Centenary

World War I nerd here.

We’ve all read All Quiet on the Western Front and seen the Metallica “One” video. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones episode “Trenches of Hell” sparked something in me as a kid. Since then I’ve been consumed with reading, viewing and trying to grasp the meaning of the First World War and the Western Front in particular. I’m still hung up attempting to comprehend the macabre idea of men throwing themselves headlong into shells, gas and machine guns, all for dubious national interests that ended the 19th century with a bang and opened the curtains on the bloody 20th. Futility, misery, bloodlust, bravery, strategy, nation-states, religion, gender, colonialism, technology, Americanism, literature, art, poetry–all these things are a part of understanding the world from 1914 to 1918 and drive questions about the human condition that can probably never be settled. It was a great existential irony that an era where rationality drove the culture led to this irrational charnel house.

I don’t have a personal connection to the war: my family were Irish republicans who had no love for the British Empire, so the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921 provides the family anecdotes. (That war itself would not have happened without WWI.) Maybe it’s a historical train wreck and I can’t look away: I did a report on Verdun in tenth grade after I learned that there were more than 800,000 casualties in that single battle. And the list of battles is long: the Marne, Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Amiens and Belleau Wood. Most of those aren’t known here in the U.S., but they are immense scars on French, British and German memory (and the French and Belgian landscapes) that have persisted even after the war generation is long gone.

Even more than World War II or the nuclear age, the First World War convinced the democratic leaders of Europe that nations couldn’t bear the death and destruction of modern inter-state warfare — Neville Chamberlain didn’t choose appeasement because he was weak — and that nationalism was something completely different from patriotism. Unfortunately these are lessons that too many Americans have forgotten, or that they never learned at all. Our “President”‘s failure Saturday to pay respect to the war dead was symbolic of a lot more than just his fake toughness; it shows a total lack of historical awareness, which is much worse.

So this Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it used to be called, spare a thought for the Great War and what it means for today’s political world. We’re rapidly forgetting the lessons, and spending some mental time in No Man’s Land might remind us of the consequences for doing so.

And if you want to dig in to the subject, try either The Great War and Modern Memory by the great Paul Fussell or the classic The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. (Thanks, Gabe.)