(Somewhere in a foreign field with the troops of 1914-18).

I don’t know if you’ve looked at what is happening in the Asian markets this morning. I have tried to stay away from looking at the balance in the 401K, which is headed south at an alarming rate. Apparently Wall Street began to panic after Mr. Bernanke’s declaration last week that the Fed would be weaning us off the printing press later this year.

This morning the news is not constrained to accessing my account information to get the bad news. The bearish Zero Hedge site and left-of-center CNBC are in agreement and telling us that global economic house of cards is shivering again. This time the ill wind is from China. There is reportedly a liquidity crunch and big stock market losses- as much as 5% over the course of a day or two. According to other sources I could not avoid, the Japanese Nikkei is leveraged to 300% of value.

I don’t understand any of this crap, but maybe it is the beginning of the Zombie Apolcolypse or something. I will be watching with interest to see how the Dow responds today.

Maybe the end is near? God, I think I should make a cardboard sign to take to the office this morning.

Funny, these things sneak up on you. The conditions are all in place, there are no surprises except for the timing of it all.

Like the First War. It seems inevitable now, but they did not know that in July of 1914, that the world was ending. I have been thinking about the Fall of the West on and off for some time. Some of the junk I moved in the garage down at the farm included a steel coal-scuttle helmet from the First War, and some other bits of militaria I have owned since I was a kid.

The centennial of the event for which they were produced is right around my Dad’s birthday in August of 2014. I have been thinking of how to commemorate the occasion. Maybe a trip to the one-time trenches of France?

It is timely enough. Amid the other wreckage of moving, Barbara Tuchman’s fine chronicle “The Guns of August” surfaced. It is a horrifying and banal account of how the military planners and incompetent politicians set in motion a chain of events that began the end of a world.

It is worth a re-read in the ramp-up to the anniversary next year, I think. Solzhenitsyn’s imposing “August 1914” door-stop book also appeared in the debris, and his contention that the defeat of the Czar’s troops by the Prussian- sorry, German Army at Tannenberg brought about the events of 1917…well. How our world was made, indeed.

And the collapse of the empires, the rise of the USSR and the other Fascists…and the defeat of the whole lot let the Islamo-genie out of the bottle. I don’t feel like thinking about that this season since I spent my professional life worrying about those idiots. I would rather go back and contemplate how it all began, and what those legions of young men did a century ago.

(The Zone Rouge was essentially a no-man’s land for decades after the trenches- many of them as detailed as this- snaked 450 miles from the Channel to the Swiss border.)

Part of the wreckage cleared out of the office on Saturday was a stack of manila folders containing photocopies of the old Michelin Touring Guides from the 1920s describing how to tour to the Zone Rouge, the swath of France in which the West Front was contested. I requested them from a variety of Federal Repository Libraries while I was at the Industrial College, thinking that I might go someday and see what had changed between then and now.

Then, the carnage was still evident and palpable. Now it is almost all gone, built over and developed, though the fields that remain still produce a harvest of UXBs and heavy ordnance with each Spring’s plowing.

I was inspired at the time by a snotty-toned book called “Back to the Front,” by a Paris-based American journalist named Stephen O’Shea. He walked much of the 450 miles of the Zone Rouge from the Channel to the Swiss border, examining what remained from the Great Conflict.

Along the way, he discovered the profundity that war is bad, which is the downside of the book. His self-satisfied pacifism jarred with me then, since it was such a superficial appreciation of the horror that marked the beginning of the Decline and Fall of the West that I felt only contempt for his naivety.

I mean, after all, the loss of that First War generation ensured the end of the Raj, the rise of the Bolshies, and the subsequent failure of vigor that sealed the fate of the greatest empire since Rome, and of it’s rivals. As I mentioned, it also unleashed the militant Islam that plagues us now, and may, in the way of demographics, complete a victory for the True Faith denied before the gates of Vienna in 1529.

Or not. But anyway, it was a fun book, if you ignored the general snarkiness, and concentrated on the description of the works left behind by the poor human sheep and their imperious and misguided commanders.

There is, of course, a personal interest in all this. The Americans played a small but crucial role in the fighting on the Western Front. My Grandfather Michael Socotra was there with the American Expeditionary Force, or the AEF.

He volunteered out of a safe railroad job in Ohio, and his skills were such that he served on a train ferrying Yanks to the Front. I don’t know if he ever saw Smedley Butler at the in-processing camp at Brest- Camp Pontanezen- which was pretty rough: all mud and unsanitary conditions. In October 1918, Marine Colonel Smedley Butler was promoted to Brigadier, and he tackled the problems with alacrity. He diverted duckboards intended for the front to literally pave the camp with wood.

AEF Commander Pershing authorized a special patch for troops serving under Butler:

(An original patch of the Duckboard Regiment authorized by General of the Army Black Jack Pershing.)

Two-time Medal of Honor winner Butler was thereafter known as “Old Duckboard.” I would expect any tour of the American part of the war should thus start at Brest. Perhaps the best approach is to fly to Heathrow and take the ferry to the continent?

It would be appropriate to start in England, where you cannot look at the list of names posted in all the little villages and blanche at the impact of so many young men killed or maimed in such small places. But that snarky O’Shea does have a point: the Yanks had demonstrated that mass infantry encounters were demonstrated to be the height of stupidity as early as Antietam. And the nice fellows at Krupp had another fifty years to tweak the technology of mass killing.

Remember the Zouaves of 1914 in their bright red pantaloons charging the machine guns?

“L’audace, L’audace, toujours L’audace!”

The generals and their tactics, n’est pas?

I am going to start planning for the tour, unless of course, the West does complete its fall later today. If so, I will adjust my plans.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com