I can't believe I've almost let this day go by without making some remarks regarding it. After all, it the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War back in '64 that piqued what was then a dormant passion for history, It was during that '64-65 year there was an episodic documentary on CBS with an episode every Sunday evening for an entire TV season as seasons were back then. I believe it was 26 episodes. It was narrated with great skill by the fine actor, Robert Ryan and it touched me to such a degree that World War One is still probably my greatest interest of any historical event. If any of you wish to pick up on this most affective of great events of the 20th century (without WWI we'd be living in a most different world today) I'd recommend starting with the very fine history of the beginning of the War called "The Guns of August" by the great historian, Barbara Tuchman. There simply is no better book chronicling the events that got the great conflict going. It's a known fact that JFK read this book on its publication in August 1962 and it had a profound influence on his conduct of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's quite possible then that "Guns" may be the only history book in er, umm, History that greatly affected History as it very well may have played a part in avoiding the destruction of the entire world! Join me below the iron cheeto for some more observations. . .
But the war. . . what a catastrophe it was. There are scores of French villages and towns that simply no longer exist, pounded by artillery into the mud of Northern France, they were never rebuilt when the war ended. Such was the expenditure of high explosive muntions that STILL to this day, unexploded ordnance turns up regularly along the 500 mile battle line that was the Western Front. This is some of the finest farm land in the world so it must be risked but sometimes these heavy artillery rounds go off, killing the farmer trying to go about his business in peace. After a 100 years, the very killing fields still know not peace.
I was reading an article earlier that if you took a moment of silence, say a second for every person killed in Europe during the four years of the war, you'd be standing silent for two years. An entire generation of young men were literally wiped out. The birthrate in countries like France and Germany has yet to recover. The reparations forced on Germany by the treaty of Versailles (probably the one thing that ensured the great war was only the first act of a greater war to come) were so great that it wasn't until 2010 that the Germans had paid them in total.
The battlefields were as much untended graveyards as anything. Since the lines were under constant bombardment it wasn't unusual that shells landing in "No Man's Land" would violently exhume the dead that had been pounded into the mud, throwing bodies and parts into the air and where they landed could be anywhere from ghastly to mildly humorous. There's the story of how the English preferred to be opposed by Germans from the North as opposed to Germans from Bavaria in the south because the Bavarians as they decomposed smelled much worse than their countrymen from the North. The English figured it must've been on account of diet as the Bavarians were fond of fat sausages and sauerkraut and the Northerners preferred more delicate fare. The reason this was even noticeable was because of the artillery constantly churning up no man's land. Anyway, a story, possibly apochryphal, goes, a dead Bavarian soldier had managed to get stretched out over the wire protecting a British trench where he had come to resemble a demented jack in the box from hell staring at his erstwhile enemies. That was bad enough but the stench from this one dead soldier was overpowering and the English couldn't take it any more. Waving a white flag, the British commander met his German counterpart and begged for a cease fire to take this one body down and bury it so deep no field artillery would ever uncover it again. The German agreed readily. Why? It seems they had the same difficulty with a dead Scotsman, a kilted corpse hung up in the German wire. The German asked the British Officer if he had any idea why the dead Scots smelled so much worse than the British, Canadian or Welsh dead. The Brit replied, "Haggis". Both sides observed a truce long enough to get the entirety of no man's land between them cleaned up. It is one of the few times such a truce was allowed during the entire 4 years and few months of the war and it was all because of what certain ethnicities ate.
You had the bodies of thousands laid out between the opposing lines, killed in foolish attacks launched by both sides against an entrenched enemy defended by machine guns and it was far too dangerous to risk your own death in order to go out and bury the dead, especially when they'd be tossed up again with the next bombardment. So bodies and bits were routinely flying about, landing in the trenches themselves or back in no man's land while one's life was under constant threat from snipers, artillery and mortar fire all the time enduring bombardments from heavy artillery that when being done in preparation for a big attack could last a week but could go on routinely for a day or two. And so it was in this war that the term "Shell Shocked" came into usage and a few more enlightened individuals in the higher ranks of the medical and office corps came to believe there was only so much an individual exposed to this could take. It could vary, and vary a lot from soldier to soldier but most men would get it at some point sooner or later and the big revelation that came to those Doctors and Generals who understood what this "Shell Socked" truly was and that it wasn't cowardice at all but could happen to anyone exposed as they were to the hellishness of life on the Western Front.
Here are some links y'all may find interesting.
Possibly the finest site on the web about WW1, it's just chock full of great information, pictures and other links to sites about WW1, it's tough to beat the BBC's.
"BBC on WW1"
A site partnered with The Huffington Post has a great article about the assassination of the Archduke and his wife, Sofie.
The Assassination of the Heir to Hapsburg Throne
An aside regarding the Archduke. As so often is the case, the target of Serbian patriots, Archduke Franz Ferdnand was for that day and time among the royalty of Europe was a liberal. He favored semi autonomous home rule for the Bosnians, a radical idea then. He had become heir to the throne of the Empire when the Emperor Franz Josef's only son died in a mysterious love murder suicide at Mayerling in 1890 (I'd recommend Googling on that, it's quite a story. There was a movie a few years ago that told the story 180 degrees differently from the story the Hapsburgs told but I'm not recalling its name right now).
This left Franz Ferdnand as the only heir to the thousand year line of the Hapsburgs. He originally had caused an uproar among his royal peers and especially his uncle the Emperor when he did the unthinkable- he married a common woman because he loved her. Not a fellow royal married for political purposes, not Franz Fernand, all he wanted was his beloved Sofie. Together they had several children and it is said that his last words to Sofie on the way to the hospital in Sarajevo after he and she had been shot were, "Sofie, don't die! You must live for the children!" Even his last thoughts were about Sofie and their children. All in all not a bad guy but the irony is the man was hated by all the other royals of Austria-Hungary although he did have a close friendship with Kaiser Wilhelm, his death was used as an excuse to crush Serbia, something the Austrian reactionaries wanted to do very badly.
So, take a moment and recall that one hundred years ago today, a tragic killing occurred that led to the greatest war the world had seen up till that time, a war that would be fought from Southwest Africa to the Indian Ocean to Polynesia which is how Japan gained possession of former German outposts that tens of thousands of US marines would die 30 years later reclaiming to the waters of the North Atlantic to Flanders' Fields. And yet another irony, the 18 year old gunman Gavrilo Princip was known to be a piss poor shot yet he was stationed on a corner along the Archduke's published route that was to have been avoided on word of assassin's being present except the chauffeur was actually lost. And so there was the Archduke and there was the miserable shot Princip who promptly delivered each round he fired straight into the Archduke and his wife's chests. Princip later said he had not intended to shoot the Archduke's wife, but he was a lousy shot so what could he do? Take that moment and remember the dead but especially remember this, nations are run by those with the greatest economic interests and their governing principles have little to do with avoiding mass bloodshed but with increasing the holdings of those economic interests. This is not to diminish the sacrifice of so many who really did believe what they thought they were fighting for. After all, it wasn't their fault they gave their lives to save the miserable, stupid and corrupt men who controlled their countries. All the sadder that.