory and its disarmament.  It also required Germany to
make huge reparation payments and to formally admit guilt for starting
the war.  The British blockade of Germany continued to starve the
country after the war’s end.  The punitive peace treaty has been
widely described as sowing the seeds of World War II: “’The
tragedies of the future [were] written into it as if by the devil’s
own hand,’” stated historian-diplomat George Kennan.

CODA

After a week of travel along the Western Front and walking among miles
of cemeteries for British, Belgium, French and other soldiers killed
in war, historian Adam Hochschild finds a lone, out of the way plot
with a large cross and a dozen small ones honoring the 1914 Christmas
truce, spontaneously celebrated by soldiers on both sides.   He
notes that the modest memorial was near where they had played soccer
together and that on one of the small crosses someone had carved the
word “imagine.”

*VETERANS DAY ORIGINATED as “Armistice DAY” on Nov. 11, 1919,
the first anniversary of the end of World War I.  In time it became a
day to remember veterans of all US wars.

_This piece is an abridged and modified version of 
[link removed]
[[link removed]]_

References

* Adam Hochschild. 2011. _To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and
Rebellion. _Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.342.
* Barbara Tuchman. 1984. _The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam_.
New York: Ballantine Books. p.27.
* Hochschild, p.357.

_Pat Hynes is a retired Professor of Environmental Health and
author/editor of 7 books.  She directs the Traprock Center for Peace
and Justice in western Massachusetts. [link removed]
[[link removed]]_

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]