I wonder how many millions thought the same thing? I wonder how many are thinking it now?

Here are some pictures from the 90th anniversary of the Sommne this year.

"Mike said, after a while, all the generals had fought battles like that. If you went on doing the same thing, at least it was something you knew. You wouldn't do any worse than any other commander. But if you tried something different and it didn't work, then heaven help you."

This is oddly isomorphic to a point David Hartwell made to us about book publishing, years ago, when we were first getting into the field.

He observed that, in your typical publishing company, if an editor does the things conventional wisdom says he or she should, and they fail to make the company money, that editor has a good chance of being forgiven. Whereas if the same editor tries something different and it fails to make money, the editor's in trouble.

This always seemed to me a pointed argument against the idea, fondly advanced by business people everywhere, that profitability is the only metric of performance. In fact unprofitable performances are constantly forgiven, provided they're delivered with unimpeachable conventionality. Businesses like to--need to!--make money. But businesses are also cultures, and cultures need to enforce social norms. Over the years I've found that this explains a great deal of institutional folly.

I remember David as saying that if an editor takes on what's perceived as a cynically commercial project, and it loses money, everyone says "Oh well, conventional wisdom was wrong on that one," and forgives the editor. But if the editor takes on an odd project because he or she is convinced it's good, and then it loses money, everyone blames the editor for being insufficiently down-to-earth and practical.

I hasten to add -- lest this nuanced point be seized upon and misused by self-publishing enthusiasts and "publishing is broken" dweebs -- that in spite of these discouragements, editors as a class are forever buying loved but theoretically impractical books. It's one of the ways bestsellers happen.

And now I'll stop talking about publishing, because that's not what this thread is about.

After it was over it was 18 months before he got home to Australia - there were no ships.

My mother told me that when WW2 started, he went around for a whole day saying "The buggers are at it again, the buggers are at it again." I think of him a lot November 11th, and all those wasted years.

The Menin Gate
is covered with names
on all sides.

They're all from one battle, and that one far from the worst.

Capt. Blackadder: Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing over the top of our trenches and walking slowly toward the enemy?

Capt. Darling: How did you know that, Blackadder? It's classified information.

Capt. Blackadder: It's the same plan that we used last time, sir. And the seventeen times before that.

Gen. Melchett: E-e-exactly! And that's what's so brilliant about it. It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard. Doing exactly what we've done eighteen times before will be the last thing they'll expect us to do this time. There is, however, one problem.

Capt. Blackadder: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds?

Gen. Melchett: Exactly. Field Marshall Haig is concerned that this may be depressing the men a tadge...

--"Blackadder Goes Forth" ("Captain Cook")

I doubt it's taught that way.

The conservatism that allowed those generals to keep sending those men over the top in wave after futile wave is one of the more pernicious features of industrial cultures in general. The corpse factory depended on that conservatism operating from top to bottom, tooth to tail, even as the corpses piled higher and higher.

For a long time after WW1, we had a population of veterans and war survivors who served as walking visceral reminders of what happens when industrial engineering goes so starkly mad. (I saw a bit on CNN this morning about the few still living American WW1 veterans.) I miss having them around in sufficient numbers that you could expect to see them. I miss the effect they had on people.

I always sing Eric Bogle's And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda on Armistice Day. Here's the final verse, the way I sing it:

So now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades how proudly they march
Renewing their deeds of past glory
I see the old men all tired sick and sore
Those weary old soldiers of an old forgotten war
And the young people ask me what are they marching for
Some days I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Mathilda
While the old men still answer the call
And year after year their numbers grow fewer
Someday no one will march there at all
Waltzing Mathilda waltzing Mathilda
Who will go waltzing Mathilda with me
And their ghosts may be heard
As they're marching by that billabong
Who will go waltzing Mathilda with...

Soon enough, we won't even have guys like Eric Bogle anymore. He wrote that song in 1972.

Then I read Forester's "The General" and I understood the process, and simultaneously became aware that to understand all is not to forgive all.

I went to school in Toronto. WWI was taught as the very definition of a rotating clusterfuck, Versailles treaty included. Special attention was paid to the use of Canadian, Newfoundlander, Australian and New Zealander troops as cannon-fodder. The descriptions and depictions of trench life, combat, and casualties were very explicit.

I'm just old enough to remember there being rather a lot of very traumatized old people around. I remember being warned not to ever be alone in a room with the shell-shocked inpatients at the hospital where my GP was.

The largest Canadian cemetary is in Flanders. Thanks to regional regiments, many towns, some pretty large, lost the vast majority of their adult male populations in a single day. We aren't going to forget this one in a hurry.

It most definitely _is_ taught that way in Canada. I would bet that it is in Australia and New Zealand, also.

There's also a link at that page to a Living History radio documentary project, hosted by Walter Cronkite.

What's unclear about this story is why he didn't just replace the generals, or order (or get someone to order) them not to try these useless assaults. But perhaps there weren't any generals who wouldn't do the same thing.

A war of attrition, however horrible, is not always so strategically useless. Grant used it on Lee, and lost more men than Lee did, but the point is, he could easily afford to lose more men, and he only kept it up for one year, not four. WW1 is not at all the same thing: for one thing, these frontal assaults inflicted virtually no damage on the enemy at all, and faith was in artillery bombardments that would cut the lines "this time for sure."

As the generals saw it, the only other course of action was to sit there and wait for the enemy to attack and possibly get through. Well, you could sit there and wait for them to lose all their men. That's pretty much how the Germans eventually lost: too many really big, really costly assaults.

I've tried to get into the heads of the commanders and heads of state - tried to see the war as an example of "generals are always fighting the last war," tried to understand the dynamic of the interlocking alliances - and that's about as close as I can get to comprehending the thing. People were still thinking in Napoleanic terms, a century later.

One of the best portrayals of the most poignant consequences of WWI is Al Stewart's song "The Last Day of June, 1934," with its haunting line about "a world forever finished with war."

I think, when people wonder why the world ignored Adolph Hitler for so long, they forget how traumatic WWI was, and how the only way the civilized world could make sense of it or justify it was to believe, with all their hearts, that it really was "the war to end all wars."

Paying attention to Hitler, recognizing what was going on, and deciding to put a stop to it, would have meant girding up for another mass slaughter when the memory of the last one was too fresh. I can understand that a lot more than I can understand the thinking that led to WWI.

Two years ago I drove from Somerset to the Dorset coast along the A350, a few days after Remembrance Sunday. A cold misty day with nobody about, through half a dozen or so tiny villages, each with its memorial and sad red wreath. Too many tiny villages where the number of names on the monument tells its own story, the wiping out of an entire generation of young men.

And the failure to even clean up the mess properly afterwards meant that it was all for nothing, that a generation later there was another war, with its own horrors, if fewer new names on those monuments.

Perceptions differ. Anyone who sees a glorification of war or an expression of jingoism in this is right to condemn it and ignore it; but I have never seen that in it myself. It always seems to me that this is an expression of shared grief, a sense of terrible loss. Yes, there is determination that it must never happen again, but also deep, abiding, sombre respect. I think that it is meet that we should do this, and I am glad that Bogle got it wrong. You may differ.

As I remember it, we went over the Revolution several times, the Civil War pretty thoroughly at least once, and white exploration and US western expansion a lot. I also remember WWII fairly clearly. And, oddly enough, the labor movement.

Here's a good one.

So -- thank you.

In Renaissance history, there's a real break, a sense of dislocation, in the art of the generation that saw the Black Death. Right before then, there was a generation of painters that seemed poised to really integrate the new interest in classical art into their work - and that stopped for 30 years or so.

I've never noticed that sort of break in art history around WWI (there is one in WWII, where Paris loses its supremacy as the capital of the art world), but as I said, this is not my period. Has anyone seen a break of this sort around WWI? If so, could you indicate what was lost? gained?

(Cubism does not count - Le Demoiselles d'Avignon was painted in 1907.)

Certainly: Gallipoli (frex) is taught as an example of ANZAC effort, and British officer incompetence.

I think most people in NZ have a mental image of gallant Kiwis, performing a haka before clambering over steep hills into Turkish gunfire as British officers sip tea.

(And the eventual retreat is told as real Number Eight Wire stuff; guns rigged to keep firing random bursts for days after the last soldier had left, etc.)

I can remember when I first realised Winston Churchill had been in charge at Gallipoli, thinking that it was absolutely amazing that the British had ever let him run anything again.

There is also a memorial in Wellington called the Ataturk Memorial. I find it a very touching memorial.

And, I think, as part of dadaism and that type of reaction, I think maybe the rejection of the more traditionally minded 19th century painters. Even in the late 70s and early 80s, announcing that you were interested in seriously studying the French Academy painters or the Pre-Raphaelites was, well, professors tended to warn one off of that territory.

In Canada, the veteran's care organization sells felt poppies for a dollar apiece starting in early October. You can buy them everywhere, and everyone walking around town wears them -- businessmen, little kids, teenagers. I was very surprised and moved by this last fall.

I think for the US, part of the reason to forget it is that it doesn't have the right storyline. We study the Revolutionary War -- we won and created the land of the free! We study the Civil War -- we won and freed the slaves! We study WWII -- we won and stopped the Nazis! But we don't study WWI or Vietnam in school; there's no happy ending to those, so the question about whether the results justify the costs isn't so comfortably answered.

I really should remedy that. Can anyone recommend a book that would give me a good overview?

One of the problems (currently) with properly teaching history in American is that you can't test for it properly on a multiple guess test. You can test for dates, and who won which battle, but not the important stuff - the why & how. It also means that you test for the boring stuff, but not the interesting stuff - so it's the boring stuff that gets taught.

It's not that you don't need the dates -but if that's all you get, you're certainly not going to consider history interesting or anything that you'll want to pursue on your own.

My own anecdotal contribution: My high school history classes were all styled as "American History" classes. World War I was covered in a few pages, little more than dates of American involvement and a few photos of trench warfare. World War II discussion was a similarly brief affair -- Hitler, Normandy, The Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans, a page of naval warfare photographs, nuking Japan, all in about six pages.

There was an elective World History class, one semester, that I could have taken, but didn't.

As it happens, I included a lot of military fiction and non-fiction in my youthful voracious reading habits, so I learned a lot about the various battles that way. Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far, that sort of thing. But I got rather less on World War I that way.

Lamentations

I found him in the guard-room at the Base.
From the blind darkness I had heard his crying
And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face
A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying
To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.
And, all because his brother had gone west,
Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief
Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling
Half-naked on the floor. In my belief
Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.

And then the jets flying over, and the fine spring weather, and the feeling of fury at the waste and ghastliness of it all, which has not dimmed with time. The last note of the Last Post has always sounded like a question to me.

Yes, it's true that there's varying amounts of local control of the curriculum. In Washington state for instance, the basic curriculum is set at the state level, including such requirements as one year's worth of vocational training. These requirements can be further refined by the local school district.

However, at the end of the day, all students in Washington must pass the state test to graduate. So guess what get's taught? To get in to a good college, other, national tests must be taken - with the same result, although to a lesser extent.

Further homogenization of the curriculum is encouraged by the economics of school textbooks. All schools in Texas must buy the same textbooks. I think the same is true for California. So, textbook companies, not being in the business of losing money, write their books to meet the requirements set forth by Texas and California - and the other states are stuck with the results.

The results are bad for history - and much worse & weirder in the sciences.

The Australian school curriculum emphasises Gallipoli, and Weren't the Brits a Bunch of Inbred Incompetants. It confidently asserts that the ANZAC landings were directly responsible for the Australian Character, Mateship and Biscuits with Golden Syrup in them. They were therefore a Good Thing but a Bad Idea.

There's recently been a bit more attention paid to the Western Front, particularly after books like _Fly Away Peter_ by David Malouf (Read. This. Book.), but it's still more myth than history which is taught.

#17 - CaseyL - I suggest Hitler was ignored because people remembered rather than forgot; chose to believe that nobody could deliberately want to return there. Wrong, perhaps, but understandable. One of the lessons we need to learn is to keep a very short rein on our leaders who would use military force as a solution for everything (wonder who I mean . . .)

#25 - Keir - You have to remember Churchill was an aristocrat, and you can't understand 20th Century British politics unless you understand the malign grip of aristocrats, and the sea change of the 1964 elections. Americans are only now beginning to get a taste of what happens when you allow 'aristocrats' to run things.

You could argue that Churchill disproves the argument that those who have been to war will move heaven and earth to not go there again. Of course, it is very much more complicated than that - the very guilty sexual thrill he got from the charge and butchering his lesser opponents; the ghastly fiasco that was Gallipoli; the belief that, if you must fight you fight to win as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible.

One thing we must remember when studying history is to at least try to understand the mind sets of the people involved. Yes, we know now that Hitler was a vile monster. Joseph Kennedy (US Ambassador in London and father of what he hoped to be a dynasty of US Presidents) thought he was a fine guy. So did many of his fellow Americans, even after he'd set Europe ablaze. Most of his British admirers got the picture some time before that (but not the Duke of Windsor, it seems)

Do American children study the 'justified war' concept?

I don't know if this was a usual thing, but we studied WWI in primary school, and not in high school. So as you can imagine I've not studied it in great detail. But I doubt anyone could get through any education in Australia - and the accompanying twelve or so ANZAC days - without the idea that Gallipoli was a clusterfuck, and thus the rest of it could hardly have been much better.

and to 11 and 13:
The RSL tried to ask the guy who burnt the Australian flag at the Cronulla riots to march with them this year (he apologised), but apparently someone complained bitterly. I've had a hunt around, but I originally heard about it in Andrew Bolt's column (blood-pressure-rising-ly right-wing in a conservative tabloid) and I can't bear to read Bolt again to find out if he actually did. The point of which sentence was that young people do indeed march, sometimes even people who might burn flags at riots.

A good plan. They landed British and Australian troops on the beaches successfully, catching the Turks completely off guard, and then - they just didn't move. God knows why - lack of imagination, lack of dash, too rigid orders. They should have raced inland, but they dug in on the beaches, at the foot of the hills overlooking them. And over the next few days, the Turks recovered themselves, and dug in on top of the hills.

That failure to exploit the first day's successes doomed the expedition.

I have seen the rows and rows of identical white crosses in northern France - with the poppies growing, and even the memory of seeing that brings a lump to my throat. My father was actually sent to Gallipoli, but while in Egypt waiting for transport to Turkey, the troops were withdrawn and they were sent to the cold of a particularly bitter European winter without proper clothing. And one of the saddest things is that he didn't believe in what he was doing, not really. He certainly didn't want to kill anyone, and I suspect that might have had something to do with volunteering for the mule train too.

And then when it was all over - they had to wait so long to come home. Imagine how the troops in Iraq would feel about that. "Sorry chaps, I know your tour of duty is up, but we don't have a way to send you back yet. Just hang around for another 18 months until we find a ship, ok?"

Dave @ 19: I'd say that the jingoistic and flag-wavy content of Anzac Day has increased, but only from certain quarters. Compare and contrast Howard's 2005 speech at Gallipoli with Bill Crews' speech from 2006.

(Yes, Norway was not in the war, but after Imperial Germany started sinking neutral shipping going to Allied ports, we had our losses as well.)

Funnily, a lot of fortunes were made - and lost - during WWI in shipping in Norway. I believe that when it came to quick winnings it even rivalled stock market killings during the Internet boom.

Per

And although I still find the portrayal of the French as "cheese eating surrender monkeys" in certain sectors enraging, the lack of interest in WW1 explains the mischaracterisation nicely.

And my Morris dancing friends are infuriated when some purist complains about women dancing Morris. It's true that Morris was traditionally danced exclusively by men between 19 and 25, but after the Great War there were no such men in England (at any rate, not enough to support the tradition), and so women began dancing it to keep it alive.

Learning that fact is what first led me, an American who never took history in school, to an understanding of how devastating WWI was in Europe. It was the stupidest war ever fought. It was started for stupid reasons, continued for stupid reasons, supported by stupidity, and fought in stupid ways both strategically and tactically. And the treaty to end it was stupider still, and led to one of the hugest disasters in human history.

NONE of which provides any excuse for not honoring the memory of those who served in it. Honoring them, and those who have served since, is in my opinion a holy obligation.

The parallels for today should be obvious.

It annoys me greatly that the US has "Veteran's Day" and everyone else has "Remembrance Day", making a lot of our memorial seem more "St. Crispin's Day" than "No Man's Land".

I don't think schools, as I have experienced them, are the right place to pick up the emotions. A friend told me some weeks ago that some thinker or other thought people learn nostalgia-- we see how our parents and friends react to something and learn the reactions. I have to agree; I've read a few books involving the trenches in the past couple years, and now WW1 flips the, "Boy, is this gonna suck," switch in my brain. A lot of horror doesn't do that.
Do we want schools teaching us what we should feel about history? Even with the Holocaust, I can't remember learning more than a few nasties, isolated from context-- they made soap, they made lampshades. It's not the teacher's job to instill respect and horror in students except as it's the job of someone in the community. The school year's too short to teach emotions on top of events.

The emotion people seem to lack in America (I cannot speak for other parts of the world) isn't something that can or perhaps should be learned in a classroom. It's something you pick up from everyone else. You learn to be horrified by certain names because everyone else goes quiet. You read, or you listen, you find out about trenches and machine guns on your own, where you aren't being watched to make sure you're paying attention to the right things. If you're me, you pick up on medical history and the Spanish flu and are really glad you haven't found a book set in 1918 that doesn't involve everyone else's nightmares, because it's the lost villages and the troopships arriving with half of them dead that gets to you. If I had been taught what to feel, would I have known that?

This is a long-winded way of saying that while it's shameful that people don't have the same attitude about this war, that war, any major event, I'm not sure it's right to blame the nebulous Schools for it. It's not their job to tell us what to feel. It's our job, 'our' meaning writers, artists, people who put individual faces on the names, to remind people that here is something to be horrified at. I learned most of what upsets me from fiction, not textbooks.

In some sense, that was a loss of innocence for us, finding out that people could do such dreadful things. I think that we as a class were the better for the lesson.

Do I wish they'd done the same for WWI? I don't know - I think you only get that kind of impact once in a lifetime, and I think they chose the more important event to spend it on.

But I didn't understand WWI until I moved to Britain, and saw the war memorials in every town and village. I get it now, a bit, and I can't watch the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth without tears in my eyes.

Perhaps it was, but it had some interesting results, including the beginning of the end of the colonial empires that had been largely created a couple of generations before (or even less -- Nigeria was created in 1904). The incompetence, waste of life, and the employment of colonial levies (with a consequent demystification of white supremacy), all had an impact on the colonial empires. It isn't an accident that Rastafarianism, for example, was founded by a veteran of the Great War.

I get to walk to work. This is because of 9/11 (my old workplace was destroyed, and my company decided to put the tech departments in Hoboken). That doesn't mean 9/11 wasn't a terrible thing. I'll take the walk to work, but would I rather be commuting to the World Trade Center? Sure, overall.

And the founding of Rastafarianism seems more like the Treaty of Versailles than the fall of colonialism to me. Rastafarians (at least according to a Trini whose article I read in the Village Voice years ago) are taught that homosexuals are not actually human, but are duppie spirits left over from Sodom and Gomorrah, and that killing them (us!) is a righteous act. A friend of mine who grew up in Jamaica tells me that if two women walked down a Jamaican beach holding hands in the morning, they would be hacked to death with machetes by sunset.

Don't talk to ME about the founding of Rastafarianism as if it were a good thing.

This time last year, I read a post by John M. Ford in which he recommended Hew Strachan's The First World War. So I ordered it from Amazon, and found out (no surprise, really), that he was right. It's relatively short (about 330 pages), well written, not confusing[*], and manages to cover a significant amount of the war outside Europe as well as the Western and Eastern Fronts -- and the relevant social and economic developments.

[*] The history of the Western Front between 1915 and 1917 can seem awfully repetitive and confusing if you don't already have some idea what and when battles like Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme were. This, at least, was one of the problems I had with John Keegan's WW1 history, for example.

A single one of us has passed away
Affecting every thread on Making Light.
We stagger at the impact. All we say
Is dimmer in his absence. He shone bright.
Imagine, if you can, a million lost
Or more: the good and better, bad and worse.
Each death its own immeasurable cost
Each grief deserving vivid, timeless verse.
We lost a friend. It's cost us all so much
In future joy and present pain alike.
That price is paid by all that death can touch
They all were missed the way that we miss Mike.
The mind cannot encompass so much grief:
They lost a forest, we mourn a single leaf.

Let me add this: that Rastafarianism was part of a series of reactions to the Great War that involved colonised people responding to the catastrophe with a new understanding of the world. True, this involves roses growing from a dungheap, but some of those roses were noble.

After grocery shopping, I think I've managed to shave down the earlier rambling to, "Yes, the schools should teach this, and things like it, more effectively. But they shouldn't have to, because the community as a whole should be teaching it too."

I didn't know this. I think I'd like to visit Australia to see this. As you probably know, the USA repurposed Armistice Day into "Veterans Day" in 1954 to honor all its veterans, not just the ones from the AEF. These days, Veterans Day tends to focus the national attention on that bleak wall in Washington, D.C. with the names etched into it, with the occasional nod to the veterans of WW2 and the however many other wars Americans can be bothered to remember.

I know some folks think And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda is an antiwar song. I'm not one of them.

The rest of us were so stunned that there were several seconds of complete silence.

So much for the state of public education in the U.S. (Incidentally, I was in college before I even HEARD of the Spanish-American War. Or the 1918 flu epidemic, but that's a different story.)

I used to own a book about stories of horses and dogs in war, and all the brave things they'd done. It was written for children, and published in England. I remember, when I read it the second or third time, being so puzzled because I couldn't figure out what war they were talking about. It didn't seem to be World War II, and it wasn't the Civil War, so what else was there? I had some dim idea that there must have been a World War I, to make the other a II, but couldn't imagine what it had been over or where it had occurred.

I'd never heard of November 11th as a day for remembering anything until I started reading Making Light.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make here. It just makes me angry, somehow, that there was all that mess and death and stupidity and no one ever told me enough about it that I could recognize it coming again, back when I was young. Maybe the schools aren't the place to teach that sort of thing, but I wish someone had told me earlier.

It isn't what you're taught in class,
but the old monument in the town square;
the lesson's a short moment, it will pass,
but listen to the ones who once were there.
I learned of war at my kind mother's knee,
stories of death, tales that were all of woe;
I learned from that what it means to be free,
and how easily into the giant maw we go.
The names I read on school wall or church plaque,
with 'eternal memory' and 'honour' are the way
that I translate both 'battle' and 'attack'
into sharp images of frightening day.
Young men who once, for country and for king,
took arms and gave them their most precious thing.

Mmm, no. The predominant "motorized means of transportation" on land were trains, which ran on coal. Most ships still ran on coal as well. Only the very newest ships ran on oil, and there was a certain reluctance to rely on that (despite the superiority of oil-fired turbines), since oil was mostly available only outside Europe, while coal was readily available at home. Most battlefield transport away from the rail heads was by horse.

abi at 55 -- very nice, my compliments.

jh at 59 -- I'm one of those who thinks it's an anti-war song, but not an anti-troop song. Just as I think Goya's prints from Disastros de la Guerra* a collection of anti-war images. Both attempt to capture the concept (IMO) "This should never have happened, and it should never happen again."

There's an article in the current alumni magazine for UCBerkeley about John Yoo, who is one of the architects of current administration policy about torture, extraordinary rendition, and indeterminate detention without access to counsel. He sounds like neither a stupid nor an unkind man. And yet, I want to ask him one simple question: is this how you would want to be treated by the state? And I'd keep asking him until he gave an unqualified "yes" or "no" answer.

Since he's a lawyer, this might take weeks.

This administration's policies, IMO, move us back towards the horrors of WWI and earlier. Not quite the trenches -- instead the hidden camps. If the reforms of the Geneva Convention become inconvenient -- let's just forget them, okay?

(*pardon my spelling if it's wrong, as I don't have a copy to hand and Spanish is not my native tongue -- I could call it "The Horrors of War" instead, but I'll make my small effort to respect the artist's original language)

Here's a hint: by 1914, the Royal Navy and the German high seas fleet were primarily powered by oil-fired steam turbines. And it was the great fleets-in-being that dominated strategic thinking. As Admiral Jellicoe put it, "I am the only man in England who can lose the war in an afternoon".

For that matter, even George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels offer a way of seeing the military-political culture that fed into the Great War--Capt. Blackadder is a cousin to Flashy.

Another name to look up is Gertrude Bell. By WWI a sense of oil's coming importance was definitely in place and I remember hearing that Germany's plan to build a railroad to the Middle East (bypassing the Suez) was a contributing factor to WWI.

A good short summary description is in the Review section at this link. Perhaps to catch some of the references, you might need more detailed knowledge of The War to End Wars than it seems many have, but I think the points mostly get through. I don't know how familiar the popular songs of the time are now, either. In 1969 the memories were a generation or two fresher than today.

Barbara Tuchman's 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam doesn't actually deal with WWI, but helps place that war in history, and in some aspects is more useful to read than her early classic The Guns of August, and a lot shorter.

In many ways the impact of World War I on the history since is arguably more than WWII (of course II flowed as a consequence of I as well). The blow to expectations of improvement & progress was a major influence on thought & society, for instance, along with the other disruptions mentioned by others. Another for instance, remember the Russian Revolution (towards its end, after three years of war) would have been unlikely to succeed without it.

War has had it's apologians,
Ever since history began,
From the times of the Greeks and Trojans, when they sang of arms and the man,
But if you asked me to name the best, Sir,
I'd tell you the one I mean,
Head and shoulders above the rest, Sir, was the War of 14-18,
Head and shoulders above the rest, Sir, stands the War of 14-18.

There were the wars against all those Louis,
There were Caesar's wars in Gaul,
The was Britain's war in Suez, which wasn't a war at all,
There was the war of the Spanish Succession,
Many other wars in between,
But they none of them made an impression like the war of 14-18,
They didn't make the same impression as the war of 14-18.

The war of American Independence,
That was enjoyable, by and large,
Watching England's free descendants busy defeating German Jarge,
But the Boer War was a poor war, And I'm still inclined to lean,
Though Sir, it possibly isn't your war like the war of 14-18,
Though, it probably isn't your war, Sir, the war of 14-18.

There are certainly plenty of wars to choose from, you pick whichever one you please,
Like the one we've had all the news from liberating the Vietnamese,
Or those wars for God and country, be it Korean or Philippine,
Sir, if you'll pardon my effrontery, give me the war of 14-18,
If you'll pardon my effrontery, Sir, the war of 14-18,

Every war has it's own attraction from total war to border raid,
Call it rebellion, police action,
War of containment or crusade,
I don't underrate the late war we see so often on the screen,
But that wasn't the really great war like the war of 14-18,
No, the late war wasn't the great war like the war of 14-18.

No doubt Mars, among his chattels, has got some really splendid war,
Full of bigger and bloodier battles that we've ever seen before,
But until that time comes, Sir, when that greater war comes on the scene,
The one that I on the whole prefer, Sir, is the war of 14-18,
Yes, the one that I still prefer, Sir, is the war of 14-18.

Wow. Well said, sir.

It's always a shock to visit an English church and see the Book of Remembrance, page after page of young men dead.

Nothing, I'm afraid; I'm not familiar with it.

Here's a hint: by 1914, the Royal Navy and the German high seas fleet were primarily powered by oil-fired steam turbines. And it was the great fleets-in-being that dominated strategic thinking. As Admiral Jellicoe put it, "I am the only man in England who can lose the war in an afternoon".

I'll disagree with you slightly, in two senses. First, my understanding is that only the very newest ships were oil-powered (e.g., the British Queen Elizabeth class of fast battleships); most of the ships in both navies were coal-powered, or used fuel oil only as a supplement. Certainly, the German cruisers which preoccupied the British during the first year of the war used coal, and I'm dubious that the German navy would have switched to complete reliance on oil when they lacked a secure, reliable supply.

Second, I'd argue that only Britain was really focused, for obvious historical reasons, on fleets-in-being above all other considerations; certainly Austria-Hungary and Russia were not, and Germany was far more focused on the twin threats of France and Russia. Jellicoe's statement reflected a peculiarly British point of view.

It's certainly true that oil was of (growing) strategic interest, but only secondarily, and the Middle East itself was largely irrelevant to the start of the war (though it didn't stay that way as the war went on).

Follows on from The Great Game, and while the Germans tried to encourage the Afghans to cause trouble, the Afghans didn;t want to be invaded again.

While I have read the usual books on various topics applying to the war, I have not yet found a really adequate one volume overview -- Keegan's book is OK, but it has some obvious issues. Any suggestions?

One thing good from Keegan is his analysis of the near impossibility of coordinating various aspects of attacks on the Western Front once they began. The distances involved combined with the conditions and nature of defences meant, first, that intelligence about what the other side was doing was often worthless. It also meant that a commander back in the trenches could not see how an attack was progressing. Because truly portable radios did not exist, any officers up forward with the troops, that could actually see and affect what was going on, had no way to communicate that back to those who could have use that information to coordinate reserves or artillery. There was no shortage of stupid officers -- on both sides -- but even a smart officer could look pretty bad under those circumstances.

They got twenty-five cents an acre, five dollars apiece for the buildings, and two weeks to vacate. The land they lost is now labeled "Argonne Forest" on the maps.

I grew up knowing men who had been gassed in the Argonne, Americans and a little Scot who'd moved to Canada right after the war and then married an American school teacher and moved to Yelm. My maternal grandmother's brothers were drafted and survived; my paternal grandparent's brothers were all exempt from the draft; my maternal grandfather was a spy in the lumber camps in Wisconsin, protecting us all from the red Germans, during the way, and then the Wobblies after.

What I know about WW1 I learned from stories from people, and a bit from movies like "Sergeant York;" what my kids know they learned from The History Channel, History Channel International, and Black Adder... both of them honor students, my son a history geek, my daughter with several AP examinations.

What Margaret Organ-Kean says at post#34 bears rereading: text books and the curriculum which goes with them are not neutral, and the sad fact is that teacher bias tends to exclude the stuff they found boring as students. There is little emphasis on teaching people what we need to know to make good political decissions (which is the assumed goal of public education in a democracy).

Teresa, I'm sorry that this is a tough time for you. If it helps, I'm glad you're here--I had a terrible dream last night that there was a post on Making Light that you were in critical care, and one of the first things I asked Chad when I finally woke up was whether it was true.

A very good movie, IMO, gritty and awful and moving and funny. A gorgeous Rashomon (sp?) -like whodunit, set in the trenches and the post-war years.

I had my parents watch; they wanted to watch it again, and my mother wanted to loan it to her rather-conservative sister.

I read Paris 1919 back in May. It's the story of the peace conference there. It's not very flattering to too many of the participants.

/relurks. stupid grading.

As for WWII, we did Holocaust units in both 6th (12 years old) and 8th grade (14 years old), crossing over between history and literature classes. Even though I may not have totally understood what the troops went through, I even now hold a very viseral understanding of the Holocaust because of those units. As someone said earlier, they brought about a loss of innocence. During both years, I was fascinated by the era, particularly the contrast between horror/evil and bravery. We read Anne Frank's diary, Number the Stars (excellent young adult book), and a number of similar novels. I even wrote a short story from the perspective of a young girl in a concentration camp. The individual stories burned themselves into my mind, and I think that they would have for WWI as well if we were exposed to them.

We have John's medals and the letters he sent home from camp and battlefield (gramma saved them). His two brothers also made it through the war more-or-less physically unscathed (Roger lost an eye), and as psychically intact as you can expect after a war like that. All we have from Semen is the few stories he told to his sons before he died. His three brothers all died. The town Nanna Ana grew up in disappeared after the war.

I once made a comment in a graduate writing course 20 years ago that conditions in the trenches of WWI had to have been comparable to (if not worse than) conditions on the ground in Vietnam. You would have though that I had espoused Nazi-ism, based on the reactions of most of my classmates. The professor, on the other hand, agreed with me, as did the only other classmate who had a family member involved in WWI (his grandfather was finally beginning to tell his stories, 75 years later).

Most people don't need to be told what to think when they see bulldozers shovelling people into mass graves, or when they see piles of shoes reaching to the ceiling.

I think it is much the same with the First World War. It might not be so visceral, but it's still possible.

If it did originate with Fisher, it would be typical of the man, though. No shrinking violet, Jackie Fisher.

The ruined church howls,
With the eerie wail of falling shells.
The foundations shake,
As a distant explosion drowns out the screams and groans of the living.
Only the dead are silent,
As if in contemplation of this sacred space.
I walk through this abattoir carrying my charge,
A Valkyrie bathed in blood.
I am splashed with the intermingled gore of dead and living,
As I deliver my burden to the table.
Once a priest's holy altar,
It is now a butcher's board.
The lambs go to the slaughter upon it,
Their blood the sacrifice that consecrates this hellish place.

The idea that the strategies of the generals in WW1 were "conservative" is overstated, to say the least. They were in fact trying to adapt to three technological advances that there had only been glimmers of in previous wars (chiefly the US Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War). First was the machine gun (this is the one everyone remembers). Second was in-depth entrenchment with barbed wire, multi-level deep trenching, and so on. Third was reasonably accurate long-range artillery.

Remember from your reading that the war was originally supposed to be a war of maneuver. Both the Germans and the French expected stunning offensive advances, and the Germans almost succeeded in theirs. (Tuchman's "Guns of August" is good on this topic, as is Keegan's "World War One"). Fundamentally, (according to Keegan) what happened is that the German army just got too tired: the plans called for continuous advances beyond normal human endurance.

So, the first thing that happened when this failed was a race to find a breakthough point and failing that, to put down entrenchments. Then came experiments on how to break through the entrenchments. The failure of the generals was the failure of their attempts to break through, using many different tactics.

They first tried the over-the-top attack most of us learned about in History class. It failed due to barbed wire and the machine gun. So, they tried to knock out the barbed wire and the machine guns with artillery, and kill all the defenders. The idea was that the artillery would lead the troops by a little bit, enabling an advance without opposition. This actually sort of worked, sometimes. The problem was the artillery wasn't properly synchronized with the advancing troops (no walkie-talkies existed), so it either left them behind or didn't advance fast enough. Even when they broke through, the reinforcements couldn't come up fast enough to make a difference. Eventually, the defensive works became more sophisticated, so the emplacements couldn't be knocked out by artillery fire, and the defenders just popped up and resumed the defense. The Germans tried poison gas. The Allies tried tanks. And so on. There's a lot more (this was just a short precis), such as how multiple trench lines developed, how dug-in defense worked, and so on, literally ad nauseum.

While it is utterly, depressingly true that the ultimate result of all these efforts was millions of dead soldiers, the idea that they just kept trying the same thing over and over again is not. What happened is that they really didn't have the tools to do what they wanted to do (break through the trench lines), but it took them a long time, a lot of different tactics tried (and failed), before they realized it. Note, after all, that the generals took home lessons, and technology advanced, and WW2 was fought with very different tactics and technology.

As another datapoint (anecdota-point?) on History as she is taught, my daughters both had WW1 and WW2 covered in their classes. My off-the-cuff impression is that there are a few "highlight" events in History that get huge coverage (the Revolution, the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement) and rest have to be stuck in around the edges.

As for standardized tests, there is no state requirement for one in History (we're talking Massachusetts here). The SAT 1 doesn't have a History component. US History and World History are optional SAT 2 tests, and (anecdotally) few college-bound kids of my acquaintance seem to take them.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

There was continuous technical and tactical innovation during the war - just as much as if not more as in the second war. The hard thing wasn't taking a trench, or even breaking through the line entirely. It was exploiting the breakthrough the next day. The "winners" of any battle would have to pour men on foot through the gap in the lines and out into enemy territory, while the defenders could freely move men up along roads and railways that mainly ran parallel to the lines, and pinch out the attackers into an enclave. It happened again and again on the more mobile Eastern Front, and in the West the Germans *won* the big pushes of early 1918 which did them more harm than losing would have.

By the end of 1916 there were half a dozen or more text-book ways of taking trench lines. They all worked. You could use mines or tanks or gas or planes or rolling barrage or stormtroopers. Or the British equivalent to stormtroopers, which were Australians.

That last isn't meant as a joke. The most effective troops in the war (in any army) were the ANZACs, Canadians, and South Africans (even allowing for a little bit of Light Horseshit in the mythology) The reason they were disproportionately pushed into the front line wasn't that unimaginative British generals wanted to use them as cannon-fodder, it was that they were more likely to win than most other units were. Some units fought in battle after battle, while others lost hardly a man from one year's end to the other. British units with a history of taking (or standing) ground were also over-used. Which is why we hear so much about the Artist's Rifles and the Welsh Fusiliers. They really did have a hell of a war, and not just in Mametz Wood.

But once through what next? The anachronistic obsession (on both sides) with keeping the cavalry in being wasn't just the irrational sentiment of a generation of officers who had learned their business in small colonial wars. It was a desperate need to find some way to exploit a temporary advantage.

Which was why they tried Gallipoli, and why they tried to get Italy to invade Austria over the Alps, and why both sides kept on coming back to the Ypres Salient. It was the strategic key to the channel ports, which offered the British (with their overwhelming naval superiority) a possible route to Germany that went round the front, not through it.

Part of it is the perspective of the long view. When I was at primary school the first war was two or three times further back in the past than the second. Now it is only about third further away. As events recede into the past there is a feeling of drawing back in the landscape, smaller objects fade into the background, larger ones stand out more, like mountains looming beyond the hills.

Perhaps with further perspective the two World Wars, the Russian revolution and civil war, the Spanish civil war, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China, the colonial liberation wars, and the Chinese Revolution will all come to merge into one great mountain range of mutual slaughter in the first half of the Twentieth Century. But it was the First World War that started it. Here in northern Europe the Great War was the biggest event of our history since the Reformation.

1914 was When It Changed.

Since then no-one can pretend to believe in the Whig version of history, or in uncontaminated Progress, or that somehow we white Europeans and Euro-Americans are morally better or culturally more advanced or more rational or more civilized or in any way nicer than anyone else. We slaughtered each other, then we raised up a new generation of sons, then we did it again.

The Great War lies behind not only Dadaism and Futurism and Nazism but also the supposed Post-modernist rejection of all those isms. It is perhaps the main proximate cause of the triumph of western European secularism. The reason you Americans mostly go to church and we mostly don't. Maybe moral relativism won the war. Since 1914 we have known that, at least sometimes, we are the bad guys.

The same with Memorial Day - it is a day to remember soldiers who died, and the original connection to Union Civil War dead is forgotten.

Part of the decreased remembrance of WWI in the US may be the fact that it touched the US relatively lightly - it wasn't fought on our land, and unlike Canada and Australia, which were involved throughout the conflict, the US didn't enter the war until relatively close to the end, and didn't have soldiers engaging in the many years of stalemated trench warfare.

I'm Jewish, so I learned most of the WWII history that stuck with me in Hebrew school, from age 11-13 or so. That meant of course, a lot of Holocaust history: they took us to the Holocaust Museum, played us Schindler's List, gave us Anne Frank's diary to read. There's a lot of Holocaust and WWII fiction aimed at that age group, much of it about Jews in hiding and various resistance efforts. Very little of it was about the camps, but we learned that other ways.

I found out a few years ago that one of my great-uncles has a boxful of medals from his service in WWII, including a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He stormed a German machine-gunner's nest single-handedly, but he never talked about it afterwards; I only know because my mother found his letters of commendation.

Minor art-historical nitpicking: it's certainly true that Dadaism -- and Surrealism -- came out of World War One, but Futurism preceded it. Most of the Futurists were really excited by the prospect of the War; two of the most prominent (Boccioni and Sant'Elia) were killed fighting in it. Afterwards, several of the Futurists embraced Fascism. And "postmodernism" is really a phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s; much of we think of as "modern architecture", for example, really developed after WW1.

Used to be that way in South Africa (1970s high school) as well - industrialized war and the tragedy of Versailles. Interestingly not much on WWII, probably because the architects of apartheid (and, not coincidentally, the Official History Syllabus) were mostly enthusiastic Nazi-supporters. 11/11 was then marked with a minute's silence at noon, though I doubt it still is, as a different history has become important.

My AP English class, which normally burst into heated discussion at the end of any film, sat in stunned silence after NAF. Our teacher didn't say anything; he started to, but then decided it was better to let us think about it until we were ready to talk.

We never were. One by one, we silently walked out.

I don't think any of my high school history classes got much past the civil war, but college classes were much better. I read Robert Graves's autobiography "Goodbye to All That" in a "Europe in the Age of Total War" history class, and found it very educational. To me, Graves has enough of a modern mind to be able to explain to contemporary audiences how people thought shortly after the turn of that century.

That much evidence, and yet people will still tell that lie Eric quoted in #101: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. No, if you ask the ones who almost did, apparently not.

As I've skimmed these comments here, I haven't seen anyone mention this book. To say that it's one of my favorites is putting it lightly, so of course I wonder: has anyone else read it?

What disturbed me was that I was the only civilian watching the parade who saluted the flag when the color guard approached. I guess that's not being taught in schools any more...

Lori @ 112, my mother has memories of buying poppies during the interwar period in the US. She thinks they were sold by the VFW as a means of supporting vets, since there was no such thing as a Veterans Administration then.

Capt. Blackadder: Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing over the top of our trenches and walking slowly toward the enemy?

is simply incomplete. There was definitely some of that throughout the war, but even on the first day of the Somme, the canonical example, the British troops tried a number of different tactics, not all of which involved walking slowly across no-man's-land. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's The Somme goes into great detail on this issue (while not letting Haig get off scot-free).

As a pause from sorrow, I recommend _Three Men on the Bummel_, the knocking-round-Germany sequel to _Three Men on a Boat_, for an accidental view of how much more insulated from change the German aristocracy was than the English. Industrial barons in the UK must have gotten some imagination into the upper reaches of power.

I can still recite "In Flanders Fields" from memory; I learned it when I was, oh, nine. It was not uncommon then to see people wearing poppies on 11/11, and many people still called it Armistice Day.

My copy is one I bought in a secondhand bookshop. It dates to 1929, the year the English translation was first published. It is the *second* reprinting of Sepetember 1929, and the twentieth reprinting since the first print run, in March. The last line of the list of reprints is "Completing 300,000". In hardback.

Anne #27: 11/11 might have gained greater significance if the U.S. hadn't had its own slaughter, and established a memorial to it, 50 years before the Armistice. It's true the U.S. doesn't take a month to build up to the date; the Civil War did not wipe out villages the way WWI did, so the day had another reason not to acquire the shock and awe that it did around the Commonwealth.

I'm fascinated by the number of comments about finding poppies in the U.S.; I'd never seen the custom until being in the U.K. in October 1997. Maybe it's more common outside the northeast?

I see a number of comments edging around something that ought to be stated plainly: teaching the truth about the stupidity of WWI would be considered subversive in large parts of the U.S. The results are plain (the third of the country that still believes in Iraqi WMD) and self-perpetuating.

"I see the old men all tired sick and sore
Those weary old soldiers of an old forgotten war
And the young people ask me what are they marching for
Some days I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Mathilda
While the old men still answer the call
And year after year their numbers grow fewer
Someday no one will march there at all."

Those words are wrong in plain fact. Bogle was wrong. Flat, dead, undeniably wrong. And bloody gratuitously offensive to boot. The 'young people' he insulted are not as ignorant as he thinks - or possibly, not as much as he'd like them to be - and they prove it again every year.

Yes, old soldiers do die. They get fewer and fewer. But what they did and what they were will remain so long as we are a nation. And so long as we are, there will be a march, and people like Bogle can write whatever they like about it, no matter how insulting, churlish, graceless and untrue their words might be. That's freedom, isn't it?

"Did you think that we'd forget you mate
With the slow march of the years?
That as time passed, we'd wipe the slate
Of your sorrow and your tears?
Did you think we'd scorn your sacrifice
Find no honour in the debt?
When your lives paid our freedom's price
How then could we forget?"

But whether it was he or his character that was wrong is somewhat irrelevant, anyway. The words were wrong, and if Bogle did not mean them to be taken as authoritative, he was wrong to write them in the persona of a WW1 digger. They were also insulting - not to me, though I am offended by them - but to the present generation and those to come. "The young people" are not so ignorant, nor so ungrateful.

So every year when I see the memorials coming up over the great electronic cobweb I feel a bit like a student of the alien finding an aspect of another civilization which obviously means a lot to at least some people but which carry little emotional significance to myself. Maybe that's what you get in the 193rd year of armed peace.

The original:
"And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march,
Reviving old dreams of past glories
And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore.
They're tired old heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, what are they marching for?
And I ask myself the same question."

On a side note- "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" was released in 1972. Part of the original context was the refusal of the RSL to allow Vietnam veterans to march in Anzac Day parades.

Think about it.

In 1901 a British businessman bought oil concessions in the Abadan area on the Iranian side of the Shatt-al-Arab

Between 1907 and 1909 the Burmah Oil company, acting as a front for the British government, bought the drilling rights with money secretly given to it by the government, and set up the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP)

In 1913 the Churchill suggested that the government should buy a controlling interest in the company, in order to secure oil supplies for the Royal Navy. This was completed in June 1914.

Iraq, then ruled by Turkey (and usually called Mesopotamia in English) was just across the river from Abadan. The Brits already had large business interests in Basra, and the Shatt-al-Arab ws the key to exporting oil from Iran. As soon as the war started Britain sent troops to defend Abadan, part of supposedly independent and neutral Persia.

In November 1914 British troops landed at Faw near Basra and started the Mesopotamian campaign that led in the end to the estbalishment of a supposedly independent Iraq under British occupation.

How things change.

I personally don't belive that our current cock-up in Iraq was ever a war for oil. I suspect the real reasons we started it are a lot less sophisticated than that. But I can't blame anyone for thinking that the British would invade Iraq for oil - we already did it three time in living memory.

I return the respect, sir, but I remain of my own mind.

Baen Books is making this offer in recognition of Veterans Day, and all our disabled military veterans. ........

.......

...... Now, this service will be available at no cost to the disabled, who must apply for this privilege.

Applications will be processed by ReadAssist (www.readassist.org), a volunteer group devoted to helping disabled readers find the books they want in the form they need, and join the community of fandom. The application form has been set up by ReadAssist, and can be found through either WebScriptions or ReadAssist.

If you'd like to volunteer to help ReadAssist, please contact them at their website: query@readassist.org.

Emphasis added

Notice also there are many and varied ways to support PC's for the troops including especially speech control.

You can disagree with his phrasing, certainly, and I do Not find that verse of "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" one of his strongest moments of writing, but I think you're reading the wrong motivations into it, and giving it a less charitable spin than Bogle meant, either to the veterans or the younger generation.

Example: in the song, the younger generation ask what it's all about, and thus learn; just as some people above, in this very thread, have declared that they didn't learn WWI -- or didn't learn the important parts of it -- in school, it was almost passed over, less important than World War II. But, those same people, our fellow posters in this thread, did ask, like the young people in the song, and did learn. And they're here now talking about it.

I also think your final remark was an uncharitable view of your fellow posters, but you may have some cause for that ill feeling that I do not know; though i am a fellow poster, and I have disagreed with you in the past, and I do not recall intentionally disrespecting you (Though i may be wrong, in that i tend to be acerbic, or read as acerbic, withut meaning to be. I've been warned often I have "an edge".)

__________________________

I'm another one who didn't get a real grounding in World War I in high school, or in school at all. But in my case, I can explain it directly: My first History teacher in high school was a woman who sent a fair amount of the late 40s and early 50s working as a nurse or something like in Japan, and saw radiation burns and the like firsthand. We covered World War I as facts (the course covered from the turn of the 20th century to the end of World War II, with a lot of emphasis on Russia, and some damning things to say about McCarthyism even though we didn't really get that far officially.) But the thing she drilled home to us in vivid detail, gave us an idea of the emotional shock, was Hiroshima. I remember one class I actually had to leave the room to recover myself. So did she, in fact; she didn't stay inside when she showed us film clips.

My second history teacher had been a child when the details of the holocaust came out to the public. That, more than the war itself, or the nuclear bomb, or even the follow-up McCarthyism or the rise and atrocities of Stalin, was his formative experience, and so that was his emphasis, thoguh he covered the rest as well (He dealt with the Unifications of Germany and Italy respectively, up to the start of the 20th century, then jumped to WWII, and covered from there to the end of the Korean War. Odd way for the curriculum to be set up, to go back and forth so, but...). We heard a lot about anti-Semitism before the war, about the Jewish refugees being turned back, and about our own atrocities in how we treated the Japanese in our own camps, and the later slaughter mostly by starvation in Ukraine, but it all centred around the Holocaust. I didn't help by doing my focused paper on the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

My teachers taught their curriculum with the emotional emphasis, deliberately or unconsciously, on their scarifying experiences. I can't argue with that, I can't say they should have shown me better how World War I was as bad or worse.

As I remarked, I do not expect any particular respect in the sense of obsequious or overly-courtly address, and add that I do expect disagreement. But you are not in any way guilty of personal or general insult, which is all I object to. I would hope that I am not guilty of it, either.

In the late sixties, I was at an Anzac Day ceremony in Broome. They had a wonderful bugler, a man who made the Last Post sound like the mourning of angels. "Good, isn't he?" asked the bloke next to me, after we'd both wiped away tears. I nodded. "Well, he should be. He was Rommel's own bugler, you know."

I can't confirm that. He was definitely German, of the right age, and the long-billed cap he wore looked like Afrika Korps to me. Could be. Officially, I suppose he shouldn't have been at the parade, him being an ex-enemy combatant and all, and I agree that if he'd been Japanese, or SS, matters might have been different. But there he was.

So no, I don't think it was different then.

The old palais du basketball at the University of Kentucky was built partially as a war memorial, and included the name of every Lexington soldier who'd died in both World Wars, and maybe in some of the others, all on plaques spiralling up the concourse and entrance ramps. I remember noticing that there seemed to be a fair amount of names, but it never really hit home until years after I'd left, when I was taking a seminar on 20th-c British society.

We had a matched pair of children's books about WWI and WWII, and the haunting but excellent graphic charts they used to compare losses still stick with me - bar graphs composed of one 'man' glyph per million? people lost per country.

Does anybody recall a similar pair of books? I can (mostly) picture the covers, but "army pictures on a book in a thin hardback format" doesn't exactly provide any sort of defining characteristic.

xeger @ 137:

I don't recall the children's books, but IIRC my World Book Encyclopedia had similar bar graphs.