On April 15, 1918, Jack was ordered to advance his troops behind a barrage of British shells fired by big guns far behind the lines…. Jack ordered his men over the top of the trench parapet and led them straight towards the enemy as the barrage of high explosives riddled with shrapnel landed ahead of them, blasting the German trenches and soldiers. Then, suddenly, as they advanced with bayonets at the ready, the barrage stopped advancing and began to come back toward them. Soon Jack and his men were being bombarded by their own artillery from far behind them, and to his helpless fury Jack watched his men being blown to pieces in the constant roar of their own artillery support. Suddenly Jack saw a blinding light, everything went completely silent, and then the ground came up slowly and hit him in the face. Jack had been hit by both the concussion and shrapnel from a British shell. His trusted sergeant had been between Jack and the shell when it exploded and was blown to bits. Apart from his own efforts to escape, Jack remembered nothing more of the battle.
(Douglas Gresham’s account of his stepfather C. S. Lewis’s wounding in World War I, from his book, Jack’s Life.)
Today is Veteran’s Day, the commemoration that used to be called Armistice Day, back when everyone fondly hoped that the last war had been fought. A hearty thank you to all military veterans who read this post. I’m flying a flag for you.
Someone asked on Facebook today, “What one historical event would you change, if you could go back in history?” My answer was, “I’d stop the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.”
I’m convinced it was World War I that spoiled everything. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe Europe was bound to stumble into continental war eventually, through one mishap or another, and then to get mired like a man in quicksand, as hundreds of thousands of its best young men sank and died.
But I seem to recall at least one historian who argued that the whole thing was unnecessary. Nobody seems to know to this day what it was about. With luck it could have been avoided, and then World War II would have had no cause.
Because when the Great War ended, everything had changed. The boys had marched off to Flanders and Belgium with heads held high, full of faith (civic and religious) and idealism. They stumbled home broken in spirit, believing in nothing, the germ of a lost generation. All the decline and malaise we’ve seen in the West since that time rises (it seems to me) from the disillusionment engendered by that massive exercise in stupidity and cruelty.
I knew one World War I combat veteran (that I’m aware of) in my life. He was a genial old Swedish American with an accent you could spear with a bayonet. He loved to tell stories.
But his stories of the war were few, and sparse in detail.
And he was an American. They were the lucky ones.
Well said, I agree. I’m a former Marine and I’m really beginning to hate war. To many ambitious men trying to make a name for themselves.
Maybe no Bolshevik Revolution either, if not for that war.
Indeed.
The only WW 1 vet I knew was a “jolly old elf” of a guy who was in his 90s when I got to know him (I was a teenager). He was an American of German descent, and it never even occurred to me to ask which side he fought on. I assumed the Allied side (or “our side” – which to me, as an American in the 70’s / 80’s would be the side that spoke English.) He was a ‘spy’ who would go up in a balloon to reconnoiter, and he said it was really dangerous, and that he was one of the only ones he knew that survived the war. They were pretty much like sitting ducks.
Old Henry was a friend of my grandfather’s, and I was blessed to know him. He shared his faith with me, as well as his life, and I am very thankful. I hope I can be as influential in other lives as he was in mine.
But did World War I cause the rot, or just expose it? Europe had already lost faith and confidence, (at least by comparison with 100 years earlier) by the beginning of the 20th C.
If I was really going to be a crusty Burkean conservative, I’d say that really, you’d need to go back another 120 years… to France, c. 1780’s. And stop the French Revolution before it started.
The French Revolution was the prototype of all later radical ideological revolutions, and of all the misery, war and genocide they have caused. It plunged Europe into 25 years of continuous warfare, and created the first modern military dictatorship (Napoleon). Napoleon’s methods inspired every self-made popular/military dictator after, just as the revolutionaries inspire every fanatical ideologue who believes they can create utopia. Without the French Revolution, you would never have had the Russian Revolution. And possibly the Nazi rise-to-power either. The French revolution created the type for modernist political utopianism, the basic premise behind virtually every bloodstained dictatorship of the last 100 or so years.
There’s much in what you say, but I’m not sure the French Revolution and its sequels were preventable in the same way as WWI. The social situation on the Continent was a pressure cooker bound to explode sooner or later, it seems to me (the blessing of the Wesleyan revivals spared England that horror). It seems to me that the “conversation” between Christianity and radicalism was still going on in 1911, and could possibly have gone either way. After the Great War, the conversation was over. No one was interested in listening to the Christian, classical liberal side.
It was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s disastrous foreign policy, I believe, that led to Europe being a pressure cooker about to explode into the Great War.
When Bismarck was working under Wilhelm II he had three Cardinal Rules
I. Keep France Diplomatically Isolated.
II. Do NOT let France get into an alliance with Russia.
III. Do not start an (naval) arms race with Britain.
By 1914 France had signed an alliance with Russia and Britain, due to an arms race with Germany, had began to see Germany, not France, as its primary threat and signed an entente, or “cordial understanding” with France.
Add in the fact that Russia, due to a major embarrasment in the Balkans in 1908 (caused by a dumb foreign minister), felt that if they let Austria-Hungary run over Serbia they would be facing a revolution and Germany’s complete refusal to compromise on the issue.
And so you have this:
http://daxxglax.tumblr.com/post/6712946022/world-war-1-in-a-nutshell
Lars,
You have a point, World War 1 was a disaster to europe.
I believe Churchill said “The flower of British youth died at the Somme”.
Also, the assassination was nearly bungled.
Scratch that. It WAS bungled.
The first two assassins on the route got cold feet and did nothing.
A third assassin later on down the route tossed a grenade which bounced off the car.
After his failure he tried to commit suicide: First by swallowing a cyanide pill which he promptly threw up and then by jumping into the Miljacka River. Alas, it was only five inches deep and he was dragged out by police.
The ringleader was only able to kill the Archduke by sheer luck.
The ringleader, after learning it was a failure walked into a cafe.
Meanwhile the Archduke had decided to turn around and go to the hospital and he happened to pass by the cafe -just as the ringleader, Princip, was walking out.
Thus you have it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria
Sheer luck wasn’t the half of it… The Archduke (knowing the volatile situation and having been threatened with assassination before)was wearing body armor – an early quilted silk “bulletproof vest”, but almost certainly adequate to stop the .32 Princips was using – had the bullet hit 3-4 inches lower, not in his neck…
As for the flower of British youth on the Somme (where my grandfather took a Mauser bullet thru the leg), and the effect of WWI on Britain, Chesterton said it most poignantly:
“They died to save their country, and they only saved the world.”
I think this poem summarizes quite well what it did to British youth (and European youth as well).
Wilfred Owen’s
“Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
———————-
Even writers like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle were traumatized.
both lost sons in the war. Kipling became far more cynical in his writings and Doyle, creator of the great logician Sherlock Holmes, delved into spiritualism and sceances, hoping to communicate to his lost son.
The problem is: It may not be “dulce” to die for your country (or honour, or freedom, or right, or democracy, etc): but if as a culture you stop believing it is “decorum” – proper, worthy of praise and honour – then how will your culture survive any conflict?
WWI so disillusioned the intellectual class of Europe from patriotism and traditional notions of honour that many of them have spent the last 90 years preaching that honour is foolishness and patriotism is dangerous.
C.S. Lewis saw the danger during the next war, as famously expressed in “Men Without Chests”:
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm
I’m not disagreeing with you Ian.
The poem illustrates that very disillusionment that World War 1 caused.