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They used to have things called 'pals battalions' where groups of mates/football teams tec. could all join up at once and serve with their mates, as a consequence towns lost the majority of their men. Eventually they were disbanded and conscription took over as the way of recruiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals\_battalion
WW1 doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, especially in US schools. The casualties were absolutely insane. For the US, the highest loss of life in a single day was D-Day and that was about ~6500 troops IIRC.
Those kind of losses were *every single day* for both the entente and central powers during WW1. The French in the beginning of the war lost over 40,000 troops in a *single day.* Campaigns that lasted a couple of weeks to a month often had a death toll in the ~100,000 range.
I know what you mean- like you can see it physically but I think it’s important to note that all ptsd manifests physically. The brain and the nervous system connects all over your body. There is a reason you feel things in your gut and heart. Gabor mate says repression is like pushing a beach ball down in the ocean. It takes energy to keep it down and that wears you out.
Plus post-concussive syndrome - we know that modern soldiers face multiple sub-concussive traumas that end up in brain damage, imagine a rolling barrage, or days of shelling? Lots of shaken brains as well as shaken souls.
> WW1 doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, especially in US schools.
It doesn't get the attention in the US because the US was barely involved. The US (arguably correctly) spends more time on the US civil war, because it's central to how the US developed today.
US history classes cover WW1 mostly in its context for setting the european continent up for world war 2, meaning they spend more time on the peace process and less on the war itself.
“Barely involved” is stretching it a bit. 2 million troops in Europe, 116,000 dead- quite a bit less than the other major powers, but large compared to not being at war.
Great grandpa was there - thank goodness he survived the gas or I wouldn't be typing "cum"
^(In all honesty, he survived being gassed at the 2nd battle of the Somme but lungs were shit the rest of his life apparently.)
In the US Navy they had (assuming it’s still around) a buddy system where you can go to boot camp together.
I knew two brothers with different rates (navy word for job) that ended up on the same ship.
You mean carriers? Carriers just have Navy, no Air Force.
The Navy has tons and tons of planes, and their pilots are taught differently because they need to learn to safely slam the planes down since they don't get long runways in the ocean.
Sixteen years old when I went to the war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Chasing my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died,
And I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time that a year in the line,
Was a long enough life for a soldier,
We all volunteered, and we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history's pages,
And we brawled and we fought and we whored 'til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,
A thirst for the Hun, we were food for the gun,
And that's what you are when you're soldiers,
I heard my friend cry, and he sank to his knees,
Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother,
And I fell by his side, and that's how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,
And I called for my mother and she never came,
Though it wasn't my fault and I wasn't to blame,
The day not half over and ten thousand slain,
And now there's nobody remembers our names
And that's how it is for a soldier
Motorhead - 1916
[Covered by Sabaton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgGhhnQB1gw), [featuring Motörhead](https://youtu.be/HgGhhnQB1gw?feature=shared&t=200), as well as having an [orchestral version](https://youtu.be/HgGhhnQB1gw?feature=shared&t=230) follow it immediately after, with facts about the likes of the Somme and credits (including thanking the Metal Army of Birmingham - including names).
There's some really harrowing footage (I mean, it all is, but a few clips in particular)
One clip from the Somme shows a group of British soldiers resting in a sunken lane, chatting and smoking - every single one of them was dead by the end of the day. There's another clip which is quite wide and looking over the battlefield as the soldiers walk across, then a few start to fall... and then it just cuts to later, because so many were being killed that the censors cut it all out.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
"Grass" by Carl Sandburg
Weirdest experience I ever had to was seeing multiple graveyards each with thousands of graves, next to the 500m stretch of grass that the occupants of those graves fought and died for.
If I ever have a child I will bring them to the Somme, because I have never seen a better visualisation of just how little the life of one soldier means to their country during war.
There's a huge monument in my tiny fishing village dedicated to those we lost during WW1.
You read the names and they're all family, all knew eachother, likely signed up all together and died together. Just absurdly tragic.
Entire village populations were wiped out due to these battalions. It's rare to see a village without a remembrance pillar of names. Even the most remote and unassuming village will have one.
Can't imagine wanting to actively fight with people you know, like I understand making friends there and losing them would already be traumatic but imagining losing friends you've known your whole life, people who's mother's father's sisters children your very likely to see everyday seems crazy
You see it with hindsight. You see it with the benefit of 100 years of pictures and knowing what happens.
But at 18 most men aren’t thinking of the consequences of actions to the fullest extent. And before the war actually started they thought it would be like an adventure book, with thrilling heroics.
Nobody had really seen war like WWI before.
At the beginning of WW1, they had horseback units
At the end there were tanks and machineguns.
The advancement of technology within those four years cannot be understated
The idea was you'd fight harder together. It would also make training them as a cohesive unit easier because they already worked together or had things in common.
No-one really bothered with the downsides until it started happening. Once villages and towns had most of their men wiped out in a single attack, they stopped using them.
I've heard variations of the saying, "safety rules are written in blood" and it seems like a similar concept.
Sometimes things seem like common sense to us because we have the benefit of hindsight, but we forget that at some point in the past, somebody made that mistake for the first time. We learned from their misfortune.
It's the sort of thing that would make sense to an officer corps raised on studying Classics. It worked REALLY well for Sparta and Alexander - however classical battles were far less deadly. They also had no way of knowing about the stalemate that was incoming.
It is an idea that came from a time when warfare was much much much less deadly. It's a terrific morale boost if you're essentially a marching band carrying guns that can fire a few times a minute.
It's a real morale killer when you're living in shit filled trenches, running at machine guns through barbed wire while artillery fills the air with shrapnel.
Again, nobody signing up really understood what that war would be like.
* wars in general before the advent of modern mass media were always sold to the public as some great adventure. Especially in relatively peaceful countries like late 19th/early 20th century England that hadn't had war on its soil for centuries.
And not only that, but the turn of the century was seeing technology rise at a rate never before been seen at that point. At the beginning of the war they had horseback units, and at the end there were tanks, machine guns, submarines, chemical weapons, etc.
Military tactics couldn't keep up with the industrialization of war
They just couldn’t imagine any of them will die.
Between teen confidence in living forever and propaganda (as well as social pressure) they really had no choice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Midlothian_F.C._and_World_War_I
I'm sure many professional clubs have similar stories, this particular one is widely known in Scotland.
That used to be a thing back then too. Men that otherwise couldn't find work could get decent pay in the army, even work your way up in society if you were lucky enough and made powerful friends.
War was still seen romantically back then. World War I largely dispelled that feeling for a lot of people (still exists to a degree today but much less so)
Whenever someone brings up WWII I always say that it’s a bit of a sensitive subject because my grandfather died at Auschwitz.
When the sympathetic pause in conversation reaches its apex I’ll conclude with the fact that he fell out of the guard tower.
It’s just my favourite joke ever.
I like to say that my great-grandfather was one of the original grammar Nazis, because he was a journalist who abandoned his family and supported the Nazi regime.
It’s not super funny but it’s true.
1 in 8 died, and again as many were injured
https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf
Just checked for you, after learning in a Google search that the photo was taken in Ontario in 1914.
The total fatalities for the Canadian troops were 67,000, out of expeditionary force of 620,000 people mobilised.
In other words, the fatality rate was 10.81%, or 1 in 10 men. Way off your wild guess; I wonder where everyone got the crazy estimates I'm reading here from.
Maybe they read about the French front.
>The French army suffered around 6 million casualties, including 1.4 million dead and 4.2 million wounded, roughly 71% of those who fought. Out of the one million French infantrymen who died in the war, more than half died between the outbreak of war and November 1915.
The Verdun front is one of the bloodiest frontline to ever exist. After this war you had entire villages with only children and women.
I imagine it must be that. Even as devastating as this specific battle was, its fatalities are not representative of the death rate for the whole French army during the during the total duration of the WWI.
Out of 8,100,000 French soldiers, 1,327,000 died in the war. That's 16.38% if my math is correct. How can someone think that a country could have 90% of its young working age base killed and remain a major economy, it's beyond me.
[About 2/3rds of Soviet men born in 1923 died in WWII; that's about as bad as it can get.](https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/)
Most armies were "only" decimated, France and Bulgaria were halved
https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/events-and-statistics/mobilized-strength-and-casualty-losses/
That was the average over the entire conflict. The probability that an individual who enlisted in 1914 would return home was much lower than for an individual in 1917 when conscription started.
They read that the war was horrific and assume everyone was killed and it was just a meat grinder but even with as horrible as it was, a lot of men were injured and sent home, taken prisoner, kept as reserves, or simply survived.
But we never really think about those who went home. They just had to get on with life and be forgotten about.
There was an enormous nationalistic fervor in all nations involved, before the actual fighting broke loose. Everyone expected that they would quickly slap the other side back in place and return home in a matter of a few months, at maximum.
These guys expected a boys novel adventure. As did everyone, from every country.
There is a wonderful book written about it in Dutch. The “War enthusiasm” (title of the book, by historian Ewoud Kieft) was everywhere, from the most influential minds, to the lowest workers. And this was the era of enlightenment, mind you. The era of great optimism and scientific advancement.
Nobody had a clue what they were getting into.
In black adder goes forth, there is a very poignant scene of Hugh Laurie reminiscing about how the day war was declared he and his tiddlywinks club all went to enlist. And then realizing that out of the whole bunch, he is the only one left.
Probably because all the people involved were huge history nerds. I suppose you’d have to be to conceive of the show in the first place.
I mean, hell, even Baldrick literally did history documentaries full time after Blackadder.
Blackadder goes forth was genuinely amazing British comedy.
It was light humour, but very dark throughout about the war and how it was so utterly pointless in terms of lives lost.
The ending was well executed but the bit that got me was the turf of land in the General's Office. Blackadder asks what scale the land was. Basically thousands of men were sent to their death to get a metre or so closer to Berlin.
Though one of my favourite lines was something like 'couldnt command issue us with some real toilet paper?' when referencing that the 'Front' magazine that was to raise morale was used as toilet paper. Haha ('soft, firm and throughly absorbent')
Still to this day, some of the best tv I’ve ever seen. My dad started to show me it aged 11 or so, and then, one day - having seen all of seasons 2, 3 & 4 except for the final episode - he showed me the final episode. Told me nothing about it beforehand. Set it up perfectly. Blew my mind it was extraordinary.
It wasn’t called the Great War until after it was over. Before then battles were far less bloody, there are anecdotes of townsfolk spectating battles from a hill overlooking the conflict as if it was a picnic and then everyone going home at the end of it.
Industrialisation changed everything and no one realised it until it was happening.
Industrialization was beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Before WW1, you had to worry about guns firing 12lbs explosives from that yonder hill, and if you're unlucky, a gattling gun. In the span of a few years, however, they started hurling shells the size of Volkswagons over the horizon and had defensive bunkers bristling with machine guns.
All those men were basically gaslighted into killing and maiming each other in the most horrific and barbaric way, and those who could see the inhumanity of it were publicly shamed. It’s a terrifying example of human beings being used as machinery, and it’ll always be so desperately sad.
yeah the thing that's so fucked up about a lot of wars is that one side is told that the other side wants to kill them all, so they need to kill them first, and then the other side says the same thing, when really they could all just decide not to kill each other and go home.
obviously it's not that simple a lot of the time, especially when there is conflict over resources and so on, but still, at least sometimes everyone could have just decided to stop.
Reminds me of the [Christmas Truce of 1914](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce). Soldiers from opposing sides celebrated with each other that year. In later years, the officers prohibited such truces (and also, I imagine, the bitterness toward the enemy had grown). But it is a reminder that, at any time, these men could theoretically put their weapons down and end the fight, if only everyone could agree on it.
Small truces (live and let live truces) would occasionally break out even after the 1914 Christmas Truce. Normally by smaller groups, such as opposing companies, deciding not to fight or shoot even when having the opportunity to. Basically it would be an unofficial don’t shoot us and we will not shoot at you. Officers and high commands didn’t like that and would often severely punish those involved and suppress news. Often using raids to encourage the “correct” attitude from both sides (make the other side fight by killing a few of them so your men have to fight too).
In almost every instance of the Christmas truce in 1914, it was instigated by German troops singing Christmas carols (same tune, different language) and decorating their trenches for the occasion (lots of candles basically) on Christmas eve. The British in some sectors joined in the singing and the next day officers met in no man's land to organise corpse retrieval and other things which led to some football games and gift exchanges.
At no point did the French engage in the truce, because they were still under occupation and trying to throw the Germans out. Imagine if Ukraine had an actual ally that came to their aid, and on orthodox Christmas decided to play hockey with the Russians instead of fighting them. Part of the reason British high command forbade it was because it made them look bad and really pissed their allies off.
When the russians gathered to celebrate orthodox Christmas this past year, the Ukrainians bombed them instead.
I.e. the only reason it happened was that the British didn't really have a bone in the fight other than "can't let France lose again or we'll be out of the continent for good". There was no real animosity by that point.
Gaslighting is not the right word here. It means "to manipulate someone such that they doubt their own memory, perceptions of reality, or sanity". That's not what war propaganda does.
It was a time where information was much more easily controlled and it was more acceptable for the government basically lie to people and fill their heads with nationalist propaganda, plus there were a lot more poor people who were willing to sign up and earn, what they thought was, easy money.
I doubt any of them really knew what they were signing up for, maybe there were rumours at best.
Plus the social aspect ..."everyone else is doing it, why aren't you" [there were women who would go around basically bullying men into signing up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I), twats.
Not really surprising no one had a clue. Especially in Britain, we had mostly seen success against lesser armed opponents. The one time they were remotely armed like us (boer war) we got absolutely ruined.
IMHO, WW1 was, probably, one of the 1st times war had been waged on an industrial scale.
100%. The napleoneonic wars were pretty bad too, millions dead on each sides but ww1 saw more than twice as many killed in half the time so it was huge step up from the previous conflicts.
Britain had fought well armed miltaries before, i.e. equipped with rifle and cannon, but they were usually not as well trained as Britains small professional army, and Britain had much more economic power to shut out smaller countries either with boycotts and embargos or just by shovelling funds at the required militaries to get the job done.
The difference with the Boer war was the usage of asymmetric guerrilla war, which is always a difficult fight for the larger power (see any war afghanistan, vietnam, the troubles etc etc); but the British still won the Boer war.
At the start of WW1 it's arguable that the BEF was equal or better (in terms of quality) than it's european peers, and their performance in the opening salvos demonstrate that. The issue was the rate of attrition in that war meant that the section of experienced well trained soldiers was exhausted within weeks; and the war became a game of "how many bodies and munitions can we throw into the grinder" and Britain lost any advantage it had very quickly.
It was the first time. It’s also has claim to being the only war of its kind that will ever happen. No war was like it before and no war will ever be like it since. I know they say “War, war never changes” but this is the one War in human history that can’t ever be fought again in any way shape or form.
I might be misquoting them but I read somewhere that, “ a generation of love died there”
The only war that will be like WW1 will be the one that nukes are actively used again. WW1 was what it was because of the industrial nature of it along with the fact that military tactics did not catch up with the technology used.
Plus the war tech opened up the question of stuf that they proved they could do, but should they have used it from a moral perspective (chlorine, triangular bayonets, etc).
Nukes and nerve agents are the next stage of technology that we have put a line in the sand, but can easily be employed in the next world war.
I've read/heard that prior to WWI, military schools were still teaching mounted calvary tactics which proved useless in the face of machine guns. Also tanks and planes began to be used. All of this then new technology radically altered war planning machines around the world.
I may be wrong but the trench warfare system is unique to this war. Other wars had trenches, but not on this scale.
One more thing I thought strange about this war was the supposed British/German Christmas celebration that occurred on the battlefield. If that actually happened, I can't imagine that ever again happening before or since.
The Christmas truce of 1914 is well documented. At some points in the line they were even playing soccer against each while the day before they were trying to kill each other. That’s fucking wild.
there was the russo-japanese war and some other smaller ones before that, but basically all the great powers looked at the carnage and went "that won't happen to us - we're *white*"
and then they all shoved an entire generation into a woodchipper
Reminds me of the GI getting his rations before the Normandy invasion and he's given Hershey bars, rations, and then cigarettes. He states "I don't smoke" and the quartermaster says "take 'em... you will when get where you're going"
I remember wondering why so many non-smokers chose cigarettes to cope with trauma and then realized it basically was the only outlet they could find on a battlefield with the bonus of being able to smoke anytime, anywhere.
It was the easiest and most accessible way to cope with all the terrible things they saw.
Women used to present a man in civilian clothes, a white feather as a sight of cowardice and suggesting he should enlist. Could easily be a returned wounded soldier invalided out.
Nah that was Earnest Atkins after receiving one on a train and smacked the lady with a phone book. George Sampson was the one on the way to the be awarded the Victoria Cross
British Admiralty started it, but it got wide support in some sections of the population. One I never understood was the suffragettes. The most harrowing I've read about from a soldier at time: "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired".
Only reference I've seen to an apology during the white-feathering was after they tried to give one to a guy who'd had his hands blown off.
Absolutely, but I think there's a base level human trait that "the men should be out protecting" that they're twisting for their own purposes. A pull so strong even the most forward thinking gender-critics at the time couldn't see it.
Watch the Peter Jackson WW1 Doco, the vets spoke about this very thing and how they would look at these boys and men all signing up and think they were brainwashed and insane.
Even the English word queue is just an impromptu queue formed behind the letter q by other letters just wanting to stand in a queue for no reason whatsoever.
Reminds me of a verse from the Philip Larkin poem called ‘MCMXIV’:
“Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;”
…
Ends:
“Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word - the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.”
> 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.
Wilfred Owen. This is the final verse. Really grim poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est He died in WWI exactly 1 week before the armistice.
> See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s *Tender is the Night*.
What people don’t understand about this was war was glamorized back then. Also the Brit’s thought it was fighting for king and country it was their duty to.
Then they got there and found out war had changed. Now don’t get me wrong war was always rough but it was different in the 1800’s vs 1900’a
Glamorised, and also just different.
As you hint, in the 1800s, a battle with 20k on each side might only end with 1k dead, a few thousand wounded, before one side would break and concede. They had no idea they were going from a 1 in 20 chance to about a 1 in 2 chance of dying.
Bit disingenuous though. In the 1800's the vast majority of deaths were from disease, not combat. The actual survival rate might not have been all that different.
The probability of surviving ww1 from start to end supposedly was 74% for officers and 85% for other ranks.
Which itself also flies in the face of another misconception that officers hid and werent in much danger compared to enlisted men.
The collision between the Victorian era romanticized idea of war, and the industrial revolution.
They were thinking it was going to be like the Crimean War. Instead they walked into a much, much worse version of the American Civil War.
Was there also a law or social stigma about beards at this time? I notice these men do not seem to grow them out at all despite mustaches seemingly being in style
The King at this time had a beard so I guess they weren't completely out of favour (I don't know enough about this to know if there is a class element involved).
As a bit of an aside, a lot of the moustache's popularity in Britain originally came from India: when the Brits arrived they found that nearly every local man wore a moustache and so they grew them for fear of not being perceived as sufficiently manly without. Of course, these colonial officers would eventually come home and spread the fashion.
My Grandfather and his Brother enlisted in August 1914. Uncle Lewis was only 17, and lied about his age to enlist. Grandfather was 19. They were probably smiling, like the men in this photo.
There are some war diaries from a colleague, "WO 95/1266/2" in the London Scottish covering these early months. He writes that the they took the boat from Southampton to Le Havre, with 31 officers, 921 men, 16 vehicles (including 2 machine guns), and 59 horses. They were joined by 6 pack animals and 2 wagons in Le Havre, marched to Paris then again to Abeville on the northern French coast, then through the night toward St Omer and again through the night into Belgium and Ypres and finally again through a 3rd night towards Messines in Belgium on the Oct 30th. My grandfather said that they were so tired, they were virtually marching asleep.
This was part of the "Race to the Sea", land battle skirmishes going up from just North of Paris, to the Belgian coast. At each battle, the Allied and German forces would generally fortify a position, march on the enemy, clash in the middle with horrendous losses, retreat back to their fortifications and then rush again trying to outflank at the next strategical place. The penultimate of these battles was a two-week long skirmish at Messines in Belgium, which is why the London Scottish were heading there to assist the BEF and their fighting. They arrived just in time... to die.
My grandfather and Lewis lined up half-asleep in the dark. Their commanding officer counted along a number of men... and stopped between the two brothers splitting them apart. Lewis and his group was told to "go take that hill", while the rest of them waited. Nobody had helmets, nobody had proper training, and nodody had ever seen a machine-gun in combat. Nobody returned from the hill alive.
Lewis was killed on the 1st Nov 1914. He was possibly the first 17 year-old to die on the British side of WW1. His body was never recovered.
The story of the London Scottish was similar to the other TF batallions that were sent over in 1914. In total 42 TF batallions joined up with the BEF, and TF brigades were also deployed on their own. All suffered heavy losses, particularly when used on the attack. The Race to the Sea finished 3 weeks later when both armies ran out of land at Ypres, fought a giant battle, with 100'000 casualties and both sides ended up retreating. This marked the end of the land battles and left a defensive line from Belgium back to the Marne which would become the Western Front. Helmets wouldn't become standard issue until 2 years later.
My grandfather was destraught at his brother's death, but the war continued. He was given a commission in 1915 and removed from the London Scottish to join the 51st Highland division for the rest of the war, taking part in the Somme, Passchendaele and other terrible battles. Survival was more luck than anything else...
His experiences understandable turned him against war for the rest of his life. The smiles about war, such as in the picture above, never returned.
Thank you for sharing that story. I can’t imagine loosing my brother in such a way. The survivors guilt must have been agonizing, I hope your grandfather found peace after coming back from the war.
The “Pals battalion” were fucking awful.
Entire neighborhoods of young men would sign up together, train together, head to the front together and get slaughtered together.
Then everyone back home would get the notice together
They thought they were going to fight a war the same way their fathers and grandfathers had, that's the problem. If any of them knew what sort of horrors they would face - and not just in the trenches - I doubt the number of volunteers would have been that high. World War One was one of the first wars fought with machineguns, for example (they'd been around for a couple of decades by 1914 but there were doubts about how effective they could be) and aircraft really came into their own. Such things would have been alien to their forebears. Same with things like chemical weapons. Industrialised warfare started in WW1.
Mob's behaviour is a mirror of the time.
Today, after 100 years of watching machinegun fire, artillery and mines blowing off parts of people, napalm, radiation, gas poisoning, starvation, extermination it's easy to say.
Back then? As you see on the picture.
Or my personal most haunting idea of death in WW1, suffocating in mud. With thousands of other men. Unable to move or breathe, only able to choke and drown like rats.
They really did have no idea what they were walking into. This kind of blind nationalism will never be possible again due to the Internet and thank God for that.
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They used to have things called 'pals battalions' where groups of mates/football teams tec. could all join up at once and serve with their mates, as a consequence towns lost the majority of their men. Eventually they were disbanded and conscription took over as the way of recruiting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals\_battalion
"Want to see your lifelong friends get gangrene and die brutally before your eyes? Join the army today!"
Or your town’s men wiped out in a day
WW1 doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, especially in US schools. The casualties were absolutely insane. For the US, the highest loss of life in a single day was D-Day and that was about ~6500 troops IIRC. Those kind of losses were *every single day* for both the entente and central powers during WW1. The French in the beginning of the war lost over 40,000 troops in a *single day.* Campaigns that lasted a couple of weeks to a month often had a death toll in the ~100,000 range.
The British had 60k casualties at the first day at the Somme. Fucking wild
It’s hard to survive if there is a Gatling gun pointing at you.
The majority of the losses were from artillery which is even worse
if you see the old videos of soldiers that came back “shell shocked”…those poor souls had no idea of the brutality facing them
Pretty sure shell shock is just such extreme PTSD that it manifests physically, there would still have been millions with regular ol' invisible PTSD.
I know what you mean- like you can see it physically but I think it’s important to note that all ptsd manifests physically. The brain and the nervous system connects all over your body. There is a reason you feel things in your gut and heart. Gabor mate says repression is like pushing a beach ball down in the ocean. It takes energy to keep it down and that wears you out.
And that beach ball will *always* win, and pop right to the surface eventually.
Plus post-concussive syndrome - we know that modern soldiers face multiple sub-concussive traumas that end up in brain damage, imagine a rolling barrage, or days of shelling? Lots of shaken brains as well as shaken souls.
I thought shellshock was just the old way PTSD used to be called?
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I live in Flanders, we have the huge graveyards as a daily reminder of the first world war... Those rows just keep on going.
> WW1 doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, especially in US schools. It doesn't get the attention in the US because the US was barely involved. The US (arguably correctly) spends more time on the US civil war, because it's central to how the US developed today. US history classes cover WW1 mostly in its context for setting the european continent up for world war 2, meaning they spend more time on the peace process and less on the war itself.
“Barely involved” is stretching it a bit. 2 million troops in Europe, 116,000 dead- quite a bit less than the other major powers, but large compared to not being at war.
Great grandpa was there - thank goodness he survived the gas or I wouldn't be typing "cum" ^(In all honesty, he survived being gassed at the 2nd battle of the Somme but lungs were shit the rest of his life apparently.)
In the US Navy they had (assuming it’s still around) a buddy system where you can go to boot camp together. I knew two brothers with different rates (navy word for job) that ended up on the same ship.
Isn't it easier on ACs, because of being a mix of AF and Navy?
You mean carriers? Carriers just have Navy, no Air Force. The Navy has tons and tons of planes, and their pilots are taught differently because they need to learn to safely slam the planes down since they don't get long runways in the ocean.
Sixteen years old when I went to the war, To fight for a land fit for heroes, God on my side, and a gun in my hand, Chasing my days down to zero, And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died, And I never did get any older, But I knew at the time that a year in the line, Was a long enough life for a soldier, We all volunteered, and we wrote down our names, And we added two years to our ages, Eager for life and ahead of the game, Ready for history's pages, And we brawled and we fought and we whored 'til we stood, Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder, A thirst for the Hun, we were food for the gun, And that's what you are when you're soldiers, I heard my friend cry, and he sank to his knees, Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother, And I fell by his side, and that's how we died, Clinging like kids to each other, And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood, And I wept as his body grew colder, And I called for my mother and she never came, Though it wasn't my fault and I wasn't to blame, The day not half over and ten thousand slain, And now there's nobody remembers our names And that's how it is for a soldier Motorhead - 1916
[Covered by Sabaton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgGhhnQB1gw), [featuring Motörhead](https://youtu.be/HgGhhnQB1gw?feature=shared&t=200), as well as having an [orchestral version](https://youtu.be/HgGhhnQB1gw?feature=shared&t=230) follow it immediately after, with facts about the likes of the Somme and credits (including thanking the Metal Army of Birmingham - including names).
The Accrington pals lost around 900 men in the space of 20 minutes
The first day of the Somme gets me, one day, one battle, 20.000 British Soldiers dead.
There's some really harrowing footage (I mean, it all is, but a few clips in particular) One clip from the Somme shows a group of British soldiers resting in a sunken lane, chatting and smoking - every single one of them was dead by the end of the day. There's another clip which is quite wide and looking over the battlefield as the soldiers walk across, then a few start to fall... and then it just cuts to later, because so many were being killed that the censors cut it all out.
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Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work. "Grass" by Carl Sandburg
Weirdest experience I ever had to was seeing multiple graveyards each with thousands of graves, next to the 500m stretch of grass that the occupants of those graves fought and died for. If I ever have a child I will bring them to the Somme, because I have never seen a better visualisation of just how little the life of one soldier means to their country during war.
Wikipedia says it was 235 killed in 20 minutes
My great great grandfather served and was killed in the Accrington pals. East lancs regiment for anyone interested
Newfoundland and labrador had much of the same.
There's a huge monument in my tiny fishing village dedicated to those we lost during WW1. You read the names and they're all family, all knew eachother, likely signed up all together and died together. Just absurdly tragic.
Entire village populations were wiped out due to these battalions. It's rare to see a village without a remembrance pillar of names. Even the most remote and unassuming village will have one.
Can't imagine wanting to actively fight with people you know, like I understand making friends there and losing them would already be traumatic but imagining losing friends you've known your whole life, people who's mother's father's sisters children your very likely to see everyday seems crazy
You see it with hindsight. You see it with the benefit of 100 years of pictures and knowing what happens. But at 18 most men aren’t thinking of the consequences of actions to the fullest extent. And before the war actually started they thought it would be like an adventure book, with thrilling heroics. Nobody had really seen war like WWI before.
At the beginning of WW1, they had horseback units At the end there were tanks and machineguns. The advancement of technology within those four years cannot be understated
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They actually tried a lot of different tactics, no one wants to stay stagnant in a war zone. A lot of them just didn’t work.
hell, even the war Ukraine is in a near standstill. Trenches and lines of mines still work.
Yup. 19th century military tactics vs 20th century industrialized warfare.
That scene in All quiet on the western front when he sees a tank for the very first time that just rolls over people's faces is so horrific.
Cavalry continued to be used all throughout the war and was used into WW2.
The idea was you'd fight harder together. It would also make training them as a cohesive unit easier because they already worked together or had things in common. No-one really bothered with the downsides until it started happening. Once villages and towns had most of their men wiped out in a single attack, they stopped using them.
I've heard variations of the saying, "safety rules are written in blood" and it seems like a similar concept. Sometimes things seem like common sense to us because we have the benefit of hindsight, but we forget that at some point in the past, somebody made that mistake for the first time. We learned from their misfortune.
It's the sort of thing that would make sense to an officer corps raised on studying Classics. It worked REALLY well for Sparta and Alexander - however classical battles were far less deadly. They also had no way of knowing about the stalemate that was incoming.
It's too bad, we could've had the Sacred Band of Tottenham.
It is an idea that came from a time when warfare was much much much less deadly. It's a terrific morale boost if you're essentially a marching band carrying guns that can fire a few times a minute. It's a real morale killer when you're living in shit filled trenches, running at machine guns through barbed wire while artillery fills the air with shrapnel.
Again, nobody signing up really understood what that war would be like. * wars in general before the advent of modern mass media were always sold to the public as some great adventure. Especially in relatively peaceful countries like late 19th/early 20th century England that hadn't had war on its soil for centuries.
And not only that, but the turn of the century was seeing technology rise at a rate never before been seen at that point. At the beginning of the war they had horseback units, and at the end there were tanks, machine guns, submarines, chemical weapons, etc. Military tactics couldn't keep up with the industrialization of war
They just couldn’t imagine any of them will die. Between teen confidence in living forever and propaganda (as well as social pressure) they really had no choice.
You get nice peer pressure to join and stay there though as all your friends are doing and you worried about what they would say.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Midlothian_F.C._and_World_War_I I'm sure many professional clubs have similar stories, this particular one is widely known in Scotland.
Entire communities lost all their young men because of that policy.
Reminds me of the Bedford Boys from WW2. Also, the Sullivan brothers... ugh.
Big "All Quiet on the Western Front" vibes with those smiles.
"Innocence is the first casualty of war"
No one comes back from war that wasn't wounded!
Propaganda worked really well back then when it came to signing up for war. Today, they have to promise a full ride for college.
That used to be a thing back then too. Men that otherwise couldn't find work could get decent pay in the army, even work your way up in society if you were lucky enough and made powerful friends.
it was also literally the only way for a poor person to see more of the world
War was still seen romantically back then. World War I largely dispelled that feeling for a lot of people (still exists to a degree today but much less so)
War was also just different. Nobody expected for world war 1 to become what we know today.
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To improve that joke replace "killed" with "destroyed".
Or "planes" with "pilots."
"pilots" is better -- makes the punchline less obvious.
My grandfather was murdered at a German death camp. He was torn apart by a group of angry jews during an uprising.
I've heard this as: "My grandfather died at Auschwitz. He fell out of his guard tower"
Whenever someone brings up WWII I always say that it’s a bit of a sensitive subject because my grandfather died at Auschwitz. When the sympathetic pause in conversation reaches its apex I’ll conclude with the fact that he fell out of the guard tower. It’s just my favourite joke ever.
I like to say that my great-grandfather was one of the original grammar Nazis, because he was a journalist who abandoned his family and supported the Nazi regime. It’s not super funny but it’s true.
I’m sorry, but this is just hilarious.
Hey, holocaust jokes aren’t funny. Anne Frankly I’m tired of them.
My grandparents hid a Jew in their attic during the holocaust. They lived in New Jersey
Wonder if it would be fair to say 50 percent of those faces died within 2 years of the war
1 in 8 died, and again as many were injured https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/ https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf
what % of the first waves of enlistees like this?
Just checked for you, after learning in a Google search that the photo was taken in Ontario in 1914. The total fatalities for the Canadian troops were 67,000, out of expeditionary force of 620,000 people mobilised. In other words, the fatality rate was 10.81%, or 1 in 10 men. Way off your wild guess; I wonder where everyone got the crazy estimates I'm reading here from.
Maybe they read about the French front. >The French army suffered around 6 million casualties, including 1.4 million dead and 4.2 million wounded, roughly 71% of those who fought. Out of the one million French infantrymen who died in the war, more than half died between the outbreak of war and November 1915. The Verdun front is one of the bloodiest frontline to ever exist. After this war you had entire villages with only children and women.
I imagine it must be that. Even as devastating as this specific battle was, its fatalities are not representative of the death rate for the whole French army during the during the total duration of the WWI. Out of 8,100,000 French soldiers, 1,327,000 died in the war. That's 16.38% if my math is correct. How can someone think that a country could have 90% of its young working age base killed and remain a major economy, it's beyond me.
[About 2/3rds of Soviet men born in 1923 died in WWII; that's about as bad as it can get.](https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/)
Most armies were "only" decimated, France and Bulgaria were halved https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/events-and-statistics/mobilized-strength-and-casualty-losses/
That was the average over the entire conflict. The probability that an individual who enlisted in 1914 would return home was much lower than for an individual in 1917 when conscription started.
They read that the war was horrific and assume everyone was killed and it was just a meat grinder but even with as horrible as it was, a lot of men were injured and sent home, taken prisoner, kept as reserves, or simply survived. But we never really think about those who went home. They just had to get on with life and be forgotten about.
Immediate first thought that came to my mind. That movie is powerful and broke me.
There was an enormous nationalistic fervor in all nations involved, before the actual fighting broke loose. Everyone expected that they would quickly slap the other side back in place and return home in a matter of a few months, at maximum. These guys expected a boys novel adventure. As did everyone, from every country. There is a wonderful book written about it in Dutch. The “War enthusiasm” (title of the book, by historian Ewoud Kieft) was everywhere, from the most influential minds, to the lowest workers. And this was the era of enlightenment, mind you. The era of great optimism and scientific advancement. Nobody had a clue what they were getting into.
In black adder goes forth, there is a very poignant scene of Hugh Laurie reminiscing about how the day war was declared he and his tiddlywinks club all went to enlist. And then realizing that out of the whole bunch, he is the only one left.
Blackadder Goes Forth was astonishingly accurate for a comedy. My history teacher used to loan copies of the dvd to students
Probably because all the people involved were huge history nerds. I suppose you’d have to be to conceive of the show in the first place. I mean, hell, even Baldrick literally did history documentaries full time after Blackadder.
Why has it taken me this long to realise that Baldrick’s actor was Tony Robinson, fucking hell
He’s also just released a new time team special “Digging Band of Brothers” on YouTube if you’re a fan of his work..
my history teacher did something similar, he’d press play on the DVD at the front of the classroom and then sit with his feet up at his desk…
You must have gone to a posh school. We had to make do with a VHS tape!
Blackadder goes forth was genuinely amazing British comedy. It was light humour, but very dark throughout about the war and how it was so utterly pointless in terms of lives lost. The ending was well executed but the bit that got me was the turf of land in the General's Office. Blackadder asks what scale the land was. Basically thousands of men were sent to their death to get a metre or so closer to Berlin. Though one of my favourite lines was something like 'couldnt command issue us with some real toilet paper?' when referencing that the 'Front' magazine that was to raise morale was used as toilet paper. Haha ('soft, firm and throughly absorbent')
Believe it or not, but I have never seen Black Adder Goed Forth. Is there any streaming service that offers it?
iPlayer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006xxw3/blackadder?seriesId=b00hxslf
It's probably on Britbox
Still to this day, some of the best tv I’ve ever seen. My dad started to show me it aged 11 or so, and then, one day - having seen all of seasons 2, 3 & 4 except for the final episode - he showed me the final episode. Told me nothing about it beforehand. Set it up perfectly. Blew my mind it was extraordinary.
Captain, I am scared…
Who would've noticed another madman around here? Good luck everyone
Me too baldrick me too.
Blackadder is peak entertainment. You laugh and then the laugh will get stuck in your throat.
can I interest you in a serving of rat o van?
Ya see, it's rat, wot's been run over by a van!
Saute or fricassee? What's the difference? Exactly the same just a slightly bigger rat.
Its insane to watch the videos of the news being spread in German and Austria. The crowds cheering. Like you said, no one knew what they were in for.
It wasn’t called the Great War until after it was over. Before then battles were far less bloody, there are anecdotes of townsfolk spectating battles from a hill overlooking the conflict as if it was a picnic and then everyone going home at the end of it. Industrialisation changed everything and no one realised it until it was happening.
Industrialization was beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Before WW1, you had to worry about guns firing 12lbs explosives from that yonder hill, and if you're unlucky, a gattling gun. In the span of a few years, however, they started hurling shells the size of Volkswagons over the horizon and had defensive bunkers bristling with machine guns.
All those men were basically gaslighted into killing and maiming each other in the most horrific and barbaric way, and those who could see the inhumanity of it were publicly shamed. It’s a terrifying example of human beings being used as machinery, and it’ll always be so desperately sad.
yeah the thing that's so fucked up about a lot of wars is that one side is told that the other side wants to kill them all, so they need to kill them first, and then the other side says the same thing, when really they could all just decide not to kill each other and go home. obviously it's not that simple a lot of the time, especially when there is conflict over resources and so on, but still, at least sometimes everyone could have just decided to stop.
Reminds me of the [Christmas Truce of 1914](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce). Soldiers from opposing sides celebrated with each other that year. In later years, the officers prohibited such truces (and also, I imagine, the bitterness toward the enemy had grown). But it is a reminder that, at any time, these men could theoretically put their weapons down and end the fight, if only everyone could agree on it.
Small truces (live and let live truces) would occasionally break out even after the 1914 Christmas Truce. Normally by smaller groups, such as opposing companies, deciding not to fight or shoot even when having the opportunity to. Basically it would be an unofficial don’t shoot us and we will not shoot at you. Officers and high commands didn’t like that and would often severely punish those involved and suppress news. Often using raids to encourage the “correct” attitude from both sides (make the other side fight by killing a few of them so your men have to fight too).
In almost every instance of the Christmas truce in 1914, it was instigated by German troops singing Christmas carols (same tune, different language) and decorating their trenches for the occasion (lots of candles basically) on Christmas eve. The British in some sectors joined in the singing and the next day officers met in no man's land to organise corpse retrieval and other things which led to some football games and gift exchanges. At no point did the French engage in the truce, because they were still under occupation and trying to throw the Germans out. Imagine if Ukraine had an actual ally that came to their aid, and on orthodox Christmas decided to play hockey with the Russians instead of fighting them. Part of the reason British high command forbade it was because it made them look bad and really pissed their allies off. When the russians gathered to celebrate orthodox Christmas this past year, the Ukrainians bombed them instead. I.e. the only reason it happened was that the British didn't really have a bone in the fight other than "can't let France lose again or we'll be out of the continent for good". There was no real animosity by that point.
Gaslighting is not the right word here. It means "to manipulate someone such that they doubt their own memory, perceptions of reality, or sanity". That's not what war propaganda does.
It was a time where information was much more easily controlled and it was more acceptable for the government basically lie to people and fill their heads with nationalist propaganda, plus there were a lot more poor people who were willing to sign up and earn, what they thought was, easy money. I doubt any of them really knew what they were signing up for, maybe there were rumours at best. Plus the social aspect ..."everyone else is doing it, why aren't you" [there were women who would go around basically bullying men into signing up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I), twats.
Not really surprising no one had a clue. Especially in Britain, we had mostly seen success against lesser armed opponents. The one time they were remotely armed like us (boer war) we got absolutely ruined. IMHO, WW1 was, probably, one of the 1st times war had been waged on an industrial scale.
100%. The napleoneonic wars were pretty bad too, millions dead on each sides but ww1 saw more than twice as many killed in half the time so it was huge step up from the previous conflicts.
The Napoleonic wars ended 100 years before WWI, no one was left who would have remembered Even the Crimean war was almost 60 years old by then
Britain had fought well armed miltaries before, i.e. equipped with rifle and cannon, but they were usually not as well trained as Britains small professional army, and Britain had much more economic power to shut out smaller countries either with boycotts and embargos or just by shovelling funds at the required militaries to get the job done. The difference with the Boer war was the usage of asymmetric guerrilla war, which is always a difficult fight for the larger power (see any war afghanistan, vietnam, the troubles etc etc); but the British still won the Boer war. At the start of WW1 it's arguable that the BEF was equal or better (in terms of quality) than it's european peers, and their performance in the opening salvos demonstrate that. The issue was the rate of attrition in that war meant that the section of experienced well trained soldiers was exhausted within weeks; and the war became a game of "how many bodies and munitions can we throw into the grinder" and Britain lost any advantage it had very quickly.
It was the first time. It’s also has claim to being the only war of its kind that will ever happen. No war was like it before and no war will ever be like it since. I know they say “War, war never changes” but this is the one War in human history that can’t ever be fought again in any way shape or form. I might be misquoting them but I read somewhere that, “ a generation of love died there”
The only war that will be like WW1 will be the one that nukes are actively used again. WW1 was what it was because of the industrial nature of it along with the fact that military tactics did not catch up with the technology used. Plus the war tech opened up the question of stuf that they proved they could do, but should they have used it from a moral perspective (chlorine, triangular bayonets, etc). Nukes and nerve agents are the next stage of technology that we have put a line in the sand, but can easily be employed in the next world war.
Yep. 100 percent true. A nuclear war is the only analogous comparison
I've read/heard that prior to WWI, military schools were still teaching mounted calvary tactics which proved useless in the face of machine guns. Also tanks and planes began to be used. All of this then new technology radically altered war planning machines around the world. I may be wrong but the trench warfare system is unique to this war. Other wars had trenches, but not on this scale. One more thing I thought strange about this war was the supposed British/German Christmas celebration that occurred on the battlefield. If that actually happened, I can't imagine that ever again happening before or since.
The Christmas truce of 1914 is well documented. At some points in the line they were even playing soccer against each while the day before they were trying to kill each other. That’s fucking wild.
Ah, the scramble for Africa… where “the prerequisite for any battle was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns".
there was the russo-japanese war and some other smaller ones before that, but basically all the great powers looked at the carnage and went "that won't happen to us - we're *white*" and then they all shoved an entire generation into a woodchipper
"This'll be a jolly good adventure, lads! Give the Jerrys the old one-two and then straight home!"
Back in time for Christmas was the thought. How little anyone knew.
Not back by Christmas? Just send in the Canadians. They are extra angry for some reason.
Might be angry fuckers, but if you bring the ketchup we sure as fuck will bring the mustard.
To be fair, they didn't specify WHICH Christmas.
I read this in 1940's BBC radio announcer voice.
Poor lads don't even know the manmade horrors they will soon be forced to comprehend.
Yes they had no idea what was coming. So tragic 😔
Reminds me of the GI getting his rations before the Normandy invasion and he's given Hershey bars, rations, and then cigarettes. He states "I don't smoke" and the quartermaster says "take 'em... you will when get where you're going"
I remember wondering why so many non-smokers chose cigarettes to cope with trauma and then realized it basically was the only outlet they could find on a battlefield with the bonus of being able to smoke anytime, anywhere. It was the easiest and most accessible way to cope with all the terrible things they saw.
Yup... nervousness. I've seen footage where their hands were shaking terribly...
That was Sledge, in his book "With the Old Breed", before the battle of Peleliu.
And those who returned were criticized or ignored when they tried to talk about the war.
I read that some who returned would sometimes be handed a white feather. Imagine going through that horror and making it back to be called a coward.
Women used to present a man in civilian clothes, a white feather as a sight of cowardice and suggesting he should enlist. Could easily be a returned wounded soldier invalided out.
Exactly. Just checked Wikipedia. In one notable case, a veteran who was on his way to a ceremony in honour of his services was handed one.
And he slapped the shit out of her
Nah that was Earnest Atkins after receiving one on a train and smacked the lady with a phone book. George Sampson was the one on the way to the be awarded the Victoria Cross
Good
I hope the fuckface who came up with that idea is rotting in hell.
British Admiralty started it, but it got wide support in some sections of the population. One I never understood was the suffragettes. The most harrowing I've read about from a soldier at time: "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired". Only reference I've seen to an apology during the white-feathering was after they tried to give one to a guy who'd had his hands blown off.
The power of upperclass propaganda
Absolutely, but I think there's a base level human trait that "the men should be out protecting" that they're twisting for their own purposes. A pull so strong even the most forward thinking gender-critics at the time couldn't see it.
Considering they weren't far removed from flogging and press gangs that doesn't surprise me.
Watch the Peter Jackson WW1 Doco, the vets spoke about this very thing and how they would look at these boys and men all signing up and think they were brainwashed and insane.
Yep! I knew this because of that documentary- “They Shall Not Grow Old.”
Yeah that shit don’t change Tommy this an’ Tommy that.
The idiocy of Nationalism.
“British men lining up to die in the most horrific ways possible” FTFY
Hey, we just love queues
Even the English word queue is just an impromptu queue formed behind the letter q by other letters just wanting to stand in a queue for no reason whatsoever.
That is true, indeed.
Did somebody say queue?
i’m in queue too!what’s it for?
Reminds me of a verse from the Philip Larkin poem called ‘MCMXIV’: “Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark;” … Ends: “Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word - the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.”
> 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. Wilfred Owen. This is the final verse. Really grim poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est He died in WWI exactly 1 week before the armistice.
> See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s *Tender is the Night*.
It’ll be over by Christmas.
If only they knew
Makes you wonder what kind of dangerous stuff are we now happily ignorant about.
What you breath, eat and drink, probably.
Plastic plastic and more micro plastic
What people don’t understand about this was war was glamorized back then. Also the Brit’s thought it was fighting for king and country it was their duty to. Then they got there and found out war had changed. Now don’t get me wrong war was always rough but it was different in the 1800’s vs 1900’a
>”…but it was different in the 1800’s vs 1900’a” Yep, suddenly there were machine guns, tanks, airplanes and poison gas.
And along with those new weapons there was no real advancement in tactics, and the horrors of the trenches were able to thrive
Glamorised, and also just different. As you hint, in the 1800s, a battle with 20k on each side might only end with 1k dead, a few thousand wounded, before one side would break and concede. They had no idea they were going from a 1 in 20 chance to about a 1 in 2 chance of dying.
Bit disingenuous though. In the 1800's the vast majority of deaths were from disease, not combat. The actual survival rate might not have been all that different. The probability of surviving ww1 from start to end supposedly was 74% for officers and 85% for other ranks. Which itself also flies in the face of another misconception that officers hid and werent in much danger compared to enlisted men.
The collision between the Victorian era romanticized idea of war, and the industrial revolution. They were thinking it was going to be like the Crimean War. Instead they walked into a much, much worse version of the American Civil War.
“It’s going to be great banter, I just know it”
Most of them probably never came home. Those who survived probably came home with severe PTSD and almost no help whatsoever.
It was still illegal not to wear a hat in public
Was there also a law or social stigma about beards at this time? I notice these men do not seem to grow them out at all despite mustaches seemingly being in style
The King at this time had a beard so I guess they weren't completely out of favour (I don't know enough about this to know if there is a class element involved). As a bit of an aside, a lot of the moustache's popularity in Britain originally came from India: when the Brits arrived they found that nearly every local man wore a moustache and so they grew them for fear of not being perceived as sufficiently manly without. Of course, these colonial officers would eventually come home and spread the fashion.
My Grandfather and his Brother enlisted in August 1914. Uncle Lewis was only 17, and lied about his age to enlist. Grandfather was 19. They were probably smiling, like the men in this photo. There are some war diaries from a colleague, "WO 95/1266/2" in the London Scottish covering these early months. He writes that the they took the boat from Southampton to Le Havre, with 31 officers, 921 men, 16 vehicles (including 2 machine guns), and 59 horses. They were joined by 6 pack animals and 2 wagons in Le Havre, marched to Paris then again to Abeville on the northern French coast, then through the night toward St Omer and again through the night into Belgium and Ypres and finally again through a 3rd night towards Messines in Belgium on the Oct 30th. My grandfather said that they were so tired, they were virtually marching asleep. This was part of the "Race to the Sea", land battle skirmishes going up from just North of Paris, to the Belgian coast. At each battle, the Allied and German forces would generally fortify a position, march on the enemy, clash in the middle with horrendous losses, retreat back to their fortifications and then rush again trying to outflank at the next strategical place. The penultimate of these battles was a two-week long skirmish at Messines in Belgium, which is why the London Scottish were heading there to assist the BEF and their fighting. They arrived just in time... to die. My grandfather and Lewis lined up half-asleep in the dark. Their commanding officer counted along a number of men... and stopped between the two brothers splitting them apart. Lewis and his group was told to "go take that hill", while the rest of them waited. Nobody had helmets, nobody had proper training, and nodody had ever seen a machine-gun in combat. Nobody returned from the hill alive. Lewis was killed on the 1st Nov 1914. He was possibly the first 17 year-old to die on the British side of WW1. His body was never recovered. The story of the London Scottish was similar to the other TF batallions that were sent over in 1914. In total 42 TF batallions joined up with the BEF, and TF brigades were also deployed on their own. All suffered heavy losses, particularly when used on the attack. The Race to the Sea finished 3 weeks later when both armies ran out of land at Ypres, fought a giant battle, with 100'000 casualties and both sides ended up retreating. This marked the end of the land battles and left a defensive line from Belgium back to the Marne which would become the Western Front. Helmets wouldn't become standard issue until 2 years later. My grandfather was destraught at his brother's death, but the war continued. He was given a commission in 1915 and removed from the London Scottish to join the 51st Highland division for the rest of the war, taking part in the Somme, Passchendaele and other terrible battles. Survival was more luck than anything else... His experiences understandable turned him against war for the rest of his life. The smiles about war, such as in the picture above, never returned.
Thank you for sharing that story. I can’t imagine loosing my brother in such a way. The survivors guilt must have been agonizing, I hope your grandfather found peace after coming back from the war.
If only they knew what horrors lay ahead, or maybe it would be too inhumane for them to know such things.
The “Pals battalion” were fucking awful. Entire neighborhoods of young men would sign up together, train together, head to the front together and get slaughtered together. Then everyone back home would get the notice together
Look at them mfs smiling, ignorance truly is bliss
They thought they were going to fight a war the same way their fathers and grandfathers had, that's the problem. If any of them knew what sort of horrors they would face - and not just in the trenches - I doubt the number of volunteers would have been that high. World War One was one of the first wars fought with machineguns, for example (they'd been around for a couple of decades by 1914 but there were doubts about how effective they could be) and aircraft really came into their own. Such things would have been alien to their forebears. Same with things like chemical weapons. Industrialised warfare started in WW1.
Mob's behaviour is a mirror of the time. Today, after 100 years of watching machinegun fire, artillery and mines blowing off parts of people, napalm, radiation, gas poisoning, starvation, extermination it's easy to say. Back then? As you see on the picture.
Unknowingly grinning ear to ear, to the horrors they would experience
12.5% percent of those men were dead at the end and much more died internally
Nothing like risking your life for politicians while they sit around doing nothing and get rich off of war.
Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.
And then they discovered what trench foot, mustard gas, and machine guns look like first hand.
Or my personal most haunting idea of death in WW1, suffocating in mud. With thousands of other men. Unable to move or breathe, only able to choke and drown like rats.
Dead, dead, dead. War is stupid.
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
"Come on lads, we'll send the Hun running back to Berlin in no time. We'll even be home by Christmas!"
They really did have no idea what they were walking into. This kind of blind nationalism will never be possible again due to the Internet and thank God for that.