November 11

Another Armistice Day is almost gone - a holiday I'm inclined to remember, in its original incarnation. World War I is finally over - the Germans making their last war reparation payment this October - but it's effects haven't gone away. Iraq, most of the trouble in the Middle East, that all goes back to World War I, and it's going nowhere. And as a war, the war itself - it still stands out for its raw horror and insanity and sheer pointlessness. I mentioned last year that a disproportionate number of the best anti-war films were set in WWI - it's hard to imagine any other kind of film about that war. (There were a few, between the wars, in the build up to the second world war - but that is about all.) And it is hard to think about World War I and not think about the plain insanity of war itself. To spend any time thinking seriously about World War I is to turn anti-war.

I spent some time a month or so ago reading about the war - reading about battles. I can't say I've studied it all that much - I grew up a history nerd, a war nerd, reading insatiably about the Civil War, WWII, Indian Wars, the Revolution - not so much about WWI though. And that probably for good reason - there's no way to turn the Great War into anything particularly engaging. There's nothing exciting or heroic about it - even more than that, there's barely any narrative about it. After the first year, it's just murder. Other wars have their moral element, political issues behind the fighting - slavery in the Civil War, the holocaust, and Nazi and Japanese aggression in WWII - WWI just has two groups of more or less unsavory governments fighting over obscure principals or power. And maybe even more than that - the nature of combat in WWI took away the sense of personal investment you can get from WWII history. It's an odd thing, but I probably turned pacifist from reading Audie Murphy - the realization that by the end of the book, all his friends have been shot - hit me. The effect depended, though, on the personalization of those soldiers - on the way they were killed or hurt one by one, over time, individually... something at odds with much of what I have read about the First World War. Killing came in waves, in masses. 20,000 soldiers in a day. (Though by the second world war, people were killing 100,000 civilians in a night; in a second; it's not like WWII lacks in evil.) The scale of WWI's combat - well over a million men shot in several battles, that moved the lines - what? a mile or two? in three months? that would be lost a couple months later? It's hard to wrap your mind around it, the number of men involved, the amount of effort that had to be expended on killing them.

Those are the qualities that make it such a prime source for anti-war films, I think. The madness of it; the lack of moral and political distinctions between the sides; the tendency to swallow heroism and individuality whole (where the fighting is concerned.) I celebrated the day (if "celebrated" is the word) by watching Paths of Glory - which gets at some of this. The arbitrariness of the executions is as good a symbol as any of the complete arbitrariness of the entire war. Those three deaths had no more or less impact on the war than all the others. The mind-boggling stupidity and viciousness of the tactics and strategy of the war are hard to believe, even. But there it is... Kubrick manages a bit of a neat trick there - personalizing the men who died - zeroing in on three of them, while maintaining the sense of randomness in their deaths. They have no chance - their actions are meaningless. They are swallowed whole, but they were alive...



So - to remember - Veterans of all wars, the people stuck in the middle of these things, though they almost never have anything to do with the reasons for being there... and veterans of that war, the war that should have ended all wars, but failed at that as much as it failed at everything else - not ending all wars, but breeding war and horror in its wake. All right.

Start with an interview with the last American veteran, Frank Buckles:



And some vintage footage - here, Ypres, 1914:



The Battle of the Somme:



and gas attack footage: