Eleven eleven eleven

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.

From August 1914 until November 1918 around 8.5 million soldiers of the various armies and navies were killed, and another 21 million wounded. Maybe six million civilians were killed and I don’t have figures for further collateral damage.

I’m also not counting the death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, or the Russian Civil War, both of which are related to the conflagration.

World War I was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners & the strategists.

What they essentially ignored was the fact that the invention and implementation of the machine gun gave the tactical advantage to the defensive, and that the frontal charge, even by mobile troops like cavalry, simply couldn’t work against entrenched forces with this new technology.

Every time I revisit this war, in books, in film or TV or on the battlefields, I’m poleaxed all over again at the utter blindness and criminal stubbornness of the professionals whose business it was to send men into battle for a purpose (to win battles, gain territory, destroy enemy armies, ,bring about some change). Because again and again they proved Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over & over again, expecting different results.

And, frankly, it’s not like they didn’t see it coming. There were European military observers at many of the battles of the US War Between the States, when the prototypical use of entrenchments and rapid fire indicated things to come. And at the battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, western military observers practically outnumbered the combatants and saw first-hand what happens when infantry charges machine gun emplacements. (Among the observers were Ian Hamilton, later to command the British debacle at Gallipoli; John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force; and Douglas MacArthur. Don’t get me started on MacArthur.)

The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of open wounds, disillusion, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it 92 years on.

The problem is, in my view, that we haven’t really learned from it, although we’ve been paying for it all along. Old men were too traumatized by 1914-18 to step up to the plate in 1933 in Manchuria or 1938 in Munich to scotch the snake (which by then was armed with 20 years of improved weaponry, like tanks and tactical fighter-bombers; as well as ideologies that would have wilted the moustaches of Wilhelm II or Franz Josef I). Willfully blind to the realities of Stalin’s rule, western leaders gave away the farm in Eastern Europe, and then gathered to their bosom surviving Nazis to help fight the Cold War. (And, 65 years beyond that, now we have technologies including satellite navigation, handheld missile launchers, dirty bombs, assault rifles and mass communications undreamt of 100 years ago. And nuclear devices.)

And then there’s the situation in the Balkans and Middle East. All the result of or exacerbated by that Great War, and all living on beyond the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.

You notice I’m short on any answers to these situations. Me—I start by remembering.