An Anniversary

[fabrisse]

In August of this year, we will reach the centenary of the beginning of World War I.

Americans won't have the same level of involvement in the Remembrances because we didn't join in until April of 1917, but it's salutary to remember this war. It was begun in idealism. It shattered the class system. Without World War I, there might still be a British Queen ruling India. Hitler would never have risen to power. Americans might not have indulged in such severe isolationism. Women might still be fighting for the right to vote.

There are stories. The Angel of Mons was fiction that people came to believe happened. The Christmas Truce with its football games between the opposing sides in no-man's land really happened. The world became much smaller in people's minds. Aerial bombings happened. The guns in France could be heard in London. Edith Cavell treated people on both sides from her hospital in Brussels and was shot by the Germans as an enemy for helping French, English, and other soldiers to escape from Belgium.

I want someone to put out a Kindle edition of Nelson's History of the War. I have a complete copy in storage, but I want to read it again. It's British propaganda, written before anyone knew which side would "win" (remember, it ended in an Armistice, not a surrender); it's stories are documented within about six months of their occurrence. It runs over twenty volumes. And it's invaluable as a tool to see the old order's death being explained to the "common folk" who will benefit, but are afraid of losing the certainty of "knowing one's place."

Read Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth for more about the upper middle class and the women who chose to work in the hospitals. Read any of Lyn MacDonald's books about the war. Read the poetry and the autobiographies and All Quiet on the Western Front to remember that the experiences of the soldier were not that different on the other side of no-man's land.

Belgium formed me in many ways. In February of 1979, while I was in history class, we heard an explosion at school. A farmer in a field near us had been harrowing a field and connected with live WWI ordnance. He didn't survive. Every commun had its own memorial, often with the same surname recurring. In Place Sainte-Catherine, there's a memorial to the carrier pigeons who gave their lives serving.

The idealism was real. The hope that this bloody, in both senses of the word, conflict might be the world's last was genuine.

So. Watch Human Nature and Family of Blood from Martha's season of Doctor Who. Watch Lawrence of Arabia and really grasp that this is a very small part of a world turning upside down. Watch Blackadder Goes Forth.

Comprehend.

This post is brought to you by Michael Gove who wants British school children to be taught about World War I in "the right way" while ignoring that the idealists who survived the war, including Rudyard Kipling, were no longer idealists when it ended.

Comments

[tediousandbrief.livejournal.com]

When I do my annual bulletin for the NAS/NMDA, I'll be including quite a bit about the start of The Great War. Poland only became free again after Versailles (11/11 is still celebrated as Independence Day there).

I wish this was a far that was more covered in school. We barely covered it in high school since it came at the end of the year and I only had one or so classes touch on it it as a history major in college.

The ending of Blackadder Goes Forth gets me every time...

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Americans tend to forget World War I, and I don't know how to change that. I had no idea that 11/11 was Polish Independence Day. That's lovely.

[tediousandbrief.livejournal.com]

We sadly don't have a memorial to that war on the Mall. Korea? Vietnam? World War II? Yup to all three. The Great War? Nope. I think part of it is that it was followed so quickly by a greater war.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

There is one actually. It's tiny, and it's specifically to those of the District who gave their lives (https://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&q=DC+War+Memorial&fb=1&gl=us&hq=dc+world+war+i+memorial&cid=2236740723681850696&ei=FMDKUpipJ-issQT91IDYDQ&ved=0CMcBEPwSKAAwEQ), but, with my experiences in Belgium and Britain, that seems to me to be the right way to commemorate that war.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

It truly is a forgotten war, which is ironic, since -- as you point out -- it caused so much that happened later.

One of the reasons I dislike Downton Abbey is because they really missed the chance to show the effect of the war and the horrific casualties on 1920's England. They mention it a couple of times, but it might as well not have happened as far as Julian Fellowes is concerned.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

The original Upstairs/Downstairs did a magnificent job with the Great War and its implications. Downton is just such a confection, sadly.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Tuchman's The Guns of August is also a classic, and her The Proud Tower is an interesting look at pre-WWI culture.

Michael Gove sounds like a twit. Seriously, England was not fighting for freedom in WWI, considering it was an empire allied to another empire (Czarist Russia) fighting against two more empires, Germany and Austro-Hungary.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Twit is the least of what Gove is about. He really has no comprehension of what that war did to his country, the people in it, and the class system he clings to.

I haven't read "The Proud Tower." I'll add it to my reading list.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Gove is clearly a Blackadder character in a poor disguise.

Of course Blackadder bloody belittles Britain as it was a century ago. It was the hideous results of the policy of promoting officers for accomplishments on the field of primogeniture that made both World Wars last long enough for America to step in. The British Empire was potentially capable of outproducing Germany's pillage-based economy without breaking a sweat.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

When I drove across country (US) a few years ago, I had a moment of disjointedness when I realized I was more than 50 miles from the sea. It was weird for me. Only once in my life had I ever lived that far from the sea. Britain is an island. No matter where you are, you are within reach of the sea. It has many people, great engineers, and, at the time of the first World War, a comparatively high level of industrialization, but it is still an island with all the mental, emotional, and physical issues that involves.

Had they conscripted immediately, we might be talking about the People's Revolution of 1915 and referring to Britain rather than Russia. Isolationism is strong, and was stronger then, among all levels of the British. Remember the apocryphal headline "Fog in the Channel. Continent Isolated."

There was no way the ruling class could risk it. Had they paid better attention to propaganda before the war, and really used their intelligence services information, then it might have been possible. But with the complacency of the ruling class and the undercurrents rising in the working class, nothing could be done as the situation stood in August 1914.

[tediousandbrief.livejournal.com]

"When I drove across country (US) a few years ago, I had a moment of disjointedness when I realized I was more than 50 miles from the sea. It was weird for me."

It's always a treat to me when we go out to one of the coasts for a vacation. I do live in what's often called the third coast (The Great Lakes are basically gigantic freshwater seas), but there's something about the ocean and the smell of salt in the air.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I don't go to the beach much. I went more when I lived in Quincy, MA, but I'm just not a beach person. Yet there was still a moment of almost claustrophobia from realizing that I would be over a thousand miles from the sea for several days.

I adore the great lakes and definitely would consider them acceptable substitutes.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Given that none of the people working on the situation was me, you're probably spot on.

Increasing military pay scales to equal civil-service pay scales, and providing a lifetime pension amounting to 2.5% of your pay for every year you stay in the armed forces, does not seem to anybody else to be obviously just.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

One of the more interesting and morbid outcomes of WWI for the British is that the professional army was destroyed by it. It took most of the 1920s and early 1930s for it to come up to the levels needed to administer and protect the Empire.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett observed the Pals Brigades that they allowed an entire generation of a village's population to be wiped out by the same artillery barrage.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. All those plaques with the same surname over and over in so many churches or village squares attest to how badly that can end.