That's the style

Tomorrow marks the 105^th anniversary of the cessation of fire that everyone hoped would end what was then known as the Great War.

It wasn’t really great, but people didn’t know what else to call a conflict of that magnitude, enveloping most of Europe from Russia to the Atlantic and sucking in peoples from around the world before it was done. It was an imperial war fought for imperial reasons; it resulted in the destruction of four empires (Russian, Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian) and prepped the ground for the collapse of another (British).

The subsequent treaties that officially ended the proceedings—constructed carefully to support new imperial gains (for Britain, France and the United States)—also planted the seeds of a century of discontent and conflict, the fruits of which we’ve seen in the Balkans and Middle East for decades.

High-level sweeping statement: the imperial victors drew arbitrary new maps of territories encompassed by the defeated empires that failed to take into account ethnic, religious or tribal connections. (“Bosnians, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Kosovars, Serbs, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians—we’re going to lump you all into one country called South Slavia, and here, here’s a Serbian king for you!”) Particularly in the Mid-East, they carved out mandates for the French and the Brits, ignoring not only the desires of the inhabitants who’d built sophisticated societies for centuries but also wartime promises made to Jews of a homeland for them.

At the end of the following war (seeds of which also sown in those very same treaties), a new set of empires (Soviet Union, American; then British and French) had another go at appropriating peoples and lands to serve ideology, and here we are.

We didn’t bother with a descriptor this time; just called it World War II.

I was looking for songs from the First War, and was struck by the clear distinction drawn between the battle front and the home front (unless, of course, you lived in Northern France; then you were subsumed). That dynamic has changed, as we see today in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. There is no buffer zone in those wars; civilians and civilian institutions are targets right along with military installations. We haven’t progressed as a species in the past century, that’s for sure.

Well, back to the earworm. So very many of the songs from that war were relentlessly upbeat and optimistic about defeating the Hun in a snap. (Yes, I’m looking at the English-language corpus.) I mean—of course; everyone wants to focus on the positive when they think their world has gone bananas. Along with a boatload of super sentimental things.

I rather fancied “Keep the Home Fires Burning”, but couldn’t find a decent recording of it. So I’m going with “Pack Up Your Troubles”. Trying to imagine the size of a bag that would hold our troubles at this juncture, but it’s a nice thought.

I have no idea who the performer is, but I appreciate the film of civilians being recruited and undergoing the training it takes to build a fighting unit.