One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the RingsA hundred years is a long time if the hundred years is the 20th century. The Great War didn't end war, nor did the even bigger cataclysm of 1939. But that didn't end things either - the long, strange twilight conflict of the Cold War had its own body count which is all too easy to forget when standing in the shadows of the twin World Wars.
That's a lot of history to pack into what amounts to a single lifespan. The history is so big as to overwhelm the human. Actually, that's a fitting metaphor of the Great War. But the human story is the one we should try to see. And so imagine yourself in Tolkien's shoes. Every single one of your childhood friends were killed, except for one.
We (justly) scorn the appeasement in the run up to the second war, But we really don't understand it because we've lost that human perspective. A generation was butchered and damned. A few passed echos of that to us in writing - Tolkien, Hemingway, Robert Graves. The futility of the Western Front is on plain display in A Farewell To Arms.
On this centenary of the silence that fell on Flander's fields, remember Tolkien's mates, all save one butchered. And remember that he carried that to the end of his life. That - multiplied ten million times - was the war.
8 comments:
Amen!
What you said about the Cold Warriors.
Few know that 30 days consecutive service in Korea, or 60 days total, meet the eligibility requirements for the VFW. And the Korean War Memorial website encourages all who served, shooting portion or non-shooting portion, to be listed on their rolls.
And those who served in Germany, as fun at it may have been, always faced a potential cataclysm,
Not to mention all the lives put in danger by our feckless political movements, reducing the budget to ridiculously low levels, pet projects that put all at risk...
Sigh.
Thank you all for your service.
So terrible was the First World War that appeasement and punishment both set the stage for the Second. Even once that war began, chemical weapons were not used, as the memory of gas attacks was too terrible to revisit.
So the world stood by as Hitler and Stalin killed millions in a quest for power. In fact, Stalin killed far more people in his purges than did Hitler. Yet the world stood by and did nothing as the communists and the socialists carried out wholesale genocide.
Borepatch, I’ve got to thank you for your historical posts on WWI over the years. I was never a serious history buff, but had long ago come to the conclusion that Europe never recovered from WWI. Some of your posts over the years, especially some of the posts about Verdun and other battles that really clarified how horrific it was.
This post and the perspective from Tolkien help explain why Europe never recovered. I think it gives insight into why Europe is committing slow motion suicide as we watch; they don't feel they have the right to exist any longer.
Excellent point. 'We' face/faced a different reality. The people were against us, continuing their lives while we did our best to defend what we stood for.
The poem I posted earlier today was written in 1914. The killing had only just begun.
It was an unimaginable loss. The British lost approximately 2% of their population, most of that young men. Try to think what it would do to this country if we had lost over 6,000,000 men in the five years after 9/11.
I was moved by that and of course the West hasn't recovered from the skid.
ASM - We did in 1861-65. Losses were proportionately higher on the Confederate side, of course.
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