The art of trench warfare.

[heartssdesire]

I watched a documentary about the lives of soldiers in "the Great War". It was a pretty poor documentary and most of it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, but a couple of things struck me in new ways.

1. Trench warfare, it seems to me, is a stunning display of the insanity of war. Bring two armies of men together along a front and stick them in

Comments

[black_reaver]

Not disagreeing with you, but trench warfare was kind of an inadvertent development. The advent of the machine gun had made traditional line fighting obsolete and a new tactic hadn't yet been developed. The huge losses in WWI were partially due to more direct attempts of charging the enemy’s position only to get mowed down by the thousands by the new weapon. Of course the advent of mustard gas (made especially effective by the use of trenches) and trench rot were also huge factors. The trenches were a "field ready" defense against machine gun fire, but once they got into them they were at something of a stalemate.

The result of all of this was the development of the tank; an armored mobile unit that was immune to small arms fire and could roll over trenches.

[jonathankorman]

Agreed. For what it's worth, the leaders didn't really know what they were getting themselves into with modern weapons. Though they should have learned the lesson a hell of a lot faster.

They say that Europe lost a whole generation of men

Yeah. It's all over European literature of the 1920s. One consequence was sort of the opposite of what happened in the time of the Boxer Rebellion in China: there was a severe gender imbalance among people in their 20s and 30s, with all kinds of weird cultural consequences.

My father describes traveling in France in the '60s, and seeing that every tiny village had a WWII memorial with hundreds of names on it.

When Americans wax snarky about the cowardly French rolling over in WWII, they don't understand how crushing WWI had been. They'd lost an entire generation. They'd built the fortifications of the Maginot Line to prevent it from happening again, and the Germans swept past it like it wasn't even there. They couldn't bring themselves to go through that again ... and then lose, this time.

[heartssdesire]

For what it's worth, the leaders didn't really know what they were getting themselves into with modern weapons. Though they should have learned the lesson a hell of a lot faster.

Yeah, I do actually understand all that. Still... You want someone to have rapped the leaders about the head and said "HEY. This. Is. Not. Working!"

[rosewelsh]

You reminded me of a section on WWI poetry that I studied in college. I'll try to find the one that stabbed at me most and post it here, but in the mean time here's one by Siegfried Sassoon:

THE REAR-GUARD

(Hindenburg Line, April 1917.)

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply.
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep,)
"Get up and guide me through this stinking place."
Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

[meliny]

I was going to suggest that you might be too young and beautiful to be thinking about such things but then I looked at the pictures you posted - gorgeous! So.....

nevermind.

[heartssdesire]

Ha. Yeah, that's right. I shouldn't worry my pretty little head with war documentaries. ;-P

I really love the "Britannia" one. That is a Goddess for sure.