American entry into the war and the Balfour Declaration both took place in 1917. This was no coincidence. It also sowed the seeds of the genocides of the next war.
2
I have something of an obsession with the Great War. This obsession is borne of a realization that it was the seminal catastrophe upon which western civilization foundered (a foundering which smolders still today). And of a realization that the war was not only unnecessary from the start, but that its virulence was exacerbated, to the despair of all mankind, by America’s hideous decision to join the carnage.
When America entered the war on the side of the Entente, the belligerents were in grim stalemate. Yet crucially, Russia - the Czar already deposed - was mere months from its final withdrawal. This would have marked a major turning point in the war (were American doughboys not en route to Europe), freeing Germany’s eastern forces to join the battle against a weary Britain and France in the west.
Had America abjured entry, had it held fast to the ancient policy of “entangling alliances with none” — had it not the misfortune of the messianic racist sociopath Woodrow Wilson, the worst president in American history (progenitor of the income tax as well) at its helm — the war in all likelihood would have ended in 1918 in negotiated peace, perhaps a tepid victory for the Central Powers...
What would the result have been? The Hohenzollerns still in power in the Second Reich — no Hitler, no Nazis, no Holocaust, no WWII. And an America that continued to serve as a moral exemplar to the world in its continental fortress, but did not sully itself by meddling in global affairs...
42
@Matt Lazare
As a high school history teacher, I share your obsession. The chain of “what if’s” relative to WW1 are infinite as WW2 was simply a continuation of the conflict.
9
To me the irony is the war to end all wars was wrongly named. It was the war that started future wars. From Europe to Indochina to the Middle East. Young men go to war because young women are watching is how one sociobiologist put it. There may be some truths to the warrior gene that perhaps we inherit and is part of the human genome. When I hear the word tribalism used today it gives me pause. It seems to be a step towards confrontation. Currently we have a confrontationist as commander in chief.
9
The UK entered the War to stop the loss of its empire and to prevent Germany hegemony on the continent. History has shown that it was trying to stop the inevitable. If it had stayed out and let Germany win, there would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. I've no idea what would have happened instead of those despots' holocausts, but I doubt it would have been nearly as bad.
4
Not courage and folly but folly and stupidity, which allowed millions to be cajoled to willingly fight and kill other human beings in a "war to end wars." What utter nonsense young men--and now women--fall for when the voices of the military-industrial complex call them forth in the name of patriotism and profits. Not heroes but fools believe the crapulent war mongers. They go off jaunty nationalists and return, Like Ian David Long trained to kill.
"'He wasn't unhinged, he wasn't violent. He was a sweet guy who served his country and was using his GI Bill to go to college and get a degree to help more people,'" the friend said. 'Out of our group of friends I thought the highest of him.'"
When our society stops making heroes of killers, honoring them with medals, and instead save our highest esteem for those who bravely refuse to serve Uncle Scam, we will be a giant step closer to the American dream. The bravest man I ever knew was Irwin Schiff, who died in a federal prison for writing books critical of the IRS and the income tax. https://www.schiffradio.com/death-of-a-patriot/
10
“World War I offers a reminder of how easily and unexpectedly an obscure spark can ignite a conflagration.“ “Reminder(s)” do not remember. People can. Remember? Forget? Deny? Distort? Be willfully blind, deaf,ignorant to the implications of the article’s painful visual languageS. To unnecessary pains inherent in ALL man-made violating.Of humans.Other organisms.Our shared environments. "The war to end all wars." A mantra used to describe WWI’s idealistic “promise.” God’s creations would finally learn from experience. 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed. 21 million, wounded. Each ONE, a person.Not a number! What was learned when “nearly a quarter of the draftees in 1918 were immigrants” in America’s segregated armed forces? Each ONE, a PERSON. From wherever? Then? For NOW? What was/IS understood, NOW, by current personally unaccountable elected and selected policymakers? At all levels. In a semantically united USA? Including the harming-unaccountable- Commander-in-Chief, President Trump? Questions which need to be asked. Inherent, demanding quests, waiting to be taken up by…The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, following WWI, infected an estimated 500 million people globally.Killed an estimated 50 million, including approximately 675,000 Americans.No medicine available to effectively treat. THEN. Now that treatment exists, insurance may not! “a reminder of how easily and unexpectedly…”Can political personal unaccountability maim and kill?
3
Can we please stop citing Nazi propaganda about the "onerous" Versailles treaty as the justification for Hitler, WWII, etc? The Versailles treaty was not particularly onerous in the context of previous peace treaties or the damages done in WWI, in which the German territory was relatively spared.
10
What a shamefull biased report.
Not a single picture of french soldiers in action beside some algerian troops (who weren't by large, representative of the.
8 millions french soldiers fighting since august 1914 to november 1918).
Those pictures are easy to find.
The "Poilus" are those of the Allieds who paid the heaviest price of the war.
1, 5 millions died and 3 millions were wounded.
What is the problem with the anglosaxon psycho and its incapacity to process the idea of normal frenchmen fighting and dying for their country, and after all those horrors, win ?
20
The NSDAP (the National Socialist German Labour Party) - the Nazis - came out of the ashes of a lost war and the crisis of the Weimar Republic. Today in the U.S., the NSARP (the National Supremacist American Republican Party), led by Trump, has taken over most institutions and wants to divide and conquer the country and the world.
4
It is also worth observing that starting in 1914 an eventual official total of 45,000 Americans or American related migrated to Canada and England to fight as members of the Commonwealth Forces. Their enlistment was at first under stealth because of uncertainty about the effect on their citizenship. During the war, however, their presence in largely Canadian forces became valuable after April 1917, and after the war they were deemed fully equal to their fellow citizens in US forces. Included in that was the right of the dead to be buried in US military cemeteries, but approximately 3,500 of them are still buried in European cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, virtually all of them under gravestones that identify them as Canadians.
http://www.americansatwarinforeignforces.com/
Dulce et Decorum Est (Latin from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”) a poem by Wilfred Owen, who died in WWI
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est
1
The insanity got so bad, that the French sent the flower of a generation of young French men into the German lines hoping that the men in front would absorb the bullets allowing the wave coming after them to storm the trenches. In the end the Germans never ran out of bullets, the French ran out of men. It is said that after this crime by the French General staff on their own men, the German were literally bailing French blood out of their trenches, which was pouring in like a river overflowing it's banks.
38
On my mother's side of the family, I had two great uncles who were in that war being the third generation of our family to go to war. Both got a "touch of the gas". On my fathers side, another set of volunteers. My nephew most recently did not reenlist in the national guard. 3 tours in the middle east did enough to convince him of the folly. My cousin retired after a career in the air force after he graduated the academy and he, too, is counseling others not to volunteer these days. Alas, our family, on both sides, has had enough of politicians without real military experience starting wars, police actions or whatever you wish to call it. When we next have a real war, our family will volunteer as always, but for anything like Korea, Vietnam and now the middle east, not so much. Serving every generation since the civil war and seeing the current folly of our national leadership is enough. As to how the world changed, anyone who actually can read and read history will see how the great powers divided up the middle east after that war with no understanding of the area along with a lot of hubris and that plagues us today and in the future. We are still paying for the first world war.
61
What has humanity learned from this folly?
In one instance the planet was saved by thoughtful leaders reflecting on these past mistakes. Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and others in his entourage had read Barbara Tuchman's history of the Great War, The Guns of August. He understood how events could spiral out of control as actions and reactions took on a life of their own and world leadership abdicated their responsibilities.
Imagine if Trump or W had been President then.
Never Forget.
34
“Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials, and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on a rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other then mutual mass slaughter”
Leon Trotsky.
I just read this quoted in Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World. So true a 100 years later.
25
According to the article: "...it is also worth observing that nearly a quarter of the draftees in 1918 were immigrants..."
My grandfather immigrated in 1909 to "Avoid the Swedish Army" (which apparently was quite brutal at the time). He was then drafted on July 16, 1917 after Congress enacted the Selective Service Act of 1917. Then his history becomes quite murky and mysterious: he was apparently issued a uniform and a gun (a photograph was found), and then abruptly dismissed from the U.S. Army. He never went to Europe, and the whole thing was lost in the family history (nobody alive today knows what happened). According to the National Archives, his military records were burned in a fire in the 1970's.
What some of us in the family think happened was that he was drafted, and then the U.S. Army dismissed him as an anti-war sympathizer. At the time the war protest movement was quite vocal, with astounding poetry by Carl Sandburg (a fellow Swede), and Communist groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W). However, nobody in the family ever heard him espouse similar political convictions.
What we think happened was that The American Protective League, which operated as a vigilance committee of private citizens here in Minneapolis, decided that my grandfather was a security risk, and got him dismissed. However, the family found that the history of the American Protective League is very difficult to find. None of their files can be found.
12
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen
34
@S.
Thank you. Remembering this early dawn 'Danny Boy' written by an Irishman for his son where at the end, he prays to be remembered as the grass grows green on his grave when his son returns. It is all the more tragic because it is his son who never comes home to his native land.
11
I am a survivor of the Vietnam War and served 50 years ago as a Combat Engineer. The more I read about our (US) wars, the more anti-war I become. My war was based on a series of lies, just as the Iraq war was. Based on these lies, young men and women, died or have had their lives changed forever.....and for what? Rich people get richer, civilians get killed, new animosities and hatreds emerge and the world order gets rearranged to presage another war decades later.
I left Vietnam 50 years ago last month. Vietnam never left me.
Yes, I suppose war is necessary - probably part of the human condition but we need to think long and hard before we unleash the dogs of war.
63
Grandpa Nick
Was poisoned from mustard gas
His voice was affected
Polyps on his vocal cords
When he spoke it was more of a growl
Like the Beast in the Disney movie
Beauty and the beast
I loved him and was his first grandchild
My sisters and cousins were terrorized by the sound of his voice
I was not
WW 1 in France
28
I guess it is acceptable to show the dead when there is no political price to be paid. If each and every death was published perhaps public opinion would prevent the continuation of these horrible wars driven by fat old men thousands of miles away.
Remember that GW Bush would not allow the press to even photograph the coffins of American dead returning to the US.
It's always so easy to be pro war if you have no skin in the game. Waving a American flag, manufactured in China and saying "thank you for your service" does not make you a patriotic citizen. It just makes you a tool.
Don't put it past our current fat old fool from starting a war to distract from his criminal acts.
18
I think of Dalton Trumbo's "JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN" when I look at these pictures. The world knew insanity at on time and it is making a comeback. We have learned nothing.
4
We don’t know as much as we might have about this war because the men who fought it were silent about it when they came home. My grandfather was one of them. When, as a child, I discovered his award for being wounded in action, I asked about it. His reply was that he got shot in the butt running from the enemy. Though I would later learn that he was injured by inhaling poison gas, that deflection was all he ever uttered about the war, which was a sort of unwritten code among the men who fought, I discovered.
17
This beautifuly written but heart wrenching article is a reminder of the extent of our collective folly, especially as it relates to war. It resonates even more strongly because of the times we now find ourselves in. We have, as our "commander in chief", a person who shows little empathy with human suffering. Rather, he seems to relish it. With the unwitting yet arrogant and self-absorbed theatrical stroke of his pen, he can subject untold thousands to misery, mayhem and murder, savor the action and tweet pointless accolades to himself in celebration of his mindless brutality.
Given just how meaningless the extraordinary loss of life was in both WWI and II, how do we find ourselves in such a state of forgetfulness not just of the folly but the absolute disgrace that is war - ANY war as they are all manufactured by the rich and powerful. War ONLY benefits the already too rich. All other participants are cannon fodder. It is completely antithetical to patriotism or to the concept of serving ones country. We have perpetuated this "for god and country" delusion long enough. A merciful god does not want men and women on a battlefield, in a trench, in a cockpit or on a cruiser bombing the living hell out of each other and everything in sight.
It is a critical time for sanity to prevail and to not let our very own abhorrent Machiavelli set the stage for one more war.
15
Growing up I never heard much about WWI, neither in school nor popular culture. I always wondered about WWI and thought of it like WWII which my father participated in and which was so prevalent in US recent history. I wondered why WWI was such a mystery.
Then I read about it and learned a bit about it. Now I know why, in the US anyway, its history is not well known and not discussed.
It was totally pointless. It was a horrific meaningless slaughter of millions of people guided by and, to a large extent, executed by willing participants with no real goals in mind other than the meaningless slaughter of other participants.
WWI shows the worst of human behavior and gives an unvarnished exposure of who we are. It defines and exemplifies a very basic characteristic of humans: senseless violence directed at other humans.
12
Dan Carlin has a excellent podcast on WWI. it’s called blueprint for Armageddon. It’s about 10 hours long and free. You can find it at his website or the apple store. It really gets in to the personal aspects of the war and hardships of the soldiers.
3
Quite simply, this article is worthy of an entire book that should be required reading for everyone on the planet, especially the next generations. Ditto for Santayana's often disregarded quotes: 'Only the dead have seen the end of war.' and 'Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
Unfortunately, peace, not war, will always be an aberration. Human nature can change for the better, yet rarely, slowly and incrementally.
4
No recounting of WW1 should go without mentioning "All's Quiet on the western Front" written by a German soldier who fought in the trenches. It is an amazing and brutal account of trench warfare and in many ways the most important book about WW1. I was left fully understanding the trauma soldiers experience when they return home from war and why they have such horrible depression, fear and shame.
12
It is surprising to me that all of the photos portray only European soldiers, with the exception of the one shot of Algerians. This was a global war and many of the colonies at the time were pulled into it, without consultation. Their presence and contributions should be noted.
3
The Ottoman Empire didn't enter the war until well after the battle had started. It was wooed by the Axis and Allies before it chose a side.
1
While the author covers a wide range of causes and results, he seemed to overlook Woodrow Wilson's determination that only American style liberal internationalism would solve all of the world's problems. Is that not still the view, that only American style democracy is the only solution to international issues?
3
The war that began in August, 1914 did indeed turn out to be the war that would end all wars. But that war took 31 years to wrap up (with a 20 year time out to grow a new generation of soldiers) and ended in the complete moral bankruptcy of a civilization.
4
We all should take a hard look at the current map of the Middle East. ALL of the borders, and most of the countries now exist with borders that were established after WW-I. The leader of the Islamic State famously announced those borders null and void. Are they? Are there US troops occupying parts of Syria? Does Israel occupy parts of what was Jordan?, and Egypt? Where are the real borders of Iraq? What, indeed is Iraq? What is Kurdistan?
Where does the Middle East go from here?
5
Future historians may identify the 1914 - 2014 period as the Second 100 Years War -- and its courage and folly -- and its not over yet. The identifiable conflict through the years has been and continues to be between Capitalism and Socialism/Communism, which remains a contentious issue in our current Red-Blue politics. The Arms Industry and the Banking Industry and their Middle Class employees have done quite well through it all over the century, while the lower class and minority class have provided the millions of PTSD (and ignored) veterans and requisite dead heroes.
6
A very sad legacy of this war is some areas of France that remain closed because of unexploded conventional and chemical munitions. When I was stationed in Germany in the 1980, one would read several times a year of a civilian killed as a result unexploded munitions from both wars. The same legacy continues because of unmapped minefiellds and duds in all former arenas of conflict.
5
Probably the main reason such a massive war hasn't happened in recent times is the daunting scale of today's weapons of war. But that hasn't prevented local, but still terrible, conflicts. Only intelligent and balanced leadership can prevent these conflicts from turning into conflagrations. But such leadership is becoming increasingly scarce...
5
Alan Cowell, yet, yet again, shows what a great writer for the New York Times he is still after all these years. So much in so few, well-chosen words and stories. He knows what works best and delivers for maximum impact. A legend among those who admire great writing.
5
World War I wasn't fought because an Archduke was assassinated. It was fought because German unification (followed immediately by short territorial wars against Austria and France) and industrialization radically changed the balance of power in Europe, without changing the political balance, which 3 generations of Germans tried to change through "diplomacy by other means."
A great industrial and military power has arisen in our times, too, and is currently building artificial island/military bases just outside its neighbors' waters. We need to pay a lot of attention to traditional diplomacy these next 50 years to prevent anyone from once more resorting to diplomacy by other means.
13
@Green Tea It was fought because France wanted revenge for 1871. It was fought because Britain was being beaten commercially by Germany. It was fought because Britain intercepted German aid to the Boers, leading Germany to try to compete with an enlarged fleet. It was fought because Czar Nicholas was a bumbling autocrat losing grip on his populace. It was fought because all the colonialists including Germany and Britain envied each others sources of raw material. The Armistice not only stopped the shooting, it began a cycle of revenge that echoes to this day. Blaming Germany as totally responsible for the war was one of the major lies of the age. If only we could have stayed out, we would have avoided 500+ KIA every day for our 110 days of combat involvement.
8
Everyone should see the Kubrick film, Paths of Glory, which accurately and dramatically depicted the insanity of this type of warfare (or any type of warfare for that matter).
13
Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" is a compelling and heartbreaking contemporary chronicle of those years; a book I read again and again.
9
@highway
Last week my wife and I visited the gravesite of Vera Brittain's brother Edward at the British cemetery, Granezza in the mountains, near Asiago. The cemetery tells the toll of the battle from around May 1918 through October. Average ages 19-20, perhaps 100 in this particular place. It is moving and utterly haunting.
The nearby plain where much of the battle took place is still pockmarked by overgrown shell holes, the trenches in the hillsides are still hellish. When she died in 1970 Vera Brittain's ashes were scattered by her brother's grave.
13
WWI was an epic tragedy, just as every war is. My grandfather and great uncle, both immigrants, were American recruits who fought in France. They did not fight to 'serve their country', they were drafted.
And yet in spite of all the horrifying atrocities , millions of deaths, terrible wounds, etc., every new generation of the young buys the propaganda that it is good and honorable to 'serve your country' as a soldier. This certainly serves the agenda of the rich and powerful that propagate wars, but it has absolutely nothing to do with 'serving your country'.
Courage, honor, and gallantry lies in caring for and contributing to the health and well being of our fellow man and our planet - not in destroying it. Albert Einstein was an outspoken pacifist during WWI and refused to contribute his knowledge to propagate the war effort. Of corse he was marginalized and called a traitor.
The end of war will only happen from the ground up when ordinary citizens decide war is what it is : dishonorable, sordid, degrading, and a scourge on human life on our planet. In my view there is nothing patriotic about signing on to legalized mass murder that destroys the body and soul of everyone in the wake of it's terrible destruction.
76
@Gwen Vilen
I appreciate your sentiment and agree with your conclusion that, "The end of war will only happen from the ground up when ordinary citizens decide war is what it is." One can as well state that mutual respect, commonality in purpose, and effective government only can occur from the ground up when ordinary citizens decide that politics is as ugly and counterproductive as it is practiced in today's toxic environment.
There are only two wars in our history which we did not have the unilateral power to avoid becoming involved in, the Revolutionary War and WWII. Both were imposed upon America by foreign factors over which we had little direct control, both imposed intolerable threats to our continued existence. When that happens, we have no choice other than to fight out of self-preservation. Those who did so nobly served our country.
Those who serve in other capacities, under other conditions, whether military or civilian, fighting or humanitarian, also serve our country. They do not generally make the decisions whether or not to go to war, they respond to the call to duty, whatever form that takes and should be honored for their sacrifices.
Your fault is well-founded and we are collectively responsible for our nation's policies and actions. The people ultimately are responsible, via our chosen representatives, for how America conducts itself. Our failure has been to act responsibly and govern by our values regardless of which party is in power at any given time.
14
@Peter G Brabeck I disagree that "we are collectively responsible for our nation's policies and actions." You presume by virtue of the ballot, as the electorate, we have a voice - let alone power - to effect policy decisions. How so? Money buys power, together determine our leadership, not the people, and drive policy as well. Try reading, for example,The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East. Nixon and Kissinger sold out America's middle class in their scheme to supply arms to the Shah of Iran which, ultimately, gave us the 'gas crisis' which Nixon and Kissinger knew was coming and accepted as the price of Kissinger's geopolitics. The New York congressman in the district that was home to Grumman was only to happy to supply 80 of the latest - at the time - F14s to the Shah. The Shah's shopping list was endless. Eisenhower's last speech warning us about the vast military industrial complex applies. Was one of us, from the electorate, supposed to intervene in the secret meetings held between Kissinger and the Shah and say, "Hey, guys, this isn't a very good idea and, besides, it goes against our values and the common good?" Your assumption is wrong: "The people are ultimately responsible, via our chosen representatives" if and only if they are responsible to us. They are not. They often, if not typically as in the case of Nixon and Kissinger, act for themselves, accountable only to themselves.
21
It is truly amazing how every topic in this publication (and the comments generated by many of its readers) can tie directly into Donald Trump.
4
Maybe trump is mentioned because the draft dodging, chicken hawk would have no problem sending other people's children to be maimed and killed, especially if he can make a buck from it.
54
@Chris,
It is singular but that is where we are today when a day in the sunlight goes by, with no name mentioned or seen of the above.
3
That may be true. It may not be true. I believe he ran on an campaign of less foreign involvement and conflict. Despite he regular untrue and bizarre comments he actually kept many campaign promises.
It is common but a simplification to call November 11, 1918 the end of the war. It was an armistice, a pause. But the soldiers there did not know that it would be the end. My father’s diary has several entries expressing anxiety that combat could start again. E.g., from May 11, 1919: “We had a call to arms Monday night. And believe me some of us thought for sure the Huns were coming over the line. We were in Bed. We heard about twenty shots, then the old horn began to blow.” He found out on July 4 that the Germans had surrendered on June 26.
6
The picture of refugees in Le Mans appears to have been taken during WWII, not WWI, judged by the subjects' dress and location. Le Mans is in western France and southwest of Paris. German forces didn't make it that far west in WWI.
21
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, he alludes to every war from the Peloponessian to WWII, and as Gene learns from his own inner war against Finny and himself, that “War is made from something ignorant inside the human heart.”
Each of us needs to shed light into that inner ignorance if war is ever to be ended.
History is essential to remind us of the horrors of war. Let us not forget its lessons, and let us remember the dead. May they Rest In Peace.
4
Like to suggest an eye-opening read: "The Sleepwalkers", by Christopher Clark.
1
The History\Fact challanged pres hasn't opened his mouth yet but I'm pre-embarrassed. My grandfather spent the remainder of his life after serving in the42nd Rainbow Div. angry and abusive, unable to take a deep breadth because of Mustard gas, Donald, please read a book or do some research, Europeans are not going to accept your"alternant facts" or enter your" Reality distortion Zone "as Homer said to Bart, son Make us proud, or at least less embarrassed.
7
The ultimate example of what happens when the men in power have out of control egos. The best and brightest of a whole generation of European manhood was destroyed and led directly to the moral bankruptcy of the German State. Not one General who sent his men to be slaughtered was ever punished.
6
Let's pause and consider the impact on history had Europe simply paused in the moments following Gavrilo Princip's misguided actions, without invoking alliances, treaties and secret agreements. Suppose Russia left Serbia to hang at the mercy of Austria-Hungary, and suppose the concept of Lebensraum not been used as a pretext by Germany. Consider what our world would look like today, were it not for nationalism having been used as the spark that lit the powder keg of war. One collective pause for the sake of rational thought, one act of restraint, could have possibly saved mankind from the stain of two World Wars as well as the enduring stain of fascism and unchecked nationalism.
7
Lebensraum was a concept invented before WWI but only became a German war aim during the war, partly as a result of the British blockage:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum?wprov=sfla1
WWI was just old-fashioned great power imperialism. It was the Nazis who elevated Lebensraum to a mass ideology.
We should remember it all. Everything.
6
This PG-13 exercise in grand narrative might be rated ‘G’ without the one photo of a clothed skeleton.
The war was a holocaust, which missing black-and-white photos here of shredded bodies around one’s feet in living color wouldn't do justice. The nurses who had to deal with blown-off faces of still-living soldiers on hospital brought home living color PTSD comparable to what any soldier from the field might have endured (so called “shell shock,” but surreal slaughter is not about that).
I recommend the PBS American Experience documentary on WW-I with film footage of living wounded fit for Lucian Freud paintings (and imagine that film in color).
“Our boys” came home to initiate The Roaring Twenties in the wake of that holocaust. Modernism is a response to holocaust.
The entire period from 1919 through 1938 was just a respite among the royals of one Godless twentieth century war that continued in the cold until 1989; and now, of course, still echoes.
4
Lest we Forget
For all soldiers and civilians caught up in Wars not of their making.
7
My grand-uncle fought in France in the British Indian Army. His monthly salary was Rs 10 he told me, and to enlist he had to bring his own horse into the army with him. He survived the war minus two fingers he lost when the German soldier charging his trench tossed back the hand grenade he had lobbed.
4
the photographs alone are enough to sicken me. This could very easily happen again, but it would be short and totally destroy civilization because it will be nuclear. history forgooten is histpry repeated.
6
@Carle,
A friend at Versailles who lived WWII believes that history or a war never repeats itself. Orwell once wrote it sometimes takes a war to ensure peace, and is nearly killed in the Spanish Civil one, taking place against Fascism.
Another friend from Paris, now at a distinguished age, has sent the Bells of Notre Dame.
It is for all of us to remember, the living, and in honor of Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of WWI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr3ODCbHCfE
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."
- Lt. Col. John McCrae, at Ypres, May 3, 1915
19
@Justin Sigman
Thank you for sharing. Compare this to one of Carl Sandburg's poems from the same era:
"KILLERS
I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.
And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
and killing.
I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.
I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,
Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of
killing.
Sixteen million men."
2
My op-ed about my grandfather who, like Gunther, was in the 313th Infantry Regiment, "Baltimore's Own."
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-op-0926-war-legacy-20180924-story.html
4
I always think how lucky I was born in New York City as my mom who came here in 1921 was a German good looking teenager from Metz Lorraine under German occupation where her father ran the Kaiser's armory in Metz during the first world war ,she and her sisters were saved as being" female war victory trophies" as her dad seeing the ending of the war and the foreign troops approaching put his daughters in a Catholic nunnery in Nancy France to keep them safe .
In the late 1930's an Aunt sent us a postal card from Metz with the stamp showing a Nazi flag .
3
@Carlyle T. I also was lucky to be born in New York City in 1934. As I look back on my life I realize that early in May, 1933 when the fertilized egg that was destined to be me was in my mothers Fallopian tube I was passionately hated. The facts of the subsequent Holocaust bear me out. Both my parents were Jewish and later as a preteen when I heard the rumors of the killings I started to have nightmares which continued for many years. My uncle Bill was in the Gordon Highlanders during WWI and told me stories of what he went through. Two weeks before the armistice the last thing he remembered was seeing a bayonet going through the soldier ahead of him and then the lights went out as a rifle butt fractured his skull. He went through the rest of his life with a silver plate in his head. He always said tha the worst day of his life happened when he was behind the lines talking to several Anzacs and walked away for some reason and then heard an explosion. when he turned to look all the Anzacs were killed by that shell. The senseless random killing always bothered him. I on the other hand mostly fought the Cold War. The words from the Bully Pulpit have consequences. "Free speech stops when you yell 'Fire' in a crowded theater." So said Oliver Wendell Holmes. Too bad for us that D. Trump is so ignorant of the past.
3
I was wondering why Trump had this sudden urge to go to France. Old bone spurs is going for the celebration in honor of those who died for their countries! I assume he will play a little golf while he is there!
10
I can't think of anything more offensive our nation can do to commemorate this momentous remembrance than sending trump as our representative. Instead of America sending its best, it sends its worst ... and a divider to boot. Shameful.
30
"A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance." Samuel Haynes
8
Quite understandably you focussed on American contributions to the first war but in terms of lessons to be learned, maybe the isolationist sentiments which delayed the US entering the war over 2 years after it started, was a travesty. One of your letter writers mentioned meeting T. E. Lawrence after the war. He might have known that Lawrence met William Yale in the Syrian desert before the US entered the war. Yale was working for Standard Oil who commissioned him to sign up oil leases while masquerading as wealthy “playboys”. During this time, his company was delivering oil to the Turks at the port of Constantinople, knowing full well they were allies of the Germans. This same selfish morality was displayed 20 years later when the US refused to enter WW2 while the Germans bombed London and killed 32,000 of its inhabitants, and over 10,000 troops massed at Calais only 50 miles from England’s shores. Churchill begged the Americans for help to no avail.
Hitler would never have invaded Poland in the first place if the US had not been so isolationist, and millions of lives would have been spared. Finally, the refusal of America to accept thousands of Jewish refugees in 1938, when war was imminent, is forever a stain. So let’s hope that when Trump makes his grand speech about America fighting the WW1 almost single handed when he is in Paris, that he admits the unconscionable American failure to support its friends, and wait 2 years before entering both wars.
15
Will we ever learn ?
5
No.
1
The clown suited generals of
europe were spoiling for a war.
They got more than they expected.
1
Every time I hear some half-wit try and compare any aspect of their “problems” to trench warfare, I’m immediately tempted to suggest they lock themselves in a bathroom and fill the tub with bleach and ammonia.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, chlorine gas probably isn’t going to help.
1
The last War of Kings and every bit as unnecessary as the Hundred Years War or the Crusades, just fought with 20th century weapons and a monstrous inability to stop it. It lit the fuse for World War II, which gave us the Holocaust and the Middle East violence of today. It's still killing, a century after it supposedly ended.
9
Walking the battlefield of the Somme is one of the most moving things I have ever experienced. Just to imagine those brave soldiers leaving their dugouts to run into German machine gun fire, knowing well that they had a high probability of not coming back. The cold, the wet, the constant bombardment must have been just horrible.
A stupid war that was totally unnecessary as so many of them are.
5
The war to end all wars. Yeah right.
2
In telling the story of world war 1, the great injustice is that often Indian soldiers are left out. Nearly a million Indian soldiers fought in World War 1 and 70,000 died. Just like in the movie "Dunkirk" and this article not a word was ever mentioned.
12
Indian troops served courageously and devotedly in Italy, Burma, and the Middle East, and they dont get enough credit. But there were none at Dunkirk so they wouldn't be mentioned in the movie.
1
There are multi-volume works on this war, its origins and its lasting impacts. This article, understandably can only scratch the surface. If we include the world-wide pandemic which followed from 1918 onward for a few years, this may have been the most disastrous event in Human history outranking by far the "Black Death" plague in the Medieval period in Europe.
As to that act of sadistic Nazi revenge in the forest memorial park, one documentary I've watched said the railroad dining car used to humiliate the French was actually a reproduction, not the same one of 1918.
Make every day Armistice Day.
4
Eugene Debs, one of our greatest Americans, warned people that they were being used as pawns by the aristocracy and the military industrial complex in this war. President Wilson, apparently unfamiliar with the First Amendment, had him thrown in prison. That is what I recall most from this unfortunate period in history. How little has changed.
10
@Eugene Debs
PBS (2012) characterized Eugene Debs' organization, the I.W.W. (a.k.a. Wobblys) as follows:
Dr. Yanella: "They're a very romantic group. They're tough guys. They're not going to listen to the nonsense of Washington Politicians. They'll go out onto the streets. They take care of themselves. They have some successes. They're very, very attractive. They tend to believe that you can settle things with your fists, that all you need to do is to stand up to the boss and dump him off your back and everything's going to be all right. And that's very attractive, very romantic, and Sandburg becomes one of the primary writers in 'THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW' for those wobbly positions about violence, about direct action, about the use of sabotage, about the need to create a revolution -- not 10 years from now, but right now." (@ 0:29:52)
Unlike Debs, Carl Sandburg never went to prison. However, he wrote under a pseudonym:
Narrator: "The INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW was now being closely watched by the United States military intelligence. Sandburg's articles, editorials, and poems were now being published under a variety of pseudonyms including Jack Philips, Militant and Live Wire." (@ 0:33:39)
Cite:
PBS. The Day Carl Sandburg Died. American Masters. Program originally aired: 24 SEP 2012. DVD, 84 Min. ISBN: 978-1-60883-701-4
Looking at these photos and anecdotes, I wonder whether any French soldiers participated in the proceedings?
4
@A Brown,
"My father, Cyprien Aubard, a professional military man from Bordeaux, was called up to the French Army's main headquarters in Charleroi, Belgium. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war in August of 1914".
In remembrance of my aunt, Eliane Browne Koeves (October 13, 1913 - February 14, 2016)
1
@A Brown
In 1987 I was in the Cevennes Mountains in southern France, in a small village. In the Place (like the village green, a gathering place) there was a war memorial with 96 names on it. Many of the names were the same last name; father/son, brothers, etc. I looked around at the village of LaSalle, and asked myself, where did they get all these people, in this small village? There were 4 names appended for WWII at the bottom of the plaque. In other small villages nearby, the churches, the civic buildings - many had their own memorials who died in WWI - horrible numbers. About I,300,000 people in France died in military actions or as the result of them, in France. I don't know why the pictures here don't represent any of them.
1
My siblings and I grew up without cousins or aunts and uncles. The reason was that my father was an only child whose three uncles all died in France. Three young men, two graduates of Harvard and the third from MIT who all volunteered and all died. Even now, I think about the impact of those deaths on my family. Sheer insanity which was repeated 25 years later and which still affects all of us.
4
Lest we forget.
Yet we did.
And continue to do so.
2
JFK demanded his staff read The Guns of August before his inauguration in 1960. A timeless classic and one passage has stood out to me decades after I first tore through it as a teen:
The incredulity of the Kaiser that Britain would go to war "over a piece of paper" that ensured Belgian neutrality (which the Germans violated).
How much death and suffering would have been prevented had the British just let Paris fall?
It is not even a question that the British Empire would have been better off (it might still exist!), 40 million more Europeans would have been alive in 1918, plus another 50 million alive in 1920 with no Spanish flu epidemic.
A quick 3 week war as Schliefen and Moltke intended and what a better world it would have been...instead the stubborn British took the first step towards utter death and destruction.
1
@Arturo
You speak with the benefit of hindsight.
At the time, no one knew it would last for 4 years and so many would be killed. And I, for one, am glad that my nation was "stubborn", that we believed it was wrong to invade another nation and overrun its independence, and that we stood up to our treaty obligations to guarantee Belgium's continued existence.
Would the world really have been better if might was always seen as right, and big nations could invade smaller ones at will? Where would a militaristic Germany have invaded next?
If any of you old timers are interested, there's a incredible series on YouTube called the Great War, hosted by Indy Niedell that's been going on since 2014 and gives an episodic week by week account of WWI from start to finish. They're just wrapping up this week, and have already started on a new series dedicated to WWII and the inter-war period.
2
The most poignant and telling story was published by the NYT on the centenary of the start of the war. The NYT story recounted that Germany was poised to dominate European economy for at least the first three decades of the Twentieth Century. If the Kaiser had not chosen war, his people would have enjoyed tremendous prosperity and been spared its 2.5 million battle deaths, 4.275 million wounded and probably the ensuing the cross of fascism and ruin. At least 13 million of other nations also perished in this avoidable conflict. It is expedient and easy to select conflict over diplomacy, especially when a leader is not called upon to sacrifice. One hopes that modern humanity has matured.
9
Since WWII, from Massachusetts to California, from Florida to Washington State, from Michigan to Texas, weapons and the military have been the core of the US economy. Air force, army or naval bases in almost every state, over 800 bases across 70 countries... Imagine if all those trillions were directed to some other purpose. Odd that never gets a mention in debates about federal taxes or our staggering national debt.
13
The military spending is ridiculous but it is not since WW2. There was a huge de-mobilization and cuts in spending for basics like ammunition that left this country woefully unprepared for the Korean War, where we almost lost to a poor North Korean army early in the conflict. Even Eisenhower who famously warned against the military industrial complex acknowledged the need for large scale defense spending. The country must use is military budget wisely while measuring its commitments around the world. We can’t do everything.
1
I think of the number of guns and the volume of ammunition in the US today, the rage that our entertainers and leader is stoking.
War keeps evolving, I guess.
2
The "lions led by donkeys" quote has since been proven to have been a line the Germans used to demoralise British troops. Many British generals died or were wounded, and the death rate in the officer ranks was considerably higher than in the ordinary ranks. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836
None of which provides any comfort to those who suffered. As a teen and young man I sat by the hearth in my grandparents' old house in Lincolnshire as my grandfather recounted his experiences on the Western Front. Often tears streamed down his face as the horrors came back. My other grandfather fought in the Middle East, was captured briefly by the Turks, and later was with Allenby in Jerusalem. He never spoke about it and never recovered.
This Sunday I will be in Guelph, Ontario where MacCrae lived, his house now a museum.
I will seek a quiet place for prayer and contemplation. And think of my grandfathers. And weep.
6
France, 1969 - Students, preparing to graduate from High School, have been cramming for the Baccalaureat, and we are in disgrace with a majority of the Teaching body.
The French Government nearly topples the year before, when the Student Demonstrations bring Paris to a halt.
'1917!', shouts an exhausted interrogator in my flushed face. Off on a gallop, I remind him that it is the year that America responds to a call for arms, and enters the War with boots on the ground. He does not know that my American grandfather, DeCourcy Browne, an engineer for Bethlehem Steel, is cited in a Baltimore newspaper, as being among the first to respond).
Back to the present - Paris is in preparation for the military parade, being held in remembrance of those who were fighting on land and sea to safeguard their country.
President Trump and Putin are expected to attend the above this coming Sunday, and the Bells of Notre Dame Cathedral are tolling.
100 years — one and two world wars — and a hundred millions lives lost. Yet war today seems easier than ever thanks to technology and a volunteer force that insulates most of our citizens from the risks and the need to question “why?” The world today seems brittle enough that a distant spark a-la Sarajevo could tip us into something as awful (or perhaps much worse) than August 1914. Prudent minds and citizens must ask “why?”, and ask “what are we willing to sacrifice?”, if we tip over the edge again.
1
A fine article.
Until and unless you fully understand the First World War,you have no idea whatsoever as to the true meaning of carnage.
It was a time when generals considered their men expendable and vast unimaginable numbers met their fate at the hands of technological advances in warfare.It was a time when gallantry and honor in all the armies, hopelessly faced more effective ways of killing.
3
My grandfather was gassed in WWI, and died before his time of related lung issues. Since then the USA has been in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and endlessly in the middle east. Nothing has changed, veterans still die too young and politicians send young men (and more often now young women) to death in defense of the upper classes and the economic interests of the wealthy.
3
The period of peace, such as it was, lasted just over three decades following the Armistice, which led to the Treaty of Versailles and the end of WWI. In reality, it hardly was a peaceful period, interspersed with constant upheavals, many of which can be traced directly to the onerous terms of that treaty.
The end of WWII was followed by barely five years until the onset of the Korean Conflict, which closely was followed by French Indochina fighting which eventually led to a disastrous American intervention in Vietnam during the 1960s. A large, though not exclusive, cause of widespread American unrest which prevailed until the latter 1970s, peace again was broken with the first Iraq war in 1990. Then came 911 in 2001, a second war with Iraq and the longest war in American history, the still-ongoing Afghanistan War.
None of these sacrifices of lives and resources have achieved a lasting, productive peace. The brief respite obtained with the election of our last legitimate President, Barack Obama, began unraveling in 2008 with the GOP commitment to obstructionism on his Inauguration Day in 2009 and loss of the House in 2010. That plunge reached its nadir after the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump in 2016 and subsequent complete domination of our government by ultra-nationalists just before the 2018 election turnabout.
Hate, intolerance, and violence never win, they only exacerbate and prolong our self-inflicted national agony. Will America never learn from its past?
3
I missed that Obama respite from war. I must have been taking a nap when he fulfilled that campaign promise. At least he followed through on his promise to close Guantanamo bay
2
This is a great song about Gallipoli. Written by Eric Bogle, but I like this version by Shane MacGowan and the Pogues more. Sorry Eric. His and other versions are on YouTube. The band played Waltzing Matilda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZqN1glz4JY
1
This is a beautiful tribute to veterans all over the world - awe-inspiring photographs, gorgeous words. As we know, war is not "glory," although it can lead to great and terrible heroism. About 100 years ago, Mark Twain wrote "War Prayer," which begins: "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief..." He got it right, too.
3
Bob Dylan said it best. "Don't follow leaders."
5
Two very readable books about this period for the general reader are Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" and "The Proud Tower". I believe I read that
Proud Tower came out of the research for Guns of August.
1
According to Vladimir Putin, the worst atrocity of the 20th century for Russia was not the casualties – civilian and military – suffered during WWI or during WWII, but the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With the current group of aggressive leaders ensconced throughout the world, including in the US, history is quite sure to be repeated!
1
It is strikingly poetic to think of the tragedy of the last soldier killed in the war but it is a western euro-centric view. WWI continued in Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus for several more years.
These are grim pictures of wonderfully high quality. Thank you for publishing them.
Incidentally: most estimates are that lethal shells (explosives and gas, la recolte en fer or "iron harvest") will keep finding their way to the surface of the main battlefields for *one thousand years.* It was that bad.
1
Thank you for this powerful piece. WWI is too often overlooked. Just the other day I was at my favorite bookstore searching for a book on the topic, and in between shelves and shelves of books on WWII and Vietnam, there was only half a shelf devoted to WWI (not to diminish the importance of studying those other wars). I think maybe the first World War is not as prominent in the popular imagination because it is further in the past and its origins are difficult to understand. But it seems like it probably informed the shape the 20th century took, and it should, indeed, have been the war to end all wars. It was the ultimate folly of marching into war for little reason with absolutely devastating results.
And yet, I fear many of today's leaders are forgetting the lessons of WWII, let alone the lessons of WWI.
3
Spare a thought for the Australians. They lost over 60,000 from a population of less than 5 million, in a war on a far-away continent.
Bringing things up to date, I believe that our military leaders fully understand the implications of sending our young people into combat. In WW1, you get the impression that the combatants were simply pawns on a chess board. How else would one describe a course of action whereby two armed opposing factions ran at each other accross a field?
9
@Mike Edwards,
You might wish to check Mikeb's comment posted earlier, and the footage of Australia during 'The War to end All Wars', listening to the theme of Waltzing Matilda where some soldiers saw things that 'were worst than dying'.
We have spent time in small villages in Europe and I am always very moved by the memorials to villagers lost in WW I. It often appears that villages may have lost an entire generation of young men, sometimes whole families How they recovered, or if they all did, is beyond comprehension. We have memorials here but I do not think I have ever seen many with more than a small group of names, keen losses still, but not what one sees in Europe.
WW II should have made sure we never forgot but right now in 2018, I am not sure that we have not. I am not sure.
12
Thank you for sharing this article. A constant reminder is what we all need. It fades too quickly particularly in these times.
I saw a comment here from a teacher who shared her seventh grader's experience reading soldier's poetry. I can imagine the sorrow given the example you provided.
Lt. Col. John McCrae, imagined fallen soldiers warning the survivors: “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields.”
10
It's really interesting being in London now. There are red poppy installations all over the city, over 72,000 shouded figures lined up in Queen Elizabeth Park each representing a British soldier who died at the Somme and who has no known grave; 10,000 torches are lit nightly in the moat surrounding the Tower of London; "They Shall Not Grow Old", Peter Jackson's restoration of WWI archival footage in color and sound. And on and on and on....
People I've spoken with treat this period of remembrance as a period of solemn reflection. The war and the sacrifices made by so many are very much a part of their present. It is very moving to see the reverence and respect given to this period of the country's history.
34
Even when the event that threw the world into the Great War conflict may be labelled as an "obscure spark", it is important to recognize that the environment and circumstances were more than ripe for that spark to explode massively. Serbian Nationalist activism had been flourishing in great magnitude, mainly exacerbated by the Austro-Hungarian policies and attitude toward the Balkan nations, and more specifically following the annexation of Bosnia in 1909. It was a well known fact that at the time, the Balkans were considered to be "a powder keg ready to explode".
Adding to Serbian Nationalism resentment, Francis Ferdinand, the Heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, visited Bosnia to oversee Austrian Army war exercises. To make matters worse, the date chosen for the Official visit, June 28th, was the Serbian National Day that commemorated the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, a day known as Vidovdan, which was a mixture of religious and patriotic Serbian festivities. Felt as a double slap in the face, the intensity of the antagonistic sentiment was fueled further.
Once the war was over, the consequences of the aftermath of the conflict were as expected, enormous, with the transformation of the region's map and the shrinking of imperial powers and the birth ( or rebirth) of new nations. Ultimately, unfortunately, the agreement that ended the conflict, along with the misguided intransigence of the conquerors, may have in turn lead to the creation of a worse catastrophe!
19
@Hugo
Interesting. Thank you for your perspective.
3
I was in Newfoundland with my family in 2016 when they were commemorating centenary of the near eradication of the local troops on a botched and bloody battlefield in ww1, There was a parade and poppies, speeches and a band. All were echoes of distant pain and pride.
I was astonished and touched to see Canadians marching on this defining day with our US flag prominently displayed.
I don’t think we often enough remember to remember well our allies. Starting with our first one alongside Lafayette, we’ve not had a major war we’ve fought alone, except perhaps the one we fought against ourselves. “America first”, if it is of any use at all as a slogan (and I dont think it is), shouldn’t mean America alone. Nationalism has many dangerous properties, among which can be demonizing or trivializing the other nations that helped build the world with us, and who still are willing to march with our flags in their parades.
43
The worst is ahead. Our civilization's and species' end. Wars will not be the cause, but a diversion from what we should have done to protect conditions of human life on Earth.
With increasing global warming and climate change, driven by self-sustaining processes we have ignited and are igniting still, migration north from the heat will continue to increase. Little men will use the migrations to stir resentments that distract us from our final chances to moderate our ignition of self-sustaining processes driving the warming.
The last of our descendants will die out not in trenches, nor from bombs or missiles or nukes, but starving in terrible heat along our Arctic shores.
21
More British and French soldiers died in WWI than in WWII.
I am disappointed there was not more awareness, more recognizing, more discussion, more reflection of this war in this country on the anniversary of its centennial.
Maybe that is because there are no living veterans that politicians and media can parade about for the cameras so we can all feel good about ourselves supporting the troops, since none of them are living.
Says a lot about what is important to use as a people.
25
My seventh graders loved the poetry best during our WWI unit. So sorrowful.
6
If you are going to be in or near Kansas City, MO, I highly recommend a trip to the WWI museum there. The museum does a wonderful job of telling the somewhat complicated and complex story of the war.
11
@Eric In which Harry Truman, the last farmer to become president, served with distinction and who, on becoming President and learning of the atomic bomb (he'd been kept in the dark), said to reporters, “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
2
Actually World War I was only the first stage of a conflict that spanned most of the 20th Century - it was continued in World War II and then in the Cold War. And its after effects continue to this day in the Middle East and even in Europe itself.
And all now agree that the war was totally avoidable.
8
The Russian Revolution did not end "Moscow’s appetite for the war". It may have ended St. Petersburg's appetite, or, more properly, Russia's. But in reality, beyond the pusillanimous Czar Nicholas and a few hardliners who egged him on, there was never any "appetite for war" in the Russian population. It is a sad irony that the first direct act that triggered the outbreak of war in 1914 was Russia's mobilization against Austria-Hungary. By then even the clownish Kaiser Willhelm, who together with the Prussian aristocracy bears full responsibility for the carnage, was having second thoughts.
7
My grandpa fought in WWI in the Argonne Forest mostly. He was gone from home for one year and on his return found his Mom had conceived and bore one last child (12 in all) in his absence. He left her working on the farm in the fields and returned a year later to her working on the farm with baby strapped to her. He never talked about his experience with me or any of my brothers or sisters or cousins, except one cousin whom he hunted with. That cousin shared how he talked about how easily startled he still was by any noise behind bushes or trees and how hyper alert he became. It was the only time he was away from his hometown in 92 years for more than a visit. He used to love to arm wrestle, saying it was an old pastime he got very good at in the trenches of WWI. The winner got free cigarettes and he smoked several a day his entire life. I always look for my grandpa's face in pictures posted of WWI. He survived the butchery and was forever changed.
69
For those who don't know too much about The Great War this is useless and for those who know somewhat more it is also not very useful. I would recommend The World Crisis by Churchill or All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque as introductions to the folly of the time.
5
I've read dozens of books on WW1, including poetry, memoirs and historical accounts. I did not find this article useless at all. I thought the writer did a nice job, in broad strokes, of describing WW1 briefly while showing how it remains relevant today. And, as an introduction, I would suggest the "Guns of August," by Barbara Tuchman.
4
This was my father’s war. He never spoke of it. He was born and grew up in this village of about 1,100 people in the house his father built, where I still live. He and about 12 other draftees from the area were transported to southern Ohio for training, then off from Pittsburgh on a train to NYC to board a ship to Europe. No more taking the cows to pasture before school. Rather guns, bombs, the chaos of battle, and the smell of death. Never a word from him about it. If I questioned him he changed the subject or ignored the question. He sent postcards back to his mother. The captions to the illustrations on the front were in German, the illustrations mostly of farm animals or scenic views of the Rhine. How the postcards were procured is not known to me. His brief notes to his mother gave no indication of what he was actually experiencing. He returned home from the war with no physical injuries. His refusal or inability to speak of his experience indicates his time in Belgium and Germany took a huge psychic toll. His grandmother’s and grandfather’s families emigrated from Bavaria and Germany to Pittsburgh in the 1840’s and then moved west to Columbiana County in eastern Ohio. Germans fighting Germans, how crazy. I am grateful to read this outstanding article and view the photographs. Thank you. CF Bretz
94
@Carol Bretz Thank you for sharing your family story!
"Germans fighting Germans, how crazy." Please note that the last American soldier to die in the war - Henry Gunther - mentioned in the article also happened to be a first generation German American. It appears that his "one man charge" in the last seconds (!) of the war, and his unnecessary heroism (senseless, really) was in part motivated by Gunther's desire to prove his "Americanness" to his superiors and peers. Among other things, "he was worried because he thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer".
8
This is the world that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon would have us return to. One punctuated by violence and brutality. A world where the strong victimize the weak and international law is abolished and replaced with the standard of might makes right! That kind of thinking can only lead to WAR and the war of today and into the future is not the kind of war from 100 years ago. The proliferation of nuclear technology will inevitably lead to their use on the battle field. We are inching closer and closer to nuclear holocaust!
62
@John ... Trump has many flaws but regime changing war monger is not one of the them. Look to the globalists for that one ... Clinton in the Balkans ( speaking of WW1 ), Bush in Iraq, Obama in Libya.
1
@BD Yeah? What is Trump trying to accomplish in Iran by withdrawing from our nuclear deal with that country and reimposing harsh sanctions if not ultimately regime change? And if that was not war mongering with North Korea before he became best buds with Kim, what was it?
2
@BD
Trump and company as I see it are leading us to civil war in this country as he and they put down fellow USA citizens who are Liberal's as an enemy of this country including the liberal press.
2
WWI also saw the wide scale realization of technologies first introduced or experimented with in the American civil war just 50 years earlier, such as armored ships and vehicles, machine guns, submarines, floating mines, electric communications and trench warfare. In our technology centric world, each war is a proving ground for the next war.
11
@doug mclaren
Yeah, you can't stop progress.
The idea that the decisive battle was over was itself overturned in the last 100 days of the war. The Canadian Corps, along with the Australians, advanced 85 miles in a series of battles where they introduced innovative tactics. Ironically, these were a prelude to the Blitzkrieg of WWII.
Participating in the war from 1914, Canada lost 60,000 dead in the war, not far from America's casualties of 100,000. This from a country that only had 8 million people at the time.
57
This is incredible and easy to understand. We need to continue to recognize the US contributions to world history and honor our positive role towards helping others on the planet- if only for our standing in a world now that is having a great time thinking that we always have been red hat wearing rubes. So much is spoken of the bad of America now, so the more we hear about the great lasting good that our families have done in the past and now- and why, the less we are to feel disconnected to our sense of pride for our country.
5
@TrerraI I must disagree with your perspective. While we have all been taught what you profess in school, as I've aged I've come to realize that the US is not exactly the sweetheart that we like to think we are. The "good guys" have really not been that since WWI. In WWII we were on the winning side as much due to the failures on the other side as any prowess we and the Allies possessed. And ever since WWII one needs to consider every other "conflict" the USA has been involved in. I'm a Viet Nam Combat Veteran and have long taken the view that the US had no business being there and no matter what constraints may or may not have been on us, the outcome would have been the same. The United States and it's "leaders" (read MILITARY) believe that if a bullet will work, billions of bullets will work better and if a bomb does the job then billions of bombs will do a better job. This nation hasn't been on the "winning side" since WWII in almost every offensive we've gotten ourselves into, either by request or by sheer ambition. Sadly there is an entire group of people in this country as well as in others that that believe that might is right and nothing else will do. Until we can overcome that handicap wars like WWII and everything that followed will continue to occur and the tin soldiers who promote them will continue to gain medals and promotions.
39
With overpopulation and global warming diminishing resources (e.g., food, clean water, land swallowed up by a rising sea level, etc.), at any one time there will continue to be warfare at multiple hotspots around the World as countries and groups fight over limited resources. Then, as in the genesis of WWI one of these hotspots will tigger WWIII, which if nuclear will outdo WWII and truly be the war to end all wars. Trump, Putin, Kim, et al., are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The future looks grim from my deck chair.
20
@DAK
There is nothing unrealistic about your deep pessimism. We ignore it at our peril.
2
@DAK
Remember Japan went to war in the late thirties because they couldn't feed their people!
2
As terrible as the slaughter once, the enmity between these nations and their people was keenly felt. It wasn't just a matter of elites on one side disliking the other.
Before long and as the body count mounted, citizens of the belligerent countries took a stake in the war and wanted to see the other side defeated.
Americans cheered our men heading over there to kill. Germans did the same as did the British and the French. The Germans at the end of the war felt wrathful about being defeated and forced to suffer deprivations and humiliations.
For as long as there will be people there will be war and there will for just as long be an allure to fighting and killing and even dying for your side. There is a reason why shows of force and military parades are political gold.
For anyone wanting a pertinent book to read on the subject, I recommend Chris Hedges "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning". It is no stretch to say that, on a certain level, war and hate feel good and identify us with one group or another. Just look at our politics for a not so extreme version of this sentiment.
9
@LR
Frightening comment. If humans are this bad, we deserve to die out!
I have always found the most disturbing feature of this war, this atrocity, to be the ordering of troops to run into a hail of machine gun fire with no hope of surviving. This was seen as an honorable way of dying. The troops were told it was a heroic tradition to die so bravely. Only a mutiny in the French ranks stopped the madness. And then the French military executed the organizers of the mutiny. WWI was and remains this planet's ultimate collective psychosis.
142
@KF2 I agree in spirit but the details are slightly more complex.
1) There was an absurd nationalism that glorified dying for the mother/fatherland...but it wasn't QUITE fanatical: many soldiers (who were quite young) bought into the initial euphoria but once the conflict bogged down by early winter 1914, were disabused of the noble ideas of war.
2) The generals really could not anticipate how machine guns and artilery changed the battlefield. The Germans previous victory in the Franco-Prussian war, 30 years earlier, was closer in its fighting tactics to Charlemagne's time than the army Moltke fielded 30 years later.
Sad and tragic as the results were, the Germans really DID prepare thoughtfully for the war and adopted good defensive tactics once they were pushed back from Paris after the Marne in September 1914.
8
@KF2
The collective psychosis, as you call it, is still alive and well. How many of the cult of trump would literally walk into a storm of machine gun fire if he asked them too?
The Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI are all examples of tactics not keeping up with technology.
8
@KF2
I believe that as the French army was coming apart under the slaughter, soldiers protested by bleating like sheep as they were sent into combat.
1
Trump is wrong. There is nothing beautiful about barbed or razored wire going up.
There is nothing beautiful about war, hate, mistrust, murder, starvation, slavery, dead faith-filled patriots betrayed by their own country. There is nothing fair about the rich getting richer while they 'pray and meditate' on all the dead, injured, and broken people spent in war to make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful.
We are the people. We are the power. That is the way the Constitution of the USA announces our place in this country. We should not forget the people who have fought in WW1 and WW2 unless we want to repeat the mistakes that led to those hell-made-on-earth but this time with our sons, daughters, and grandchildren. They have enough to contend with anyway.
What we need is to remove from any sort of public office the people who very anxious to lift us into war again so that they will be so much richer while praying and meditating, while we bury our children and grandchildren.
We need to teach that war is a certain hell that only the rich and powerful want to play on the middle class and the poor.
95
Dulce est Decorum Pro Patria Mori...the Greatest Lie Ever !
28
@arun - thanks for the reminder. I've copied Wilfred Owen's poem below for anyone who needs a reminder:
Dulce et Decorum Est Launch Audio in a New Window
BY WILFRED OWEN
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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 flound’ring 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.
8
@Nancy
Thank you very much for this Arun and Nancy. You beat me to it.
The best example of a worst case scenario.
2
@J P,
In Veteran Country, let us remember our troops overseas fighting for our safety. Those of us who are awaiting their return, wish to offer them a comfortable welcome and warm shelter from the guns of war.
1
I almost wonder whether the photo of "American soldiers in New York after the United States declared war in 1917" actually depicts Boy Scouts running with American flags.
3
Thank you for this reminder of the Great War's brutality. Now that the WWI veterans are all gone, and fewer and fewer WWII vets remain, I fear we will forget the true cost of war.
24
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die
I ask, and cannot answer,
If otherwise wish I.
Fair broke the day this morning
Against the Dardanelles;
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.
But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
Shells and hells for me.
O hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?
Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest and I know not—
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Killed in action, Cambrai. 30/12/17.
79
@Mat
The darkest chapters of human history seem to produce the most profound poetry.
"The Parable of the Old Man and the Young:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."
- Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918
13
Someone please pin a poppy on Trump before he forgets what this weekend's remembrance ceremony is about.
8
Give him a white feather too
2
@A Reader
It will be about him.
I hope he recognizes in his speech that others were involved and many millions paid the ultimate sacrifice.
I agree with the comment that instead of a poppy he should wear a white feather.
For me the biggest "game-changer" war ever!
2
@Gabriel
war should not be a game, for any reason.
1
Looking back, World War I seems but an utter waste. Some 15-20 million people died. My grandfather was driving a wagon away from the front with his wife and children. When he was stopped by soldiers, they took the horses and impressed him into the army. A chronic illness contracted in the trenches led to his death three years after the war.
And look at that strikinng picture of those Algierian soliders. Here was a conflict that had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Yet because they were part of the French empire, they had no choice in the matter.
64
@Ã. Rothstein
The Irish too were conscripted into this madness and while technically they were part of England at least at the outset, they didn't want to be there.
8
@Ken meagher
There was never conscription in Ireland. All who fought were volunteers or career soldiers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_and_World_War_I and they should be remembered.
However, it is true to say that support for the war, particularly as nationalism grew, and the Pope came out against the war, declined significantly.
3
Such a beautiful article, completely marred by the introduction of the left lean-ing pro illegal immigration that you placed near the end.
Other wise, this piece was poetry.
7
@AutumLeaff I agree. This was a wonderful article, and proves why the Times, with reporters like Alan Cowell, is so special. Kudos to Mona Boshnaq and Gaia Tripoli for assembling the incredible photos. As to the "marring" of this article by the criticism of "left leaning pro illegal immigration" near the end, I would suggest you take up your phony criticism with the military historian and professor who stated that ..."nearly a quarter of the draftees in 1918 were immigrants..." I would trust his information. I would also recommend the film, "Paths of Glory," directed by Stanley Kubrick with Kirk Douglas, that painted a portrait of the futility of WW1.
3
@AutumLeaff
Don't like facts? And those were not illegal immigrants. In the days before WWI anyone healthy was welcome to come although they were often discriminated against once they were her.
3
@AutumLeaff Your comment is curious -- would you please identify the text that you portray as "left lean-ing pro illegal immigration"? I've read this moving article several times, and all I can find is a direct -- and typically crass -- quotation of Mr. Trump regarding the use of barbed wire to prevent people from entering the country. The fact that you find this to be "pro" anything (except maybe pro-barbed wire) is symptomatic of the cultural civil war that's tearing us apart. Is it really your position that simply seeking asylum in US (not necessarily gaining it, just seeking it) is an illegal act? What would the people in these photos make of someone like you?
5
Alan Cowell, Mona Boshnaq and Gaia Tripoli, this was simply incredible! Thank you so much for your work which was stunning in every single way. The pain of what happened in World War I is devastating even to read and consider the incredible scope of human destruction and suffering. War is HELL.
As an American with Trump as our president its sheer terror to consider in light of his history, his "crazytown" getting more so by the day. He has not read ANY history and he probably will skip this incredible work you've done here, too.
Naturally, it goes without saying, that he never read Tolstoy's War and Peace. SAD.
“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
18
I would say the average citizen in the US probably could not name the combatants, a single battle, where the much of the fighting occurred or much else about WWI for that matter. We are coming close to the same situation regarding WWII.
In some ways, it is good that wars are slowly forgotten... the hatred should dissipate. But we forget the lessons of the pain and sacrifice of all who lived through such events.
WWI saw the advent of the machine gun, chemical weapons and aviation, very indiscriminate killers. Technology was both a curse and a blessing with radio being a major factor.
I don't think the horror of war should ever be forgot, nor the industrialization of killing. It's not about the glory, it's about the pain... Remembering all of those I knew and know who suffered through such terror.
35
@doktorij Machine guns were used in the American Civil war. Officer purchased Gatling guns were used at Petersburg 1864, as well as elsewhere during the war. Hand cranked rotary multi-barrel weapons, they were not 'automatic weapons', but firing at a rate of around two hundred rounds per minute surely qualifies as machine gun.
11
So pleased that the Times devoted space to this subject. Yes from the Balkans to the Middle East to Asia and Africa, the self-serving and vengeful aftermath is being felt all too painfully to this day. And the Versailles Treaty and its toll on German civilians truly gave Hitler and his people all they needed to write the political/propaganda manual that Trump follows today. But...will we ever learn?
42
there will be no more wars when humans no longer roam this earth.. as marlon said the horror the horror..
13
Reading this article, I can't help but think of a poem written by Siegfried Sassoon:
Does it matter? -losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? -losing you sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you’re mad;
For they know that you've fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.
For all those millions, rest in peace, and forgive us for our folly.
128
The greatest crime ever committed on human beings by other human beings in the history of the world. And on this planet that's saying a lot.
5
@artfuldodger
I would put the slaughter of Native Americans, of Aboriginals in Australia, slavery anywhere in the world, all coming after early wars by the conquering Romans, Huns, colonial Britains etc right up there. The there was the enslavemnt of native peoples in South America in the greed for rubber, the banana wars, the Spaniard theft of gold and on and on. In short we humans are a nasty lot and even the Christians had the Crusades and the Catholic church perpetrated abuse right up to the current day.
5
World War I was probably, even more than WWII, the defining moment of the 20th century, in the sense that it cast the die for so much that was to come. The fall of Russia to the Bolsheviks was driven by this war (ironically, pro Slavic nationalists in Russia supported the Serb groups that in the end assasinated the Austrian prince that culminated in WWI starting, and led to their own downfall) for example. The brutality of WWI led directly to the isolationism in the US, as well as France refusing to use its then largest army in the world to stop German agression (any one of which might have led to a coup against the Nazis). Fear of the USSR and communism led to the appeasement of the Nazis, and of course the loss of the war in Germany led to the rise of the Nazis, thanks to shortsighted insistence on reperations (which in turn was triggered, if Curchill can be believed, by the loss of power of the Aristocracy and the need for revenge by the common voter). The fear of trench warfare led to the total destruction war that was WWII, armor and tanks and the use of bombing came out of the fear of another trench war. ...
WWI was best phrased by Barbara Tuchman when she called it a giant mistake, it was a war fought out of stupidity and blindness (the French, for example, knew the German battle plan for years), and in the end literally fought over nothing but some weird sense of honor and duty to an order that even then really had died.
32
@bill d
Not really. The history of Europe from the medieval Period onwards is a history of the attempt to restrict the ever growing expansion of Germany and German power (I mean the nation state - since France and most of the english peoples were german, ethnically). From the moment Frederick the Great started his first Silesian war with the Austrians that particular struggle became the number one struggle in Europe. In context, WW1 and even WW2 were simply further steps in the German mission to expand and the rest of Europe's determination to prevent that. The Irony now is that germany has got more power in Europe now there is peace.
5
Haunting photos !
A reminder what wars can do and how easily to get into. With Trump, the next one will be fought in Mideast, between an assortment of alliances and with Turkey on the side of Iran, not with NATO.
5
To the modern Republican Party, who seems to love war so much: how glorious was this disaster?
A stark reminder of why war should be avoided at all costs.
24
@AJ - if all had served then the conversation would be quite different. John McCain was a Republican and a reasonable, highly principled person. Senator McCain was no hawk and no dove either. He was simply human with a measured response to circumstances.
Trump is not always reasonable, and doubtful that any consider him highly principled. He never served in the Armed Forces. He’s not a veteran and that influences his views.
From your unilateral attribution of mindsets to two polical parties I assume you’re not a veteran either. Perhaps I’m wrong. But you certainly are.
8
@Col Flagg
So you can't have an opinion on war and diplomacy without having served, then? Thats news to me, and may explain our current military posture. After all, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.
4
@Col Flagg I disagree. McCain is no longer with us and had little in connection with the "modern Republican Party" as AJ posted.
In addition, to call Trump "not always reasonable" is laughable at best. Tell that to Mr. Acosta exercising his First Amendment Rights, only to be slandered by edited propaganda from the White House. It appears you and he swore an oath. When will you meet your obligation?
5
This war should never have happened had Francis Joseph not signed the mobilization orders for an attack on Serbia. He knew that a major war could be the end of Austria-Hungary, which despite drawbacks, was a fairly progressive society, rapidly developing with a good economy, modern infrastructure, social welfare programs. He should have told von Hotzendorf and the Germans to mind their own business, accepted the Serbian response to Austria's demands except two of them. The results can be seen and it paved the way for another round who would dominate central Europe, Germany or Russia instead of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Now we have the EU and some of the Europeans are playing nationalist games again and the US is not doing enough under Trumpee to counter this.
7
My paternal grandfather was in the US Embassy in Constantinople under Ambassadors Rockhill Henry Morganthal, and Elkus at the outbreak of WWI and had to leave in June of 1916 when we entered the war. His primary role was as an interpreter. In 1918 he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army and he escorted TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and King Faisal to the Paris Peace Conference. Grampa told me that they were out-spoken about the problems that would arise from the way the maps were redrawn in the Middle East.
49
"Grampa is Arthur H. Leavitt @John Leavitt
4
This war was fought not for the interests of the common man, but because of conflicts between imperial cousins. So many men died for so little. But many of the imperial houses were brought down by the war, and the Labour Party gained its first strength in Britain.
28