I have recently been listening to an awesome podcast on the history of WWI. It is called Blueprint to Armageddon by Dan Carlin and is part of the Hardcore History series. I can't tell you how awesome this series is. Carlin goes to great depths to detail the deep intricacies of the Great War and its underlying causes, what the effects were and how in four years it killed off the old world society and dragged the modern world into the spotlight.
But one of the things that Carlin talks about the most is the absolute devastation that the fighting nations, or more accurately, the soldiers of those nation suffered in those four long, arduous, bloody years.
Millions of lives were lost during the Great War. Millions again were mangled, disfigured both on the outside and inside. Countries and empires were destroyed. Regimes were laid low. Ways of life, traditional societies and mankind's way of thinking about each other and their world was turned upside down.
More pointedly, Carlin goes into long explanations about what it was like for the common soldier during WWI.
These brave men, British, French, German, Italian, Australian, Russian and dozens of other nationalities saw warfare that manifested itself in way it had never been seen before.
Warfare had escalated to levels that bordered on attempting to totally annihilate the enemy and the territory they held. The familiar landscape turned into an alien one. One that can only be described as hell on earth. Something akin to the landscape of Mordor from The Lord of the Rings. (It is believed that Tolkien took many cues to describe Mordor from his experiences of what he saw on the Western Front in WWI)
Soldiers lived mud holes. They lived among corpses. They killed each other with weapons that had never been used before on human bodies. They created clouds of gas that killed friend and enemy at the same time. They stood in a line and walked forward into a hail of lead. They cowered in cesspools of feces, blood, rotting flesh, and mud for weeks on end. Powerful shells rained death down upon them for days at a time and when the artillery stopped, the enemy would rush toward them to shoot at them. And this went on for four years.
And they endured it. They remained in their positions. They followed orders. They stood up to attack when ordered and offered their lives at the sound of a whistle. And they endured. And they did it again. And they endured. When their numbers became low, more soldiers took their place and relived the same hell. They endured.
Why? Why in the world would people continue to endure this living hell for so long The WWI has always fascinated me but also confused me. I can't wrap my head around it. The leaders of those armies seemed to have lost all sense to end the war. If something did not work as planned they would throw more lives at it until it did work, or there were no more lives to throw at it. And the soldiers did the bidding as instructed. Why?
Carlin surmises that these men, on all sides, were part of a generation that... did. They did what needed to be done. Duty was something that was not taken lightly. Even if it meant giving up life and limb. He asks the question... would modern (and I mean this generation or the last one) be able to endure these same depredations for weeks, months, and years on end? Could you endure as these men did?
I am in awe of the soldiers of WWI. It was something that the world has never seen since on this scale. The only thing that comes close are those prisoners that endured and survived the Nazi concentration camps, but they were not willing "victims" of the hell they would have to live through.
Could you endure such an experience? I am pretty sure I could not. I don't think those kind of people, those kind of societal expectations exist anymore. I believe they passed with the last of the WWI survivors.
Hopefully, human will never have to willing endure this sort of hell again.
If you are interested in hearing more about this subject I highly encourage you to listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. You will not be disappointed.
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