The Great War - Recommendations Posted by Jeff (Wednesday November 12 2003 @ 09:43PM EST)

The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the First ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct result of the First. On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised frontfighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: 'It cannot be that two millions Germans should have fallen in vain... No, we do not pardon, we demand -- vengeance!' The monuments to the vengeance he took stand throughout the continent he devastated, in the reconstructed centres of his own German cities, flattened by the strategic bombing campaign that he provoked, and of those -- Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, that he himself laid waste. The derelict fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, built in the vain hope of holding his enemies at bay, are monuments to his desire for vengeance; so, too, are the decaying hutments of Auschwitz and the remnants of the obliterated extermination camps at Sobibor, Belzac and Treblinka. A child's shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War. They have their antecedents in the scraps of barbed wire that litter the fields where the trenches ran, filling the French air with the smell of rust on a damp morning, in the mildewed military leather a visitor finds under a hedgerow, in the verdigrised brass of a badge or button, corroded clips of ammunition and pockmarked shards of shell. They have their antecedents also in the anonymous remains still upturned today by the farmers ploughing the bloodsoaked soil of the Somme -- 'I stop work at once. I have great respect for your English dead' -- just as the barely viewable film of bodies heaped into mass graves at Belsen in 1945 has its antecedents in the blurred footage of French soldiers stacking cordwood of their dead comrades after the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915. The First World War inaugrated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to pitiless consummation. There are more ceremonial monuments. Few French and British communities lack a memorial to the dead of the Second World War. There is one in my West Country village, a list of names carved at the foot of the funerary crucifix that stands at the crossroads. It is, however, an addition and an afterthought. The cross itself was raised to commemorate the young men who did not return from the First World War and their number is twice that of those killed in the Second. From a population of 200 in 1914, W. Gray, A. Lapham, W. Newton, A. Norris, C. Penn, L. Penn, and W.J. White, perhaps one in four of the village's men of military age, did not come back from the front. Theirs are the names found in the church registers that go back to the 16th century. They survive in the village today. It is not difficult to see from the evidence that the Great War brought heartbreak on a scale never known since the settlement was established by the Anglo Saxons before the Norman Conquest and, thankfully, has not been known since. The memorial cross is, the church apart, the only public monument the village possesses. It has its counterpart in every neighboring village, in the county's towns, where the names multiply many times, and in the cathedral of the diocese of Salisbury. It has its counterpart, too, in every cathedral in France, in each of which will be seen a tablet bearing the inscription, "To the Glory of God, and in the memory of the one million men of the British Empire who died in the Great War and of whom the greater number rest in France." --John Keegan, from A European Tragedy, chapter one of the First World War.

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By The Pragmatist (Thursday November 13 2003 @ 10:32AM EST)

A remarkable book -- thanks for the excerpt. The first chapter is an exceptionable synthesis of the tragic strands of European history in the century just passed. I find it hard to get through this passage without my throat catching..."and of whom the greater number rest in France." Keegan uses a phrase throughout which I found interesting -- "Sepulchre Perpetuelle" -- referring to the land ceded in perpetuity to the British for the graves of their dead. I assume a similar treaty exists for U.S. dead in Normandy and elsewhere -- in essence like embassies it become property the U.S. or the British government. The following sites give some further information. While browsing there I found that because of the British involvement in the Iraq War, there has been a spate of vandalism in France, attacking British cemetaries. I'll usually defend the French on any number of stereotypical arguments, and I'm sure this is just a minority, but it really is too sordid for words. They can't go home Commonwealth War Graves War Cemetery History

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By Jeff (Thursday November 13 2003 @ 10:44AM EST)

I assume the Frog meant to deface the monument with, "Roastbeefs Go Home." Am I missing something? When did the Limeys become Roastbeef? Beyond that, the Froggie's swatiska makes an odd statement indeed. If not for those Yanks and Limeys, its hard to imagine the French would have thrown off the yoke of Nazi, then later Soviet, oppression.

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By The Pragmatist (Thursday November 13 2003 @ 10:49AM EST) Rosbif's has always -- since Napoleonic Wars I would assume -- been a derogatory term for the British: I found this on the subject: I believe the French spell it rosbif. It refers to the British penchant for eating roast beef, something which, alas, is not a common food item for the French and therefore aptly evokes anglo-saxon culture while simultaneously disparaging their cuisine. It is therefore similar to the epithet "frogs," which originated in the disparagement of the French delicacy of "cuisses de grenouille" or frog's legs. Secondarily, it benefits from having alliteration. [ reply | parent ]

By Spaniard (Thursday November 13 2003 @ 04:24PM EST) For those of you who don't read or speak french, here is what the vandals wrote: Left side: "Unearth your remains, they contaminate our soil" Middle: "Sadam will be victorious and will make your blood run" Right: "Death to the Yankess (I'm assuming these aren't Met fans, and they mean all americans), Bush, Blair to the TPI" (No idea what these initials stand for) Not to excuse the French, I do defend them on just about every occasion, but this could also be work of islamists living in France. France has an extremely high muslim population, which could have its share of islamic nut jobs. Then again it could just be some french nationalist. Either way, defacing this monument is inexcusable. Those rosbifs, as they call them, fought side by side with the french and died defending french soil. [ reply | parent ]

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