Great Read re: WWI

I found these WWI links at GoodShit.  Interesting perspective here on WWI. It’s a long, interesting article that I recommend. By the way, the author, Mike Gerber, is endeavoring to treat his blog like a magazine, which I think is a neat idea.  Excerpts below.

So for three months, Sir Michael Howard shepherded a hundred or so of us future leaders of the world (you’re welcome) through the sorry events of 1914 to 1918. As my friend Rob and I traded jokes in the shadows—he was a fellow Record E-Boarder, and just as punch-drunk as I—the facts and conclusions flew like shrapnel. What an unholy mess it had been, starting as a comic opera (if the Archduke’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn, and Princip hadn’t stopped for a sandwich, the assassination would’ve never happened), and ending like a Wagnerian tragedy. Then as now, it’s difficult to keep the facts in order. Ypres, Mons, Verdun, Chateaubriand—is that one, I forget? The battles are almost impossible to keep straight because they are all the same: stupid plans carried out with incredible bravery, unimaginable slaughter ending in utter stalemate.

“By the end of 1915, the French had lost 995,000 men.” That fact alone is enough to paralyze the imagination, or should be. A million men from one country? In three months? And they were just getting started. How many Einsteins, and Picassos bled their lives away into the dirt of Flanders? How many Alexander Flemings or Louis Armstrongs suffocated in a collapsed dugout, or froze to death on the Eastern Front? How many—and now I am speaking as my 21-year-old self—Thurbers or Benchleys or Groucho Marxes perished? What wars really destroy is potential, the future, and that is something simply too big to mourn. And so Rob and I kept joking, even going so far to pop “Sir Mike” into the magazine for an issue or two. He took it all in very good humor; somewhere I have a letter from him mock-failing us both.

There is no story in World War I, only suffering. There are no great heroes who triumph, nor villains who are vanquished; there is no cause thrumming underneath worth all the sacrifice, nor any final victory redeeming it all. It is, to be blunt, some of the most depressing, unsatisfying history one can study. That is its gift to us, and why everyone should have a passing familiarity with it. Especially citizens of countries who emerged from it relatively whole, and have a tendency to forget what they do not wish to remember—yes, I’m talking to you, United States.

* * *

If our modern madness has a name, this is it. The only reason some members of the US military advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union was, obviously, they felt that they and theirs would come out all right. One always believes that one will survive, this is how human beings are constructed. In people like Curtis LeMay, that instinct was infinitely more powerful than their imagination; that’s the difference between him and say, Jackson Browne. I’d argue one cannot be Curtis LeMay—or indeed any part of the modern military—without killing that precise area of one’s imagination. If a neurotic sees death and decay everywhere, the modern military mind sees everything but death and decay, and must, or be unable to function

Finally, the author linked to youtube uploads of the “The Great War”, which is a BBC series on the first world war similar to “World At War.” I’m happy to find it on youtube, and I’ll be watching all of them.

History, Socio-Political, TV