The Great War
[This is a very long post. Sorry. I have a lot more I want to say, and I’ll probably cover it later.]
Reading about World War I is depressing in the most literal, real sense of the word. I was in a great mood today until I read the chapter on WWI in my history textbook. The levels of death and suffering are truly unimaginable.
British, French, and German commanders all wanted to be the military heroes who would break the stalemate, and sent waves of thousands of poorly trained, poorly equipped men who had been lured to the front lines by naive patriotism and promises of gallantry. For instance, Sir Douglas Haig took control of the British force in France in December 1915. Haig knew his army would not be fully trained for an offensive until summer of 1916, but he ordered an immediate assault anyways in northern France on the river Somme.
The Battle of the Somme has justifiably carved a place into British culture for its horrors. The textbook:
Fourteen British and five French divisions attacked well-entrenched Germans along an 18-mile front. The assault was preceded by a week of artillery shelling, but the artillery failed both to cut the Germans’ and to crush their trenches. The British troops thus were caught in the open by murderous machine gun fire and artillery barrages. By the end of the first day, the British had suffered sixty thousand casualties. Attack followed counterattack for 140 days. By the time Haig shut down the offensive, British and imperial forces had lost 415,000 casualties - all for the advance of a few miles.
The strategy and tactics were brutally simple.
The machine gun could send an unbroken stream of bullets down the length of no-man’s land from entrenched strong points and with a minimum of tending by its operators… The only hope for attacking forces to have any chance against the enemy’s trenches was for their own artillery to throw such a tremendous weight of shells that the machine guns would be destroyed and the defenders either killed or paralyzed by shock. Ideally, the attackers’ artillery fire by the techniques of a “rolling barrage” could move steadily forward in front of them. Attacking troops, therefore, could in theory go “over the top” of their own trench, quickly cross no-man’s land, and seize the enemy’s trench by hand-to-hand fighting.
Attacking troops, however, normally found that the preliminary artillery bombardment did not work. Each side learned to dig bomb shelters at key points in their trenches… Battles thus became races once the opening artillery fire lifted: the attacking troops tried to cross no-man’s land - invariably a lunar landscape of shell craters, churned-up terrain, and barbed wire - before the machine gun crews dug their way out of shattered bomb shelters and ran up the steps to their gun emplacements. If the machine gun crews managed to set up their guns while the attackers were still in no-man’s land, they could cut them down like hay before a scythe.
There’s something about the combination of the panicked scrambling with the extremely quick, abrupt death of huge masses that makes this just seem particularly terrible.
Staff officers were notoriously unable to understand what was going on in the trenches. Seven thousand British men died a day even when they weren’t attacking or being attacked just because of the conditions in trenches were so bad; this was known as “wastage” among the strategic planners. Decisions were made with no knowledge of the conditions surrounding attacks and catastrophic mistakes were commonplace. In 1915, the British army ran out artillery shells after two failed offensives; this problem wasn’t rectified for more than a year. The assault at Gallipoli was unbelievably hastily planned and poorly supported, and as a result Allied forces lost over 200,000 casualties. When mustard gas started to get used, planners forgot to check wind conditions, and British troops often suffered from their own gas canisters as the clouds blew back into their own trenches.
In one offensive during the Battle of the Somme, a group of chipper young volunteers known as “Pals’ Battalions” led a charge to occupy German trenches after seven days of nonstop artillery barrages. Their company officers were largely drawn from the aristocracy, and thought it was the duty of their working-class troops to do the killing, while they themselves walked in advance - unarmed. Of course, the British artillery failed to cut the German wire or destroy the macihne guns. German gunners won the race to their parapets and mowed down the volunteers in waves. Most of the 20,000 killed that day died in the first hour. One British officer later described the desolation as “line after line of dead men, lying where they had fallen.”
The actions of the officers reach farcical proportions to the modern eye. We tend to regard them as bumbling fools and approach the whole thing with dry bitterness. The officers become little more than clowns. This coping mechanism was created by the soldiers themselves during the war. British poet Siegfried Sassoon, who participated in the Battle of the Somme, wrote:
“Good-morning; good-morning!” The General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
This bitter distrust of elites was invented in World War I. We don’t see it in the literature or culture of Britain at any point prior, but it remains a fundamental part of our culture, to the extent that some historians say that it is the defining feature of modern culture. Today, we view this attitude of bitter, detached irony to be natural and mature. Optimists are “naive,” “childlike,” “innocent.” Pessimists are “realistic.” Even the first World War is posited in these terms, as a “coming of age” for civilization, “growing up” to find the “reality” of industrializatiion. You hear it every day: “You just can’t trust those idiots in Washington.” “In today’s economic climate, I don’t think anybody has any idea what’s going on, much less Congress.” “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” These are the echoes from the banks of the Somme.
And today, I think that it’s being slowly transmuted into an overwhelming lethargic apathy. Today’s slogan seems to be “Why bother?”
