I finally read this book a few weeks ago. It is a short read, but it is not for the faint of heart. I have always been fascinated by World War One. It is as if all the political and military heads of Europe got together and said, “I’m bored, let’s go insane.” More than any other event WW1 shaped our modern world as a half dozen old empires bled themselves dry in the mud of the world’s second smallest continent.
It was the most appalling military slaughter in history. The tactics that involved the marching of teenagers into the meat grinder of “No Man’s Land” for over three years are unforgivable. I have read estimates of up to a million casualties at the battle of Verdun alone, and nothing was gained.
The idea of these generals sitting many miles from the hellish front repeatedly ordering eighteenth century assaults against twentieth century weapons is infuriating to me. I have said for years that the only people that should be marched into battle are men over the age of fifty. Let the young live. We old men would be too tired and grumpy to put up with stupid leadership and both sides would eventually just take a nap.
The arrogance and incompetence of the leaders at the end of the war set the stage and gave birth to the Second World War, which gave birth to the Cold War, which gave birth to the various regional hot wars we’ve had for a generation. The firefights in Helmand and the battle for Fallujah are just the great grandchildren of Sarajevo and The Somme.
When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s they had this book banned and burned because it was unpatriotic. But it wasn’t, it made me sympathetic to the plight of the German soldiers; the terror, the blood, the loss, the insane futility of it all. They just didn’t want their citizens reminded of the true horrors of war so they would have a free hand to start a new one.
The world’s political leaders need to be kept on a short leash. They have an unfortunate habit of gambling with the blood of young warriors. And they always lose.
“He shall judge between the nations and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Isaiah
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to a single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”
Eric Maria Remarque