The 'Great' War

Field gunners loading shrapnel shells

I suppose I should have posted this yesterday, but I was having too mellow a day off to dip my head into thoughts of war. Yesterday was Veteran's Day, which used to be called Armistice Day. Yesterday (at 11 a.m., to be exact—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) marked the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI.

World War One—called "The Great [i.e., large] War" until there was an even greater one—was perhaps the most pointless catastrophe in modern human history. There was no reason for it to happen. It solved nothing. And no good came of it—many historians make the case that it laid the foundation for the rise of Hitler and WWII.

The human waste was utterly appalling. The Wikipedia page begins, "The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was about 40 million: estimates range from 15 to 19 million deaths and about 23 million wounded military personnel, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. The total number of deaths includes from 9 to 11 million military personnel. The civilian death toll was about 8 million, including about 6 million due to war-related famine and disease." It killed so many young men that males born from 1883 to 1900 were known as "The Lost Generation" in Great Britain.

The head of the German delegation that signed the Armistice
was murdered by right-wing German assassins in 1921

"Armistice" means truce, but the end of WWI was not a truce. It was a surrender. Yet, as one writer put it, if there was ever a war with no victor, WWI was it. Very little fighting occurred on German soil, and home-front propaganda was so relentless and pervasive that the surrender took the German population largely by surprise, planting the seeds of resentment and dark conspiracy theories about betrayals that surely contributed, at least indirectly, to the Holocaust. The head of the German delegation that surrendered to the vengeful French Field Marshall Foch, Matthias Erzberger, was murdered three years after the end of the war by members of an ultra-nationalist death squad—two former German naval officers—while he was out for a walk at a spa town in the Black Forest. The weapons of war were so brutal and the conditions so miserable that it marks the point at which all of humanity became aware of what's now called PTSD—in the 'great' war it was called shell-shock. The unending rain of explosives was as likely to unhinge soldiers' minds as blow them limb from limb. Roughly 60% of physical military casualties were caused by artillery.

 

As if relentless shelling wasn't bad enough, soldiers in the trenches had to deal with poison gas—the first widespread use of chemical warfare—which was so universally agreed to be inhuman that it later contributed to the establishment of the the Geneva Convention.

There are many great books about the First World War. Best of all might be Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August—although her book The March of Folly might actually be more pertinent. ("Folly" is beginning to be an old-fashioned word, known mostly to people who read—it means foolishness. The book chronicles four of the greatest examples of foolishness by governments. She didn't include WWI, probably because it was the subject of her masterpiece, but she could have.) Great books came out of the war, including Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front, Robert Graves' bitter but darkly comic memoir Goodbye to All That, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (Consider getting the illustrated edition.)

Veterans Day is a day to honor all veterans—the survivors of wars—but, as a separate occasion commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, the fictional veteran I can't help thinking of is Joe Bonham, the protagonist of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. I like reading books in pairs, and I'd pair that one with a book that is subtitled "The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier": U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's War is A Racket. He should know. He was a veteran.

Soldiers washing in a shell hole

Off to play pool! I put this together in two torrid hours of work—please forgive typos! I'll proofread, fact-check, and make corrections when I get back home. [UPDATE: Done now. I had a great time playing pool with my friends, some of whom are veterans. My friend Loyle's father Fred—Loyle is soon to turn 90—had the unusual distinction of serving every minute of both WWI and WWII, beginning way back when WWI broke out in 1914. —Ed.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Patrick: "Someone tweeted this link yesterday. It's quietly very striking, about a minute or two audio clip."

Mike replies: Wow. There are so many written accounts of those moments, many of them very moving.

V.i. Voltz: "It’s little known, but a great account of the First World War is Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune. Manning died at 53 in 1935, still wracked by the memory of the war."

Mike replies: The writeup says that Ernest Hemingway re-read that novel every year.

Thomas Rink: "The men who murdered Matthias Erzberger—Heinrich Tillessen and Heinrich Schulz—were members of the Organisation Consul (O.C.), a right-wing terrorist group. The O.C. was founded by Herrmann Ehrhardt, a former Captain of the Kriegsmarine (German Navy).

"In the winter 1918/19, the political and social situation in Germany was very unstable; in some of the major cities, workers and disbanded soldiers seized power and established soviet republics (most notably, in Munich). Among other cities, this happened in Bremen. In this situation, Captain Ehrhardt gathered 300 troops and overthrew the local soviet system. This was the origin of what should later become the infamous Brigade Ehrhardt, a Freikorps (militia).

"The problem for the Weimar Republic was that the Brigade Ehrhardt was not a singular case. Around 1919/20, there were dozens of militias which had tens of thousands of well-armed and battle-tested combatants. Initially, the social democrat German government under Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske relied on the Freikorps to quench leftist turmoils and soviet republics. But, what to do with these militias after the political situation had stabilized? It was not possible to integrate them into the Reichswehr (provisional army of the Weimar Republic), since the treaty of Versailles limited it to 100,000 troops. An attempt to disband them ended in the attempted coup d'etat by Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz in 1920 (in which the aforementioned Brigade Ehrhardt played an important role).

"After the coup failed, the Brigade Ehrhardt finally disbanded in April 1920. Some members, Ehrhardt among them, later founded the Organisation Consul.

"Given all this, the treaty of Versailles doomed the Weimar Republic from its very beginning. It provided the anti-republican extreme right-wing forces with a founding myth (Dolchstoßlegende, or stab-in-the-back legend—allegedly, the German army would have won the war wasn't it for politicians like Erzberger), and made it very difficult for the democratic government to properly disband all these armed militias."

John Krumm: "I have my grandfather's diary around here somewhere, where he described the excitement on the ship heading over, how good the food was. Like most diaries, the entries became shorter and shorter as the fight went on. One was just the date and 'Gas.'Here he is before shipping out:

"But he made it back and started a family in Medina, NY. Later, working as a state trooper, he was killed by a drunk driver."

AlexV.: "Tragically for the people of northeast France, WWI's legacy of killing continues. Due to the stagnant battlefields in muddy terrain, poorly implemented technology, and the sheer volume of the shelling, a large swath of the region is polluted with unexploded ordinance.

"On maps, is is the 'Red Zone.' Animals and plants now thrive amidst the scenery, but no one is supposed to walk in many of these places.

"In other areas the have been returned to agriculture, farmers regularly dig up so many shells that they now place them by the side of the road for disposal. This 'refuse' includes shells with still active gas agents. The casings are now rusted and brittle, hence one can crack them open like an egg to release the toxicity inside. In the papers, one apparently still reads of the unlucky farmer who ran into one with a tractor, or a member of a disposal unit who had an unlucky day.

"National Geographic put up this site, but it is one of many.

"Just as tragically, Laos is even worse, because that country is covered in cluster bombs ('bombies' in the local patois) dropped during the Vietnam war. (I am sure there are other regions with equally grim tales of land mines, etc.)"

Joe Holmes: "My grandfather was in the trenches in France for WWI. He was living in Pennsylvania at the outbreak and volunteered at age 16, lying about his age.

"But over there he was gassed and also lost one finger on his left hand to a shell that landed nearby. (I inherited his Purple Heart.)

"He never told any of his children about his time in the war. When they asked about his missing finger, he joked that he had accidentally bit it off when he was eating a slice of pie. As far as I can tell, I was the only one who ever heard him say what really happened.

"In the trenches, he was so frightened that he promised God that he'd become a minister if he survived, and when he returned from the war, he went to a seminary and became an Episcopal priest, the rector of our town church for more than 30 years until he retired in 1970. He died only two years later at age 72—his lung cancer may have resulted from that early exposure to poisonous gas in France."

James Symington: "I spent a four years in the British Territorial Army (National Guard equivalent) as an artillery command post officer. As part of the training we were put in a bunker, on Salisbury Plain, with tiny, very thick perspex windows looking out over an impact area just outside. We were then subjected to a battery firing different kinds of 155mm shells at us. Even in the absolute safety of this bunker the concussion of the shells going off 10 yards away was breathtaking. I cannot imagine what months or years of it felt like whilst sitting in a muddy, open bunker."

Chuck Holst: "I once met a soldier of the Great War. It was 1966, and it was in a laundromat at 9th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. He might have been in his early 70s, but he seemed older to me at the time—I was 22. As I recall, he just started talking about the war out of the blue, about the gas attacks and how so many of his friends and comrades had died in the war. I didn't know what to say to him, but I think he really just wanted someone to listen to his story, someone to serve as an excuse to talk about it. The war was still very much present for him 48 years after the events. I wish I had taken the time to sit and talk with him and hear more of his story, but I probably had things to do."

Comments

[Rube39]

Interestingly enough, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front, is a good read in English. In the original German, it is regarded as most kitsch and cliche.

[Andrew Lamb]

Thanks for this, Mike. You've mentioned some interesting books on WW1. With regards to films on the subject, I'd like to mention Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion.

The scene when Jean Gabin says in German 'Lotte has blue eyes' is one of the most moving of all time.

[Chris]

WW1 is a constant reminder that war can a happen even when all logic dictates otherwise. The globalized interconnections of trade among the great powers meant they should have had no interest in war, but it does bear remembering that very few people expected the war to last that long (although there were some who guessed correctly). Most felt the war would be swift like the Franco-Prussian or Austro-Prussian war. No one seemed to think of the American Civil War and take note. It is a very interesting to wonder why. Even more incredible is that the Nazis were happy (and I use this word intentionally) to start all over again. Even Robert Graves, I seem to remember, was an active and at the time a not unenthusiastic warrior, although later on after the war he seemed more affected. In present times we have to be aware that prickly nationalism can lead to catastrophic consequences (US "versus" China comes to mind).

[Rick in CO]

Barbara Tuchman's books are a fantastic read, scholarly researched and well-written! I re-read A Distant Mirror every couple years for re-enlightenment on why people wanted to escape the political and religious oppression of 14th century Europe for the New World. The Zimmerman Telegram complements The Guns of August in showing the sheer arrogance of the German Government. Stillwell and The American Experience in China reveals our governments' hypocrisy and is the prelude to The March of Folly's chapter on the Vietnam War.
Particularly interesting in The Guns of August is that the British and French Military developed plans in the early 1900's to defend an anticipated German invasion of France. Do things ever change?

[Лазо]

History repeats itself over and over much to the dismay of students of history and those of us with long memories. Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" is a good reminder of how ignoring the obvious and oneupmanship with a lot of ego and little horse sense has gotten in the way of pragmatism and coming to a simple solution. Over and over again these strong egos with little temperance has let the the little conflict grow to the point of no return and no backing down to a common-sense resolution to solve the issue. "...Folly" shows that time and time and time again from the Trojan war more than 3300 years ago to the 1970s and Viet Nam. Today, that history is repeating itself.

With her "Guns of August", the beginning salvos of "The Great War", Tuchman continues pretty much on the same theme of a little transgression here, a little transgression there and soon egos get in the way of logic and it all goes to hell in a hand basket, and the folly continues into the conflict, death, destruction and solving little to nothing.

Another book expanding on "Guns..." is Scott Anderson's "Lawrence in Arabia", expanding upon the concept of Folly and expanding its reach by several years before "Guns..."

All three books lead to a scary scenario that seems to as though we are living these vary same days as recorded by Tuchman and Anderson but a century later.

I hope I'm not right but with my memory and study of history, I'm almost certain the cycle will continue again and again...

[John]

When I was at university in the UK, I had access to the boat club's records. There were extensive notes from the WW1 period concerning the fates of the members from years just previous. One year, I don't remember exactly which (this was over 50 years ago now), not a single member of the first VIII survived. There were serious losses from at least two other years.

[Richard Nugent]

Tour any of the small villages that dot the English countryside and one can get a measure of the impact WWI had on the nation. Typically, there is a memorial statue on the commons that lists the names of the thirty to fifty or more war dead from the small community that probably numbered no more than a few thousand. Most villages have been preserved as they were a hundred years ago, so as one reads those names and looks around, it is easy to imagine the devastating emotional, social and economic impacts such losses would have had in that more simple time.

[Jeremy T]

I would add Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That which ranks alongside All Quiet On The Western Front, for its description not only of the hellishness of trench warfare but also how it destroys the mind.

[Thanks Jeremy, but that WAS one of the books I mentioned! I guess you missed it. --Mike]

[Tom Bell]

My grandfather Andrew fought at Gallipoli as a doctor. However the “war to end all wars “ left him as one of doctors incharge of the evacuation from Dunkirk , and then in Korea.

The plan didnt work.

Much as I love the black and white images of James Ravilious and Chris Chapman . In a way however those images of the first world war always look from another universe.

Peter Jackson has produced a wonderful film ...”They shall grow not old.”

He has coloured the black and white film and brilliantly lip sinked the silent film. It brings the horror and humour and everything into something poignant and immediate. A brilliant and unique contribution. A wonderful tribute to his family members who fought. Good on him. A truly inspiring film.

[Kev]

Lovely post Mike.

Another book to add to the list, which is incredibly moving, is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Horse-Michael-Morpurgo/dp/1405226668

[robert e]

I haven't seen it yet, but Peter Jackson's film "They Shall Not Grow Old", featuring footage from the war restored and digitally enhanced with color and sound, is receiving much acclaim, seemingly accomplishing the director's purpose:

'I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more - rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film... There's been lots of documentaries made on the First World War...and I just decided for this one to strictly just use the voices of the guys that fought there... It's not the story of the war. It's the story of the human experience of fighting in the war.'

As far as I know, WWI was the first industrialized war--the obscene scale and speed of destruction and death enumerated above was made possible by the technological and economic developments of the second industrial revolution, and made much worse by its novelty.

[robert e]

P.S. US release date for Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old is December 17.

[Richard Khanlian]

Thank you for this post, Mike. We need to be reminded that what we now call "Veterans Day" was originally called "Armistice Day" and celebrated the end of a senseless and brutal war. The British poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action just one week before the Armistice was signed, captures the madness in his poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est":

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

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.

[SteveW]

Another excellent book on WWI:

https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-How-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0061146668/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542044360&sr=8-1&keywords=the+sleepwalkers+how+europe+went+to+war+in+1914

[Richard Tugwell]

As well as prose, don't forget the poetry that emerged from WWI. Owen, Sassoon etc. Also, the work of Ivor Gurney, gassed in the trenches and traumatised, who in my opinion composed the best songs in the English art song idiom

[John]

For a more up to date version of Tuchman’s book “The Guns of August” try Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers” or Margaret McMillan’s strangely titled “The War That Ended Peace”. The best summary of how and why the first world war ended is McMillan’s “1919”.

[KeithB]

I recently finished Keegan's "The First World War", an encyclopedic treatise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keegan

[Tom Burke]

"The War that ended Peace", by Margaret Macmillan (Professor of Intenrational History at Oxford, among other posts), is a recent and pretty-much definitive account of how first Europe and the many other parts of the world stumbled into the Great War. Recommended.

The truly worrying thing is that I can see parallels between then and now.

[Kaemu]

A couple of other books are worth a mention: “Her privates we” by Frederic Manning and “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger (who later served in occupied France). The first is anovel, but I think it’s quite good and the second is biographical and, in my recollection, different in tone (if that’s the right word) from similar works coming out of that war.

Also interesting is “Now it can be told” by Philip Gibbs who was one of the four officially accredited British correspondents on the western front, and, as the book title indicates, published a more complete version of his experience a few years after the war ended.

I grew up in France, where, especially in the northern “départements”, the scars from that war are still in evidence.

[Paul De Zan]

Dan Carlin's "Blueprint for Armageddon" podcast on the war is very good and appropriately punishing listening. It's available at all the usual outlets free: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/

[Daniel]

There would be few wars if Politicians kids were the first to go into combat.

[Soeren Engelbrecht]

For those musically inclined: The album “A Feast of Consequences” by Scottish singer/poet Fish (Derek W. Dick) contains the 25 minute “High Wood” Suite (5 songs) about the atrocities of WWI. As far as I remember, he had grandfathers fighting on both sides of that war.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3kdceBquJDqC01yWN5jCnO?si=KL-Ev2j6T_2g-AE3mLsxXQ

[Richard Parkin]

Several times each winter I take a winding private road up to a windy old hilltop in the Yorkshire Dales to pursue my sporting pastime. Near the top one passes a tiny WW1 Memorial (https://www.walkingwiththetaxidriver.co.uk/the-walks/leeds-pals-ww1/leeds-pals-long-walk-to-the-somme-colsterdale/) to the Leeds Pals Battalion who trained there before going to France. It’s all sheep pasture again but you can still the outlines of the huts they lived in, see: https://binged.it/2RPDfhz . It’s not the “Somme” but it must have been damned uncomfortable. When they got to the battle of the Somme the battalion casualties, sustained in the few minutes after Zero, were 528 men, of which 248 were killed.

[H Bernstein]

Two more must reads are:

https://amzn.to/2OA12QF

Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier ( https://amzn.to/2OA12QF ), the least known of the three great anti-war novels to come out WWI: All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque, and The Good Soldier Svejk ( https://amzn.to/2OC93EI ), by Jaroslav Hasek. Available in translation from the Czech, The Good Soldier Svejk introduces us to the archetype of the wise-fool soldier, popularly portrayed in another war as Sargent Schulz in the film Stalag 17 and the tv comedy Hogan's Heroes.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 ( https://amzn.to/2FgCblv ), Adam Hochschild, which highlights the opposition to the war in Britain and the terrible toll that the war took on the social fabric as well as on combatants.

[Bill Mitchell]

Thanks Mike. For once this was a really good, informative, and appropriate off-topic post.
(Too bad the "powers" that got us into 'afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, etc, paid no attention to history).
Apparently we will never learn.

[Julian Behrisch Elce]

Yes, but let's all read:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836

Just to keep things in perspective. If I’m anywhere close to the average age of this blog’s readership, the things many of us learned about WW1 have undergone 30-odd years of scholarship since.

Yes, it was an awful event, but not as uniquely or monolithically or insanely as we learned.

["Many soldiers enjoyed WW1. If they were lucky they would avoid a big offensive, and much of the time conditions might be better than at home. [...] Many young men enjoyed the guaranteed pay, the intense comradeship, the responsibility and a much greater sexual freedom than in peacetime Britain." If I were you I wouldn't take that "debunking" article as your sole authority, Julian. Historical consensus and a wide variety of viewpoints need to go into a more measured appraisal. --Mike]

[Alun J. Carr]

You missed two books (both set in the Austro-Hungarian forces):

* The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek:

https://goo.gl/D17V14

* Radetzky March by Joseph Roth:

https://goo.gl/n9f1iT

The first parodies the chaos of the system, and unfortunately the author drank himself to death before completing it. The second chronicles the death of Empire and its social hierarchy, at least to a degree. Listen to Mahler while reading them.

[Eolake]

I’m not ashamed to admit this: I love the books by Maude Montgomery, starting with Anne of Green Gables. The last book in that series is different, in that it takes place during the Grand War, and it’s also alone in being just fokkin depressing. (Still a good book though, that chick could really write.)

- Eolake

[Stan B.]

Speaking of ol' Smedley, most Americans are not even aware of the coup that was plotted against President FDR; a coup that may have very well occurred had it not been for Smedley, a coup that many would anxiously dispose into the conspiracy bin- had it not been made a matter of Congressional record!

https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a

https://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr

[Walter Glover]

"There was no reason for it to happen. It solved nothing. And no good came of it—">/i>

To the contrary, I feel that for many of us in other parts of the globe, the most notable achievement of the wasteful carnage was the seemingly abrupt end of European colonial and imperial control of far flung dominions.

Walter

[Yonatan K]

Thank you (and subsequent posters) for the suggested reading!

Responding to one or two of the posts above... The problem that I see with Santayana's line, `those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', is that it misses an important point: we (humanity) often repeat history despite remembering it. The real problem as I see it is that our ability (i.e., technological prowess) grows much faster than our wisdom, possibly due to chronic short-sightedness in combination with our innate self-centeredness.

[Julian Behrisch Elce]

Thank you so much for showing my comment. It certainly isn’t my only source of information about WW1. But that article and a lot of other sources should at least suggest to us that WW1 wasn’t just running through mud in Belgium. We know that most soldiers didn’t fight in the trenches. They were cooks, mechanics, ostlers, clerks, quartermasters, drivers, artillerymen, pilots, and so on. They fought mobile campaigns in Italy, Prussia, Eastern Europe, and around the world. Yes, the experience of combat is horrible, but we won’t avoid more if we just piously repeat old narratives.

[Bob F.]

It's been years since I read it, but another good first hand account of WWI is Guy Empey's "Over The Top." For a brief time, I considered narrating a recorded book version of it. In one unforgettable passage, Guy recalls the leg of a casualty sticking out of the side of his trench and how it seemed to writhe in his imagination. What a horrific image...

[misha]

FIFY: (post by Walter)

"There was no reason for it to happen. It solved nothing. And no good came of it—"

[Ade]

Coming at the run-up to WWI from another angle, Miranda Carter's "The Three Emperors" (2009) is an entertaining yet disturbing account of the lives of George V, Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas, and the outcome of Queen Victoria's theory that close, ideally familial, relationships between monarchs could guarantee peace between their nations. Perhaps this might have been true if the individuals in question had not been so starkly flawed and isolated from reality. For the present day reader, there are also some fairly blatent parallels to be drawn between the unstable behaviour of Wilhelm and that of a current world leader.

[Dennis Moyes]

Hi Mike,

Your friend must be older than 90 if he served in both wars. I hope he writes a memoir! I second Dan Carlin's series Blueprint for Armageddon as required listening!

[It was his dad who served in both wars. 1890-1988 were his dad's dates of birth and death I think, something close to that. --Mike]

[Paulo Bizarro]

If only Mankind would learn from such lessons... another disaster, that may have been a consequence of WWI, was the so-called Spanish flu, that also killed in the millions.

[Andrew Lamb]

"The first parodies the chaos of the system, and unfortunately the author drank himself to death before completing it."

Sadly, the same fate also befell Joseph Roth.

[Rick in CO]

The TV show Babylon Berlin is an interesting, if fictional, piece on post-WWI Weimar Germany. Looking for more on this intriguing time period of history.

[Severian]

In the category of never learning from history, consider that one of the main reasons France was so insistent on war reparations after WW I was that reparations were forced on them at the end of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war by Prussia. What goes around, comes around and "an eye for an eye" leaves everybody blind.

Mike, thanks for this post - I think WWI is critical to understanding the rest of the 20th century. Nearly every conflict of the rest of the century has its roots in what came out of WW I.

[Richard Tugwell]

I echo the recommendation for Joseph Roth's Radetzky March. Apart from the historical backdrop it's a great and moving personal drama. One of the few books I have re-read several times.

[Lynn]

I recommend viewing the work of Otto Dix, who savagely illustrated the futility of the war, and life in the trenches.

[EvanG]

Some soldiers accounts that haven't yet been mentioned:

The WWI Diary of Ernst Jünger - the diaries kept
by the author of Storm of Steel

Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918

And We Go On - Will R. Bird:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22210279-and-we-go-on

Le Feu/Under Fire - Henri Barbusse:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4380

[Doug C]

The audio recording of the guns falling silent was interesting and quite moving. I had no idea that they fell quiet at that one moment, very odd.

But the Metro story about it was quite odd, "Strangely, audio couldn’t be recorded at the time so the Allies created them using ‘sound ranging, which recorded the intensity of noise to photographic film (a seismograph for earthquakes is a good comparison)."

Of course we all know audio was being recorded at the time. I would not have guessed that optical recording would be what they would have used. I associate optical recording with sound tracks on films. Indeed I paid quite a bit of money to have one made for a 16mm film I made, and crummy sound it was and is. But they didn't have magnetic recordings at the time. I suppose cutting a disc, classic analog sound, would have been a problem in the trenches, what with the dirt and all.

Interesting how modern writers seem to have so little reference about the technology of the time.

[Tim Bradshaw]

I live in a country (the UK) which was deeply affected by the great war: my grandfather fought in it, and my grandparents' & parents' generation were enormously changed by it. I can remember, very clearly, old men marching past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and find it deeply strange to have lived through the time when it passed out of living memory. I spent much of Sunday standing in the rain watching people lay wreaths: it was convenient it was raining as tears are less apparent.

Nevertheless I think it is important to remember that while the great war was uniquely horrible, it is not even close to being the worst catastrophe of the 20th century in terms of death toll. The great war killed 15-19 million people. The second war killed more than 60 million. The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic ('Spanish flu') killed somewhere between 50 and 150 million people. More people died in the US from the 1918-1920 'flu than died in the second war.

Almost certainly I have missed some 20th century event which killed more people than the great war.

Our impressions of the relative severity of these events are, I think, extremely unreliable. In the UK we're biased because many more people died here in the first war than the second, even including civilian casualties, so we tend to think of the first war as worse than the second. Russians would have a very different opinion. We need to remember that people who don't live close by are also people.

[Bear.]

Um, Mike, a 90 year old could not have served in the whole of a war that ended 100 years ago - typo? [read it more carefully --Mike] But I bet your friend's father can remember Armistice day marches by CIVIL war veterans - the last died in the mid-1950s - and it ain't so long ago...

I second Frederick Manning's 'Middle Parts of Fortune' as a great book about WWI (a forgotten Australian classic) - I have a Folio Society edition (I think still in print) with a lovely introduction by David Malouf (another great Australian writer).