Gentle Readers,

Some thoughts from a pal on the 11th…

Armistice

November 11th is now referred to as Veteran’s Day. But it’s worth remembering that it all began as Armistice Day, on the first anniversary of the Armistice of November 11th, 1918, which brought to a close the horrible spectacle of World War I.

The historian Stephen Ambrose made the comment several decades ago, that the best way to think of World War I and World War II is that they were part of a European Civil War that spanned the first half of the 20th century. One might even argue that that civil war didn’t really end until the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989 and the final breakup of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of Russia in 1991.

But that seems to drag us too quickly past World War I, the “War to End All Wars,” as H.G. Wells named it in 1914. World War I was an horrific thing, and event that shaped the modern world far more than we like too admit, and the sheer depths of the violence are hard to grasp. At the same time, there were a host of problems that contributed to the start of the war, and to its ferocity, a horrible lack of understanding of the changes in technology, horrible tactics, poor leadership, etc.

What can’t be denied is the courage of those who fought in the war, in particular those who fought in the trenches, who fought for weeks or even months at a time to gain mere yards of terrain.

A.E. Housman wrote a fabulous poem about the men of the British Regular Army who held the line during the first months of the war….

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

To give some idea of the extent of this fighting, the British Expeditionary Force in the summer of 1914 – the professional army Housman refers to – consisted of perhaps 247,000 men – world-wide. 6 divisions – about 80,000 men, were sent to France that month. By November they had received many more reinforcements, but had also suffered some 90,000 casualties – more casualties than the original force.

Later, the recruits came in, and experienced even worse carnage than seen in 1914. The roll call of battles is a “who’s who” of slaughter: First Marne, First Ypres, Second Ypres, the Somme, Passchendale, 2nd Marne, 2nd Somme, and on and on. Nor was the horror confined to only the Western Front. Gallipoli saw 6 months of slaughter that led to roughly 1/4 million casualties on each side. The Eastern Front – which helped to bring the decade long crisis in Russia to a head – saw its own long litany of horror, with millions dead.

How bad was it? On the First Day of the First Battle of the Somme (01 July 1916), the British suffered 19,200 killed, and 38,000 wounded. Just on the first day. The Germans suffered as well, though not quite so badly as the British: some 3,000 dead and 9,000 wounded. And the British high command beloved that it had been a fairly good day.

How violent? Unit after unit reported men dead from enemy machine-gun fire before the first man got OUT of the trench to begin the attack.

The 2nd Middlesex, a battalion of 673 officers and men, suffered 623 casualties on 01 July – a 92% casualty rate. This is not unusual. Along one sector of the 34th Division’s assault, 5 battalions attacked abreast and suffered an estimated 80% casualties (killed and wounded – on average 3 wounded for every man killed) in the first 10 minutes.

By the time the battle ended in November of 1916 the British had “moved the line” about 5 miles east in that sector (the maximum point was just 7 miles further east), gaining perhaps a total of 70 square miles of terrain, but had failed to capture the town of Bapaume, the nexus of several major roads and good terrain. The British had suffered some 420,000 killed and wounded, the French 205,000 and the Germans 660,000.

Winston Churchill, who served on the Western Front during WWI, famously and accurately remarked that there: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.” But there is also truth to the remark that: “Low Intensity Conflict is when they are shooting at someone else; High Intensity Conflict is when they are shooting at you.” My own very limited such experiences leave me in awe of the men who served in the trenches in World War I.

Company after company (a company is nominally 120 men) suffered multiple dead before the first man got out of the trench. The truly amazing thing here is that the rest of the men in those companies did go “over the top” and got out of the trench, after seeing the their officers and sergeants killed. And they did it again and again and again for the next 4 months, and the next several years. I stand in awe of their courage.

World War I was a horror. But the men who served in it displayed courage that is virtually inconceivable as we look back. Enjoy Veteran’s Day. But take a minute to say a prayer, and honor those who went over the top… May they all rest in peace.