Armistice Day 2020

 I haven't updated on November 11 in a couple years. The last time was the end of the war itself, ion fact, two years ago. I know I have not been blogging much lately. And the war is over.

I have been watching The Great War on youtube lately - a neat historical channel, hosted by Indie Neidell originally, that followed the war week by week, 100 years after the fact. I wish I had found that sooner, though I was doing a lot of reading, and taking actual classes, back when it started. Still - good stuff, and so is the World War Two channel Neidell hosts now.

Meanwhile, the word we live in is interesting enough. 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu was winding down, having killed millions, more than the whole war did. In 2020, COVID 19 is in full force still, killing 230,000 or more Americans already, many many more throughout the world, and still going strong. And the fool in the White house who has made this worse is still there - 

We did, in fact, vote his sorry ass out last week. Everything went about according to expectations - lots of votes cast, lots of absentee votes cast, Democrats much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, so the election night results looked grim. But the places counting absentee ballots after the in person ballots saw Biden's numbers just rise and rise and rise, and by the time they were done, he had taken most co the contested states - Pennsylvania, Georgia, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska, by fairly healthy margins. Biden took the popular vote by a very healthy margin. Basically, it was a butt kicking. 

But weepy Donnie is still hanging on, raving about election fraud, promising to fight it in the courts, and sabotaging everything he can reach rather than admit the obvious. This is what you get when someone fails at everything they touch and no one calls them on it. It is also what you get when you have a fascist in the white house, supported by a party that knows it can't win elections if people vote. They have to steal the election, they sure as hell can't win it. The Republicans have won one National election since 1988. They have to commit to minority rule.

So here we are. Self-imposed chaos here in the USA. Trump doing his best John Breckinridge - if he can't win the vote, he'll commit treason. I don't know how this gets that far, of course. Trump is terrible at it, his allies are terrible at it - there is no way for him to actually win the election, and I doubt anyone will have the stomach to turn to arms to overturn it. But it's ugly, none the less.

All right. End with the Great War again. This time, Metallica's One, a song, from a book and movie about the war, about all wars - and about the blacklist, while we're at it. Dalton Trumbo writing as much about his own time being silence as about the results of the war, I think. A good way to remember this remembrance day.

The End of the War to End All Wars

100 years ago today, 11/11/1918 at 11:11 AM (Paris time) an Armistice ending the Great War went into effect. The fighting stopped; the guns fell silent. (There's a Vonnegut quote going around today, about the moment the war ended: "I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.")

The war did not end, officially - that took a couple more years, and when it happened, the resulting treaty went a long way to starting the next, even worse war. The fighting did not stop - there was still a war in Russia, involving most of the countries fighting WWI; that war only got worse in the next couple years. Even on the last day of the war, typically for WWI, the combatants were scrambling for position, and another 2,738 men were killed and 10,000 odd wounded. But the utter catastrophe that was the Great War ended.

The War to End All Wars did not, in fact, end wars; the war to Make the World Safe for Democracy, did not, in fact, make the world safe for democracy. People did try, though - not very effectively, probably because the unchecked power politics that started the mess continued without interruption. England and France made Germany pay; they worked to isolate the new Soviet Russia; they remade the maps of Europe and the Middle East without very effective consultation with the people they were redistributing, and usually to serve their own interests; they paid no mind to the interests of their colonies, and divided up German colonies (as "mandates" rather than outright possessions, but that's not the strongest distinction in history.)

But that doesn't diminish the importance of this day. (It might betray the importance of this day, though.) The war ended: soldiers went home, families were reunited, countries had the chance to recover, the places where the war raged could try to rebuild. And people did try to do something about this thing that had just happened. The Great War was a massive trauma - psychologically as well as physically. The war broke the world, which had seemed to reach a kind of comfortable stasis in 1914 - at least in western Europe and places like the USA - that was gone, any expectation of uninterrupted progress and improvement was gone - it felt like the end of the world. And (as I've harped on before) there was nothing here to take comfort from, except the fact that it ended.

And that leaves this day as the one good thing about that war. It made it a symbol of the desire for peace, the work of making peace. It is the symbol of remembering the horrible things men do to one another; the horrible things, as well, our machines to do us. The horrors were documented, film and photography, and famous poetry and art - there is a reason governments try to suppress those images: it does not pay to think too much about what a bullet can do to a body. Let alone gas....

I have let my First World War posts slip lately - there are lots of things in the war and around the war to write about, and I wish I were still as energetic about them as I had been. We live with the consequences of this war, maybe more than any other war; we live with the failure to actually build on the end fo this war. (We did far better after the next one, though I fear a lot of that was directly related to the fact that the winners were divided into two camps almost as hostile as the two sides had ever been. So we rebuilt Germany and Japan to thwart the Soviets - cynical reasons, maybe, but we did it, and it worked. At least for Germany and Japan.) I have been stunned, living in this country, the last two years - thinking about "making the world safe for democracy" is a bitter thing to swallow in a country where democracy has been so eroded in the last couple years. Maybe that will change, as we slowly bring things right in the USA - I don't know. WE can still vote, though; when we vote, we can still take power. Maybe we can fix it.

And maybe, we can look at the one good thing from World War I: the fact that after after 4 years of evil and destruction, we managed to stop.

1918 Spring Offensive

Hello! I know I have become a very lazy blogger, and a big casualty of that has been my complete neglect of history blogging. It's a bad time to get so lazy, especially with anniversaries - 100 years ago was the climax of the Great War, the Revolution in Russia - 150 years ago, Reconstruction was in full swing.... I should be doing this. What can I say.

What I can do is come in quickly to get a post up today - 100 years ago, March 21, 1918, the German army launched a huge offensive on the western front, designed to end the war. I am not going to wrte too much about that - I will point instead fo Robert Farley's post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, complete with links about the strategic and tactical elements of the offensive.

So just a quick summary. By the spring of 1918, the Russians were out of the war - the Bolsheviks had sued for peace, and by March, signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending Russian participation in the war. Even before that, the Germans had been moving men from the Eastern Front to the Western Front - it gave them a numerical advantage in 1918 in France. However, the Americans were coming - eventually - so the Germans felt they had to move fast. They hoped to defeat the British, particularly, in France, causing them to break with the French. Not sure how like that would have been even if they had been more successful, but that's a topic for another day.

The Germans attacked. They used new tactics, developed through the war - powerful, concentrated, surprise artillery barrages; infiltration tactics by the infantry - moving in squad sized units as deep into the enemy lines as they could go, to avoid presenting the kinds of targets machine guns and artillery could decimate, and to consolidate their gains before the enemy could counterattack or build a new line of defenses. It worked. They broke through the British lines, and drove deep into allied territory - 40 miles in some cases, on a front that hadn't moved more than 4 or 5 miles in 4 years. But it failed. The Germans used up to many resources; the British and French did not break; Americans started to trickle in and take a part in the fighting, and the lines held. And when it was done, the Germans were too spent to resist - in late summer and fall the Allies counterattacked, using their own new tactics and technology (tanks, for instance) to drive the Germans back, and eventually end the war.

Why did the Germans fail? Farley links to a number of articles about WWI tactics - it's important to remember that the war was not as static as it is sometimes portrayed. Everyone tried new methods for breaking trenches, tactical or technological, and they were more successful, sometimes, then we tend to give them credit. New artillery tactics usually did work, the first time they were used; gas worked, the first time it was used, and was terrifying and effective afterwards; infantry tactics worked. Armies found ways to break enemy trenches - they never found ways to do anything about it. Operation Michael was the most successful - but it bogged down as completely as any other battle. My pet theory holds up - that the problem was always that while the technology of killing (guns and bullets and explosives and gas and flamethrowers and all the rest) had advanced unthinkably before the war, and continued to advance throughout the war; and the sheer industrial power of the main forces had advanced to the point that it could sustain this murder for years - transportation technology had not kept pace. It wasn't until tanks started to appear that anyone had any means of moving across the battlefield fast enough to prevent the other side from creating a new impenetrable fortress on the other side. Tanks let you move firepower fast enough to stop the other side from reforming. Tracks let you move across torn up battlefields. As armies became more motorized generally - as air support became decisive - it was possible to move men around on the field, and take advantage of the holes you could make.

That and, in the end, the Germans ran out of men and material before the allies did.

Armistice Day, 2017

I've already managed my World War I post this week, getting the Russians in there along with Third Ypres. But today is Armistice Day and it is good to remember it, and to remember why this day was remembered as a day to bring abut the end of war. The horrors of Passchendaele sum up the horrors of WWI quite succinctly, and those horrors are a distillation of the horrors of all wars. We should keep it in mind, and we should try to stop this stuff from happening.

Here is a documentary about the battle of Passchendaele:



And a bit of Iron Maiden, to mark the time:

Shaking the World

Happy Friday again, the only day I seem to post - but 1 is better than none.

A strange week, this one: November 7-8 marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution - the Soviet Revolution, that brought Lenin to power. I should have posted something, but I am lazy and careless - but what is stranger is that I have seen almost nothing about it anywhere. Maybe it isn't American history; maybe the Soviets are well out of fashion - but this was one of the most important events of the 20th century - top, you know - 2 maybe - and you would think it would be talked about. Maybe it was and I haven't seen it - the news this week has been busy, with another mass shooting, an election that saw decisive Democratic victories around the country, another celebrity caught whacking off in front of strangers, and what might be the least surprising revelation of all time - sometimes judge Roy Moore, right wing, racist, homophobic god bothering scofflaw running for senate in Alabama, turns out to also be a pedophile, dating 17 year olds and making lewd passes as 14 year olds. So poor old Lenin and Trotsky and co. had a lot of competition this week.

That doesn't mean they should get a shout out. The Russian Revolution is, well - difficult. There's no denying the wickedness of the Tsar's regime, or its incompetence; there's no denying that WWI gutted Russia; there's not much likelihood that the government could have changed into something else without a revolution of some kind. But Revolutions never really work out - not in the short term, usually not in the medium term. The February Revolution held some promise, but no one was able to form a stable government, the war gutted the provisional governments as much as it gutted the Tsar's government - and it failed. And the Bolsheviks took over and - weren't willing to accept anything less than total victory, so slowly moved to banning all political opposition, crushing all dissent - which then sparked civil war, foreign invasions, massive and horrible political reprisals, devastating famine....

That is usually the result of revolution: war, death, devastation, famine and disease,and tyranny at the end. But among their horrors, sometimes governments emerge with some breathing room, with the space to get better.Could the Russian Revolution have done so? I am not sure what I think about the Russian revolution - the horrors of the revolution and civil war are horrors of war and revolution; it is more fruitful to ask what they led to. I don't know: there are signs, in the 1920s, that Lenin and some of the others in the government might have been willing to move toward a more just society - there is no denying that the revolution unleashed a torrent of cultural change, artistic change, which was very exciting. But that only lasted a couple years - and Stalin's version of the revolution codified and solidified the absolute worst possible elements of the revolution. He brought out the absolute worst possible outcome for the revolution. (As did Mao, in the 1950s; as did Pol Pot, for example.)

So what is the Russian Revolution? The hope of the overthrow of the Tsar? the promise of the people rising to create a new kind of government in November 1917? (That's what China Mieville emphasizes in October.) Or the fall into civil war and terror in 1918? The tyranny and cruelty of the 20s? or the almost immeasurable sense of possibility it created? Or both? Or the sheer (and wildly self-destructive) horror of Stalinism? The exhilaration of Eisenstein's October is real - the film creates it, of course, but you sense the exhilaration of the moment itself, the hope, the sense of liberation and empowerment. I can see the appeal. Though I am too much a cynic, or maybe a historian, not to know how this stuff ends. How all of them end: in blood and devastation, the guillotine, the ax, in a decade long war with Iraq. Or in retreat - the old guard takes over - or the new guard proves to be just like the old guard, only more racist and more self-righteous. (You thought I forgot the America revolution, didn't you!) I don't want any revolutions around me, thank you very much. I get worried when people start talking about them.

Though I know that most of them, a generation or so down the road, ended up making the world a better place. The world is better for the English Revolution, the French Revolution, certainly the the American Civil War - and it's probably better for the Russian Revolution. Just that - sacrificing a couple generations for the sake of the future seems like a sub-optimal route to a better world...

Meanwhile, today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Third Battle of Ypres, aka, the Battle of Passchendaele, another in the gruesome series of pointless bloodbaths that marked that war, especially on the western front. I suppose in the end, it's impossible to say that this one was more or less pointless than any of the others - though by 1917, it's hard to see what anyone had in mind in these exercises. I suppose it is true that one of the things the Allies had in mind was distracting Germans from the eastern front, where Russia's first revolution had cast the war effort into serious doubt. Indeed, Lenin and company mounted their revolution largely on the platform of getting out of the war for good. (Maybe because Lenin was bankrolled by the Germans, but that seems more like opportunism on both sides - the Germans were surely not communists.) In any case, Passchendaele didn't keep the Russians in the war, so...

I can't find any ambiguity in World War I: there is no greater unambiguous disaster in modern history. World War II! you say - but that damned thing continued with barely an interruption the first one. The horrors of the Russian Revolution would not have happened without the Great War - who knows what would have become of that country, but it's probably nothing like the bloodbath it was. And Passchendaele? Individual battles in the first world war are mind-boggling affairs, endless repetitions of what didn't work 6 months ago, tweaked with that one thing that did kind of work for a day or so 6 months ago.... When it changed, it changed because of sheer numbers and some real innovation, first by the Germans, then by the Allies (taking advantage of the German's complete collapse.) Everyone finally got bled out, I guess. Passchendaele contributed to the bleeding, of course, but that doesn't recommend it. It did help establish one of the dominant images of the Great War: if the Somme is the ultimate in the Doomed Charge image, Passchendaele is the ultimate in the Flooded Trench image, fought as it was in the wetlands of Belgium, in a very rainy summer and autumn. But there is nothing else there - heroism, but what good is that, when it's put to no end? There is no hope to be lost at Passchendaele, no missed opportunities - nothing but death, and there was never going to be anything but death there.

World War I is a very depressing subject to care about.

Lafayette! Here We Come!

I've been bad about keeping up with historical posts, but this is worth noting: 100 years ago today the US declared war on Germany in World War I. (The Great War, back in the day.) It was an important act - the US pretty clearly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies, at a time that the Russian Revolution was starting to look like it would tip the balance in favor of Germany. The effects took another year to show up on the battlefield - 1917 would be another miserable year for all concerned, and leave France pretty well neutralized as a force, and the UK not far behind - American troops turning up in 1918 would turn it back. Though just the presence of the Americans in the war, fully committed to the cause of the Allies, and thus to their economic and naval warfare against Germany would have almost as much impact as those fresh soldiers would.

The Germans - well, they were in a hard place in the first world war - submarine warfare brought the US in - but without it, they were going to be slowly starved into submission (while their enemies were not.) Submarines were their best chance to win the war - but they turned the world against them, so they had no chance. One of those things. Wars are never entirely military. Politics and diplomacy never go away - economics never goes away.

As for the US - we didn't get much out of our involvement. Woodrow Wilson dreamed of using the war to bring about a peace that would stabilize the world - that didn't work out (to put it mildly.) There were widespread crack downs on civil liberties in the US - it led to prohibition - it probably helped spread the influenza epidemic that killed more people than the war - and killed 100,000 odd Americans outright. Whether this saved anyone, improved the situation in Europe in any way, is anyone's guess. But off we went,a nd took our place in one of the worst disaster ever to befall humanity.

Remembrance

Armistice day is on us again. 98 years since the war to end all wars ended, and the world immediately began preparations for the next war. It's a hard week to find anything good to say. World War I isn't the central event of American history the way it is in modern European history - the Civil War is. But we're still fighting the Civil War - Trump ran and won as much against the results of the Civil War as anything else. When both the Civil War and WWI ended, the losers set about instantly to try to undo the results, and refight the wars if they need to. This country still hasn't accepted the results of the Civil War...

All right. This is about Armistice Day - Veteran's day in the US - we can, should, honor veterans today, but we should also keep the spirit of early remembrances of the day, and the hope that somehow, this horrible cataclysm might move people to work against wars. Remember the sacrifices, remember the sheer horror of The Great War, and try to do something to stop it from happening, over and over again.

And, today - remember Leonard Cohen. This year - it's parade of good and great people dying (as well as a few monsters) just never seems to stop. Cohen was another of those musicians with a long, deep career and a massive body of work that I dipped into almost at random, never quite embracing the whole thing - but loving the parts I knew. So - we're heavy on the early stuff below, because I had them going obsessively there for a while... He's also someone who's songs could absolutely transform a movie: McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the most obvious, but everybody knows in Exotica was a jolt as well... He will be missed; and reading this new, this week, is a fucking stab in the gut...

So: video - start with Cohen doing his part for Remembrance day, from last year - reciting In Flanders Fields:



And songs - the ones that got me, and kept me the longest. Suzanne:



Bird on a Wire:



The Stranger, from McCabe and Mrs Miller (the title sequence):



And the Partisan:

First Day of the Somme

100 years ago today, the Battle of the Somme began. The results of that first day's attack are what we usually think of when we think of World War I: slaughter, quick and efficient on an unimaginable scale. 120,000 British soldiers attacked: something like 57,000 were killed or wounded, that day; 20,000 dead. Some gains were made, around the edges of the main battle, but nothing much was accomplished by the men who made the bulk of the attack. The Germans lost about 8000 men in the day's fighting. The battle then continued until November, with the Allies moving the lines forward a few miles, and losing another 700,000 or so casualties, to the German's 500,000.

Everything in WWI comes back to this (at least everything on the Western Front.) Individual battles all follow that form - a massive attack, usually unsuccessful, though sometimes with some progress - that always degenerates into a long brutal slog. You come across attempts to explain or justify some of the tactics and strategy of the war, but these all end up being explanations of how things went wrong in such a battle, and how maybe that didn't go wrong in quite the same way in the next one - though it always went wrong. The details are different in how Loos or Verdun or the Somme or the Aisne or Ypres went wrong, but they all went wrong, hundreds of thousands of casualties, minimal change in the fronts, and no change at all in the strategic situation of the war, except t convince the generals that they needed another battle to relieve the pressure of this battle. That's part of the story of the Somme - a massive British attack that was supposed to relieve the pressure from the massive German attack on Verdun. On and on, death breeding death.

So what happened at the Somme? The British blasted the hell out of the Germans for weeks (having learned, from Loos, that preliminary artillery bombardment was crucial) - but they still didn't actually break the German lines. Most of the German soldiers spent the bombardment hiding well below the surface, and popped back out in time to man their machine guns before the British soldiers arrived. The artillery didn't destroy the barbed wire, so the Brits were funneled directly into the field of fire of the machine guns. The bombardment didn't damage any of the German artillery, which responded quickly and to great effect. Etc, etc. And then - horrible as the first day was, the fact is - if the first day had gone differently, the rest of the battle would not have changed. Even had the British broken the German lines on July 1, they would not have been able to move past the battle zone fast enough: they wouldn't have run into more trenches and the rest of the battle would have gone just abut as it did. Until the tanks arrive, there was nothing anyone could do to end this warfare.

But they kept trying. There's not much more to say, besides to look in stunned horror at the stream of battles that look just like this - massive casualties, noting changed - that made up the bulk of the western front in the Great War. Only at the end, with tanks and a completely exhausted Germany, did it change. It's hard to say what anyone anywhere gained from all this death. It's hard to escape the conclusion that both sides could have sat in their trenches and waited for the British naval blockade to destroy the German economy and force more or less the armistice they signed. That might not have worked out so well for France (where all this fighting was taking place), but then again, France also bore unimaginable casualties in all this - it's hard to what they gained by trying to drive the Germans out. Millions dead. That's pretty much all you can say about the western front.

All right - let's move to some video - first, a 1916 Documentary about the battle:



And some music - Fairport Convention's version of The Battle of the Song, set to a painting of part of the British attack:

Easter, 1916

100 years ago today elements of Irish Republicans rose against the English, demanding independence. They seized the Dublin General Post Office, and a few other business, and held out a few days against the British army sent to out them down. It was not a very effective rising, nor a popular one, but the British - in the very depths of the Great War at the time - were in no mood to fool around, and set about executing the leaders without much ceremony. And that made the rising far more popular among the Irish, and, you could say, ultimately successful. The dead became martyrs; the living were more dedicated to their purpose, and would continue on, striving for an independent Ireland, that would come.

Abd Yeats, the poet, would brood on the rising, and the deaths, and would write about them. And get, I would have to say, the essence of revolution - its appeal; its folly; its ways of corrupting its adherents - too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart - but a stone that transforms the world, as well, perhaps. A terrible beauty is born.

Easter, 1916

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Verdun

100 years ago, yesterday as it happened, the Battle of Verdun began. It began with 10 hours of artillery, followed by infantry attacks by the Germans, and it continued for the rest of the year. (And in some form, for most of the rest of the war.) The German's hope was that they could inflict great damage on the French through artillery, and by making modest attacks, that threatened Verdun itself (or more accurately, the ring of forts around Verdun), could draw the French into counterattacks that would exhaust the French reserves. It didn't quite work - the French held up better than the German's hoped, so the Germans were forced to attack more than they wanted, so took more casualties than they'd expected. Casualties ended up being relatively close between the two armies. (About 5 to 4, not 2 to 1 that the Germans had hoped for.) Still, it was a bloodbath, though not the worst of the war - the Somme, the Brusilov offensive on the Eastern front, were both bloodier, as was the fighting in 1914, when both sides were fighting on open ground. Verdun was a battle of forts and artillery - and endless grinding down of both sides. The French army survived, thwarting the Germans' hope that they would collapse; but by the end of 1916, the French army had been ground down fearfully (they lost more men in both 1914 and 1915 than they did in 1916), and were in danger - when another pointless attack failed in 1917, they started to come apart. The Germans, meanwhile, were still strong - though after this, they turned their strategy on the Western Front to pure defense, and set out to win the war in the east first.

And like so much of the fighting of WWI, it was a horrific experience - constant artillery pounding, living underground and in trenches, the whole world turned to churned up mud, full of dead bodies (human and animal), everything else - plants, trees, buildings, leveled and gone - for months at a time. It probably comes closest to our conception of the Great War - endless pounding trench warfare, a constant grind, with no end in sight, and little purpose to be seen. And, like most of WWI, looking back on it, it's hard to figure out what possessed the generals to try it. They really thought that would work? or accomplish anything? I suppose in the long run, this kind of war did accomplish what it hoped to - wore down the combatants to the point where they lacked the men and material to withstand attacks, assuming the other side got a fresh injection of men and material. That happened in both directions in 1918 - the Germans brought men from Russia and launched a very successful attack on the Allies, that wasn't strong enough to win the war. Then the Allies added Americans and their machines to their side and launched an even more successful attack on the even more exhausted Germans. Killing millions of people is a pretty bad way ot getting to that point, though.

Armistice Day, With Robert Graves

Today is Armistice Day, a holiday established to mark the end of the Great War, the War to End All Wars. We shouldn't forget the most important message of this day: Never Again. It's a message the world has failed utterly to understand. We Americans, who for a time seemed to keep it in mind, except when we were attacked, have forgotten it, fighting a number of wars for no purpose and to no good end. Vietnam and the Second Iraq war were particularly disastrous - killing thousands, causing immense domestic strife and harm, having ongoing repercussions. (Though oddly, 40 years along, Vietnam's legacy isn't quite so bad - we get along with them now. We had the decency to lose, I suppose, and somehow were able to get past that loss, and move toward decent relations with Southeast Asia. Though that just tends to indicate that the war was a waste - we would have ended up friends anyway, maybe. When you look at the devastation that war brought - to Vietnam, to Cambodia - and the amount of harm it did to us, the ways it stranded Johnson's political achievements, delivering the country to Nixon and evil - it is a horrible thing.) And Iraq? we're back to talking about boots on the ground in the Middle East - insanity... Though here - blaming George Bush and co. is well justified - they took bad things and made them far worse - but in so many ways, the ongoing strife in the middle east is just a reminder that 11/11/18 was just a ceasefire in one theater of the Great War. The war didn't really stop in the middle east - it kept going, the results of the war warping and twisting around each other, and forming new conflicts, which go on to this day.

Ugh.

It's important, then, to remember that today is a sad day - a day of mourning for the men sacrificed in war, for what war did to them. A day of atonement for all the young men we have killed (all us countries.)

So - from one who was there, Robert Graves. First, an arty video set to the poem, The Assault Heroic:



And then - getting to the point in a hurry: the Dead Boche:



And text: The Assault Heroic:

Down in the mud I lay,
Tired out by my long day
Of five damned days and nights,
Five sleepless days and nights, ...
Dream-snatched, and set me where
The dungeon of Despair
Looms over Desolate Sea,
Frowning and threatening me
With aspect high and steep—
A most malignant keep.
My foes that lay within
Shouted and made a din,
Hooted and grinned and cried:
"Today we've killed your pride;
Today your ardour ends.
We've murdered all your friends;
We've undermined by stealth
Your happiness and your health.
We've taken away your hope;
Now you may droop and mope
To misery and to Death."
But with my spear of Faith,
Stout as an oaken rafter,
With my round shield of laughter,
With my sharp, tongue-like sword
That speaks a bitter word,
I stood beneath the wall
And there defied them all.
The stones they cast I caught
And alchemized with thought
Into such lumps of gold
As dreaming misers hold.
The boiling oil they threw
Fell in a shower of dew,
Refreshing me; the spears
Flew harmless by my ears,
Struck quivering in the sod;
There, like the prophet's rod,
Put leaves out, took firm root,
And bore me instant fruit.
My foes were all astounded,
Dumbstricken and confounded,
Gaping in a long row;
They dared not thrust nor throw.
Thus, then, I climbed a steep
Buttress and won the keep,
And laughed and proudly blew
My horn, "Stand to! Stand to!
Wake up, sir! Here's a new
Attack! Stand to! Stand to!"

A Dead Boche:

TO you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
"War's Hell!" and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Loos, 1915

Today, September 25, is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos. It's an important battle - the largest fought by the British in 1915; the first use of gas by the British in the war; and the first significant use of New Army troops in the war. It was, for the most part, a disaster. The Brits had a huge numerical superiority, but their preliminaries did not dislodge the Germans, who mowed them down, as machine guns will - the Germans then brought up reserves and drove back subsequent attacks. They kept fighting for a few more days - dragged it on for weeks - but nothing really changed. (That's the basic description of every battle of WWI - bloody and disastrous initial attack, that maybe made some progress - reinforcements and counter-attacks that negate whatever advantages were gained - weeks of both sides trying it again - nothing different at the end.) (You can read all the details here, matter of factly - with casualty numbers at the end.)

Loos was very badly handled. It was the first big British attack, and it was fraught with trouble. There weren't enough shells - so the artillery barrage didn't really suppress the German lines, even the front lines. didn't break the wire. didn't support the initial waves of attack. (This would become a major scandal - it would help to bring down the British commanding general, John French, leading to Douglas Haig taking his place.) The gas (the "accessory") didn't do much good - the Brits released it from canisters, hoping the winds would carry it into the German lines. The wind wasn't blowing; it hung over the battlefield and sometimes drifted back into the British lines. It probably could have been worse - Robert Graves says that the gas-company had the wrong spanners, and couldn't get the canisters open - only a few of them went off, though of course they did the Brits more harm than the Germans. The Germans were ready (says Graves) - and managed to do what the gas company couldn't - scored a couple direct hits on the unopened canisters, releasing their contents to add to the confusion... All this mess was compounded by French's misuse of reserves - by supply problems (Graves writes about a New Army division that made notable advances, only to have to retreat when they ran out of rations) - and by general and complete confusion.

I know the battle best through Robert Graves' account in Goodbye to All That. It's a masterpiece of understated fury. Graves was at the left of the line, part of the attack on the town of La Bassée, a diversion from the main assault in theory. He described the attack as a complete fiasco - even before the battle, with drunken subalterns and staff officers abusing their commanders. Everyone expects disaster - a "glorious balls-up". And it is. Not enough artillery; the gas attack goes all wrong; when the attack gets going, the communication lines are broken, so no one behind the lines knows what is happening, no orders come up, no information goes back. The fighting itself is pure confusion - men go forward, are shot, and come back, or lay in shell holes sniping at the Germans to no effect. There is heroism - almost all of it involving men risking their lives to save their comrades. Or a fatally wounded man choking himself to stop crying so no one else will be killed to try saving him.

He had no love for the higher officers, Graves. He tells us how the colonel went to the rear with the wounded, "with a slight cut on the hand." (The junior officer who chewed his hand to stop himself from screaming, meanwhile, was hit 17 times. Lieutenants and captains take the brunt of the damage and acquit themselves well in Graves' account.) He ends his story of the battle with a very nasty (but typically understated) story of two second lieutenants who survived the brunt of the fighting. (2 of 3 officers in their battalion to emerge from the battle unwounded.) They reported to their commander, who they found eating a meat pie; he took their report, and sent them on their way (without offering any of the pie), with an admonition to make sure that men remembered to button their shoulder straps. Graves adds that the colonel was heard to complain “that he only had two blankets and that it was a deucedly cold night.” At least another officer, having heard the story, gets some payback, by helping himself to the meat pie without being invited...

It's an extraordinary passage, and well worth seeking out. (The book, of course, is itself extraordinary, and well worth the read.) It gets at so much of what was wrong in the war - the pointlessness of the tactics; the endless screw ups, undermining the already bad plans; the absurdity of the class structure and command structure that kept haunting the war effort. (He tells the story of the son of a prominent Jamaican planter who got appointed a first lieutenant by the governor of Jamaica. The boy (a kid, 18 or so) was hopelessly incompetent, but outranked most of the other officers. He was appointed to the mortal battalion, since he was otherwise useless - at first, mortars were useless too, but they were starting to become valuable by the end of 1915. When the battle started, the kid ("Jamaica" as Graves call shim) did all right, working the mortars - but in the middle of the battle, a captain, the only man in the battalion to treat him well, was mortally wounded - and "Jamaica" fell to pieces. Abandoned the mortars - leaving one German machine gun unscathed, machine gun that proceeded to cut down attackers in swaths. And more - "Jamaica" and his wounded captain blocked the trenches, so men couldn't move top and from the battle - another disaster. But all too typical, given the men in positions of authority because of who they knew, rather than what they knew...) Grave's account is, in miniature, as clear eyed a picture of what the hwole war was like as you can get.

End of the Week Music Plus

Welcome back Friday, glad to see you, as always.

This is not going to be a huge post - music, mainly. Saw the Feelies again last week - they were, as always, spectacular. Took me back 30 years. It is strange - nothing has changed, they might be older, but they look and act the same, and sound more or less the same - one of their essential qualities, that: everything sounds as though you've heard it a thousand times before, and everything sounds absolutely new. I notice it in the guitar parts - they can play riffs exactly as they always played them, but they still sound somehow completely new. It's in the tone, it's in the twists around the edges of the notes, in the details. Seeing them live is still a euphoric experience.

And - anything else? The 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos is today - first use of poison gas by the British in WWI. With disastrous results. I hope to have a longer post up this weekend - Loos is the centerpiece of Robert Grave's writing about WWI in Goodbye to All That - a particularly scathing account of a badly run battle. I can't say "particularly" badly run battle (though it was), because most WWI battles were complete fuck ups for almost all concerned.

For now though, just some random music to hold you over.

1. Louis Armstrong & Hot Five - You're Next
2. Ric Ocasek - Crashland Consequences
3. Wire - 99.9
4. James White and the Blacks - Bleached Black
5. Outkast - ?
6. The Rolling Stones - Let It Loose
7. Wire - I Am The Fly
8. Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong
9. Melt Banana - Mind Thief
10. Husker Du - Divide and Conquer

Video? start with a clip from last week's Feelies show, because, there's a clip from last week's Feelies show:



And since iTunes wants Wire - here's I am the Fly, from the Peel sessions:



And if you need more Wire than that (and who doesn't?) here's a full show from Rockpalast, 1979:

Summer time Film Going

It has been a long time since I have managed to do this - I need to get back into the habit. I could blame my Russian class int he spring, and have been inclined to blame the heat lately - but there is no excuse. Time to write! Time to write about films - since the end of June, these are.

Starting with the most recent films I saw, two extraordinary documentaries about the evil than men do and the good they would do. Both utterly heart breaking films:

Don't Think I have Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - 12/15 - Documentary about Cambodia's rock and roll scene of the 60s and 70s, and also Cambodia's history through its pop music, Sinn Sisimouth on. Start with Cambodia's independence - France let them go without a drawn out war - and continues through the 50s and 60s, as they tried to find a place to survive in an increasingly perilous world. Follows the music - the influences from outside - Afro-cuban, French, later British, American soul, American rock - showing how these outside styles influenced their music, and how the music itself evolved. The European and American music fed into Cambodian styles, especially gtheir singing styles and melodies, to create something really cool. There's quite a lot of detail, digging into the artists, the development of the music, the business and so on. This story is poised against the political history - Cambodia's attempts to thread a neutral path between its enemies - which can't hold. You see the dangers gathering - you see the bad decisions by Cambodians (Sihanouk's flirtations with both sides, the coup that overthrew him, his flirtation with the Khmer Rouge), the casual villainy of the United States, the opportunism of the Chinese and Vietnamese - leading to the final horror of the Khmer Rouge takeover. And the killing fields - which wiped out not just the music, but many of the musicians. Seeing them bac to back, you can't help notice the parallels with Look of Silence - in Cambodia, communists killed anti-communists; in Indonesia, anti-communists killed communists - though the actual targets of both seem eerily similar - artists, intellectuals, small time labor leaders, teachers.... At the end - the film does justice to those who survived - letting them speak, of the joys of their youth and the horrors of the 70s - and is a fine tribute to them all.

Look of Silence - 13/15 - This is the follow up to one of the films of the decade, The Act of Killing - again examining the anti-communist bloodbath of the 1960s in Indonesia. This time, Joshua Oppenheimer approaches the killings from the victim's side, particular one Adi, the brother of a man killed in the massacre in 1965. Adi was born later, 1968 - he grew up without the direct memory of the killings, though unable to escape their effects. He is an eye doctor, and uses this as a hook to talk to many of the people involved in killing his brother - he meets them and tries to get them to apologize, not heavy handedly - just telling them who he is, and asking if they have regrets. These interviews are the spine of the film. There are several of them. A thin old man who talks about drinking blood to not go crazy, and asks why Adi wants to talk about politics. The leader of the paramilitary, who brags about the killings until Adi mentions his brother, then tries hard to avoid the responsibility. (Oh, the army ordered us! he says.) There's a politician who as much as threatens that they will do it again if Adi keeps asking questions. Then another old man with his daughter - she talks about being proud of her father, but then the old man tells his version of the story of drinking blood to not go mad, and she cracks. Indeed - she is the one person on the side of the killers who does so - she apologizes, begs forgiveness, tries to reconcile. Adi talks to his own uncle, who was in the army, a guard at the prison camp - who tries to avoid responsibility for his part And finally, Adi confronts the widow of another of the leaders, a man who had been seen bragging about it on archive footage, showing off a book about it and bragging about killing Ramli (Adi's brother) by name. Ramli died hard - running away, being recaptured, being stabbed repeatedly without dying, finally being castrated and bleeding to death. Adi asks his widow and children about it, and they deny ever knowing about it - he shows them the book, with a drawing of Ramli being taken away from his family and they deny ever seeing the book. So Oppenheimer plays the clips from earlier, showing the man talking about it, showing the book to his wife and others. The man's sons get defensive and even turn on Oppenheimer. These visits are interwoven with scenes with Adi's family - his parents (father ancient, blind, crippled, mostly deaf, thinking he is 17, forgetting everything else - his mother, also old though not that old, and seeming to have forgotten nothing - and his children, growing up learning the stories of the killings, that still praise them as defeating evil communists. The film ends, finally, with Adi and his parents visiting another survivor - the father is lost, he doesn't know where he is; the mother falls into the man's arms weeping.

In the end, this is less formally thrilling than The Act of Killing, but even more gut wrenching. And it is a picture of the sheerest courage - Adi's interviews with his brother's killers might be the bravest thing I have ever seen on film. More than once, you know that all that is standing between Adi and death is a Danish film crew and an American with a camera. (An impression borne out in Oppenheimer's description of the measures they took to ensure their safety.) In a way, this film works like a sane, pacifist version of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Adi confronts people who did heinous things, trying, over and over, to get them to acknowledge what they did, and that it was heinous - without any luck. But he does so peacefully, gently even, calm and direct in the face of the past - as quiet as Kenzo Okuzaki is ferocious. Paired, especially, Oppenheimer's films rank with the very best documentaries.

The Tribe - 11/15 - A fairly standard Young Gangster film made interesting by 2 things - all the characters are deaf, and perform it all in sign language without translations; and it contains a total of 34 shots (per IMDB; I counted 28 myself, but probably missed a handful.) Those are both gimmicks, but they work. The film is a tour de force, with those long takes and silence, and the visual punch of the sign language - performed with great elan, and very well made. Clear story telling, visually engaging, and so on. The formal properties are superb: the silence, the editing, the camera movements, the use of sound, the choreography - bands of kids moving back and forth - as well as the silent filmmaking chops. The story - is old hat, probably old hat 100 years ago (one kid in a gang falls for one of the girls and gets crosswise the rest of the gang, with lethal results), but traditional genres are traditional for reasons; this one doesn't do anything new with the story, but plenty new (or newish), and all very well with the form. And old hat or not, it is engaging - a very good film.

Do I Sound Gay? - 10/15 - Documentary about the "gay voice" - where it comes from, what it is, and so on - interesting, if not revelatory. Follows the writer/director, David Thorpe, as he examines his own voice, and takes steps to change it - there is plenty of interesting material around this. Old clips of comedians with "sissy" voices - Paul Lynde, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace - as a potential model; interviews with speech therapists, on the gendering of speech and so on; discussions of performance, and how - and why - sounding gay is sometimes perceived as worse than being gay. (A revealing Louis CK joke to that affect...) There is a lot of interesting material here, maybe too much - lots of questions and observations are raised, but they aren't always followed through that deeply.

Tangerine - 12/15 - Christmas eve in LA, with 2 trans prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-Dee Rella. Sindee is just out of jail, and Alexandra tells her that her pimp/lover has been cheating, with a woman - so Sindee goes on the war path to find her. She tracks her down, and drags her back to confront Chester the pimp, while the film follows two other characters, Alexandra, and an Armenia cabbie named Razmik, who is having a very bad day. Annoying fares, 2 drunks puking in his cab, and finally what he thinks is a ladyboy prostitute who doesn't have anything between her legs - but he hooks up with Alexandra, and things get better. That night, Alexandra has a gig singing in a club - though only Sindee and Chester's white fish show up. And then they all converge on the donut shop (Sindee, the white girl, Chester, Alexandra, Razmik, Razmik's mother in law and his wife) to have it out. All of it adds up to a remarkable film. Shot on iPhones, taking full advantage of their size and flexibility, a really fine looking film. It's carried by the performances though - the leads (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are fantastic - charismatic, funny, surprising. A very fine film.

Mr. Holmes - 9/15 - An entertaining and sometimes almost moving story about a very old Sherlock Holmes, losing his memory, going to Japan to get "Prickly Ash" - a plant with magical powers he hopes. He is hosted by a Japanaese man who seems to adulate him, but turns out to have lost his father because Holmes told the man to stay in England. Back in England, Holmes' health declines, and especially his memory - but he teaches his housekeeper's son bee keeping, and tries to remember a story that caused him to retire. The film jumps around between these time frames - the present in the country, the story he is trying to remember, and his time in Japan - and all come to their climax together. Roger is stung almost to death, but by wasps (one last piece of fairly obvious detection for the old man), and he remembers the story - a woman who lost two still born children loses her mind and he doesn't prevent her suicide... (Sorry for spoiling it, in case anyone is reading this... but I've spoiled better films already haven't I?) Anyway - it is sentimental nonsense - I've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories this summer and he failed rather often to save people, and while he always strove to avenge them, it doesn't seem likely to break him... But that aside - apart from the sentimentality, Ian McKellan and the kid playing Roger (Milo Parker) are fantastic. I'm sure Laura Linney would be too, if she had anything to do. But they are great and worth seeing the film for.

Amy - 11/15 - Biography of Amy Winehouse that does justice to her, as an artist as well as a fuckup. Starts with Amy in home movies, ae 14 or so, belting out happy birtthday, and then marches through her life - singing professionally at 16, making a record around 20, winning prizes, with a kind of jazzy sound - going more pop in 2006 with a huge record - then everything coming apart. Though we also see that it was always apart - she was already a pothead at 16, etc. Her nemesis is her boyfriend and eventual husband, one Blake Fielder, a flashy club kid who takes up with her, lives an amour fou, then dumps her; when she becomes a huge star he comes back, and they sink into crack, heroin and so on (along with booze) - and - 5 years of decline as it happened, until she died. And so? I didn't think much about Amy Winehouse when she was alive - the film does a fine job of demonstrating what the fuss was about. She had a stunning set of pipes, and more talent for song writing than I had any idea of. The film dwells on her songs - maybe leaning a bit toward milking the autobiographical content from them, but still showing them clearly, showing her songwriting skills. They are good songs. I'm still not totally convinced - she's a fine singer, a master of old styles, but all of it comes off a bit to derivative, too polite - she's too much Tony Bennett, not enough Frank Sinatra. But that's a matter of degrees - and she died at 27 and was basically done as an artist at 22 - if she'd had half a chance to survive a while, she might have lived up to the raw talent. Unfortunately, her doom seems pre-ordained: she was screwed up young and stayed screwed up, and surrounded by people who wren't going to let her troubles get in the way of her paycheck. Blake might be the most obvious monster, but you feel a hint or so of sympathy for him - he's in the same state she's in, after all. But her father and her manager come off as just about as crass and oblivious to her condition - they are riding the gravy train and trying to get everything out of it they can, as if they knew she wasn't long for the world, and they wee going to make their bank before she went. The kid never had a chance.

Big Game - 8/15 - Fake 80s style action comedy - the president's plane is shot down in Finland by Walter Palmer - wait, no - but - terrorists, or big game hunters - something. But on the ground, the president (played by Samuel L Jackson, who would make a fine president) is found by a 13 year old on some kind of coming of age mission to kill him an animal in the woods. The kid proceeds to save the day. Yay! It is all amusing, sometimes very nifty - though also usually simplistic and sometimes rather dumb. It's an homage to the 80s, in a way that seems half serious and half comical - since a lot of the films it riffs on were half serious half comic the math get confusing - but it's more than enjoyable enough on its own terms.

Testament of Youth - 9/15 - This is a handsome, inteligent adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir of WWI. Brittain's book is a bit of a brute - very long and full of horrors, being about WWI - the film is not very long, and though it has its share of horrors it doesn't really do justice to the book. It starts well, this new film, but falls apart in the second half - which is probably an inevitable by product of the story. The book covers WWI and its aftermath - an in conventional terms (and this is a very conventional film), her story is very front-loaded. All the drama happens up front - she studies for Oxford - she meets Roland Leighton, a young poet on his way to Oxford - she gets into Oxford! - the war starts and all the boys go off to war - she goes to Oxford, but decides she can't be in school while men are dying in the Belgian mud, so she becomes a VAD (a volunteer nurse) - and then Roland dies in the Belgian mud. All that is by the end of 1915: there are still 3 years of war to go; 3 more close friends to die; and then it's back to Oxford and time to End War Forever. The effect is noticeable in the book (which I read for the class I've mentioned before, The Great War in Film and Literature) - it is a definite slog through the middle parts, a long march of death and pain - but Brittain knows it, and makes that part of the story. It is a story of endurance, survival - and survivor's guilt (in spades) - and maybe ultimately redemption and return to life, sort of. She makes it work by making the endurance part of her subject - treating her experiences like stations of the cross in her education: the Mediterrainean, Edward's wounding, Victor's death, her time in France and Hope Milroy, Edward's death and so on. And she makes it work by always maintaining a double perspective on the material, from beginning to end. Her voice writing in 1933 is always present, always important - along with her sense of her immediate reactions to events. (Often achieved with primary sources - letters and poems written at the time, incorporated whole into the memoir.) This film is pretty good, actually, through the first part, the dramatic part, the love story - but completely lost once Roland is gone. It never figures out how to get through the rest of the war, so reduces the main events to a couple scenes, and drops much of the material that gives the book its emotional punch: the sense of the length of the war; Vera's friendship with an older nurse, Hope Milroy; her brother's increasing bitterness as the war progresses. It speeds past things that have great resonance for Vera - her survivor's guilt, particularly, which is made worse when she leaves the VAD to take care of her mother; this happens in the film without any weight. It's probably hopeless, really - there's no way to make a conventional film out of the material without butchering the material, and this is a very conventional film. Though to be fair - even as a mini-series, it ran into trouble - it could cover the material, but they also dropped Brittain's narration, and that flattened out the material. It's a problem - that love story at the beginning makes it a tempting story to film - the rest of the story makes it very likely to come short...

Still - I wish they could have done better. The cast is very good - Alicia Vikander is especially good, Kit Harrington holds his own, and the rest of the cast is fine. But Vikander, particularly, doesn't get enough to do - Vera Brittain's character is flattened out along with the story - the politics (and it is a very political book - feminist and pacifist, and quite pointedly so in both) is mostly gone, certainly made polite. She registers suffering - she doesn't register the anger that is obvious in the book...

Lusitania

Today is another aniversary from 100 years ago - the Sinking of the Lusitania. The Lusitania was a British passenger liner running between New York and Liverpool, still making runs in 1915, despite the increased danger from German submarines. The Germans wee. at this point in the war, beginning to carry out unlimited submarine warfare - that is, they were beginning to attack British ships on sight, from under water, with torpedoes - rather than surfacing and attempting to evacuate the ships first. They made no secret of this - before the Lusitania left New York, they circulated a warning, pointing out that England was a war zone, and they had the right to attack ships near England, and would - that passengers traveled at their own risks. But passengers traveled, including a lot of Americans - and when the Germans sank it, 218 Americans died, of the 1198 total casualties. It caused a sensation - the British condemned the attack roundly; the Americans too, and edged toward war - and certainly turned against the Germans. The Germans, for their part, while defending their actions, abandoned unlimited submarine warfare for two years - they only resumed in in 1917, when the war was starting to go against them. It didn't help - in 1917, the Americans were having none of it, and came into the war not long after. The sinking of the Lusitania, then, did finally lose the war for Germany (the US's involvement went far toward breaking the stalemate) - though it took a few years to come to pass.

That is probably all for the best, but you have to feel some sympathy for them. They claimed at the time that the Lusitania was a legitimate target, carrying armaments - and it was. Which makes it not entirely untrue to say that the passengers were being used as human shields - the morality gets muddy there. The morality of naval warfare - blockades and submarine warfare - is pretty murky anyway. The British blockades the Germans for the whole war - and went a long way toward starving them out. Causing serious ongoing suffering in the civilian population. But the British did this with surface ships - they had a huge navy that could cut off trade with Germany without using submarines. The Germans lacked the surface fleet, but they had submarines, which were very effective against shipping - though the nature of submarine warfare makes it impossible to wage without killing people. Surface ships can turn back freighters - a large surface navy can stop shipping without always sinking it, can drive off any military escorts and so on - submarines can't do that. They can only sink ships. They can't surface to engage with ships - a few destroyers can rout a submarine. So waging a blockade with subs is a murderous affair - immediately murderous: killing people instantly and terrifyingly, rather than starving them slowly, the British way.

But it points to something else - that 20th century warfare was becoming total war - wars are always won and lost through logistics, but this is all the more obvious in the 20th century, with heavy industrialization, with larger populations, concentrated in cities that have to bring their food from somewhere else. And with the industrialization of warfare itself, creating an insatiable appetite for machines of killing. Commerce becomes all the more important - commerce and industry - and they become legitimate targets for attack, with all the civilian casualties that come with it. This would only grow more important as time passed, as air power became more important - it would justify the use of strategic bombing in WWII. That's a topic for another day - but in the end, it would end up killing millions (maybe) of civilians, without really making any dent in anyone's war making capabilities. Not in absolute terms, and not in comparison with what submarines (and conventional blockades) would accomplish.

Finally - here is Winsor McKay's animated film on the sinking of the Lusitania, a fine piece of wartime propaganda by a great filmmaker:

Gallipoli

100 years ago today, the landings on Gallipoli Peninsular took place. The campaign was the brainchild of Winston Churchill basically - the idea was for the allies to force their way up the Dardenelles and take Constantinople, giving them access to the Black Sea, and thus Russia. There's a lot of backstory to this battle. Start with the Ottoman Empire deciding to join the Germans and Austrians in the war. The Young Turks hwo rules the Ottoman empire were close to the Germans - the British tended to be more bullying, while the Germans offered help and support - the Turks chose Germany. That shut off the Dardenelles, and most significantly, cut off sea routes to Russia. The Russians in 1914 were desperately short of supplies - England and France had no way to get them material. So Churchill and company thought to force their way up the Dardenelles, take Constantinople, and open the shipping lanes to the Black Sea.

Churchill tried first to do it with naval power alone. Battleships were sent, they bombarded the Turkish defenses, then tried to steam up the straights - only to be devastated by mines, primarily. Several ships sank - the fleet retreated. After this, the army was sent in. The idea was to find and destroy the Ottoman artillery - the guns hadn't done much against the battleships, but they had driven off the minesweepers, leaving the battleships helpless against mines. And so - on April 25, 1915, troops were put ashore at several beaches on the Gallipoli peninsular.

The landings were a disaster. Amphibious landings under fire were still something of a novelty - getting men ashore was not easy. What's worse - the Allies did not really know what they were getting into. The ANZAC forces landed a mile off from where they were supposed to land - across the whole area, the Allies did not understand the lay of the land, the conditions on the beaches and so on. They didn't have any idea of the strength of the men waiting for them. They landed in the face of determined resistance, from men dug in on high ground, from positions that allowed crossing fire - they never had a chance. Casualties ran 60-70% in most of the battlegrounds - by the end of the first day, the British and ANZAC forces had managed to take a strip of land by the beaches, but no more. And they never went anywhere in the next 7 months. Because as bad as the landings went, once the Turks were able to bring in enough men to hold the ground, they had the allies completely at their mercy. They had the high ground - they had positions that let them rake the allied positions - the battle quickly turned into protracted trench warfare. It was probably worse than anything on the western front, too - the peninsular was dry and hot, and what fresh water there was was controlled by the Ottomans - water had to be brought in to the allied forces - every thing had to be brought ashore to the allies forces. And there was never enough - the trenches became hellish and stayed that way.

In the end, the allies left, losing 250,000 odd men. The Turks lost about the same, but they won, expelling the invaders. As far as the war went, it was just another of the many pointless and hopeless battles that accomplished nothing but very long casualty lists. Beyond the war, though, it has a great deal of importance. It was a great moment in Turkish nationalism - the victory had great importance to their morale, and provided a source of national pride. It also elevated Mustafa Kemal (later Attaturk) to prominence. It had a similar effect in Australia and New Zealand. The heroism and suffering of the ANZAC troops made Gallipoli the definitive campaign for those countries. And their use - the sense of being thrown into battle half prepared, and of beings used as distractions and covers for the British (an idea that is not really fair) - led to resentment in Australia and New Zealand against the British, and helped to form the idea of those countries as nations unto themselves. It strengthened their sense of independence - the emergence of their sense of national character. It has made today, April 25, a national holiday in both countries, and made it the most important military commemoration as well.

Gas! Gas!

The other big historical anniversary right now is the Great War. And what happened 100 years ago today needs to be mentioned. On April 22, 1915, the Second Battle of Ypres began - it was a very important battle, because it marked the first successful use of poison gas in WWI. The Germans opened the attack by releasing a great mass of chlorine gas - they had it in canisters that they opened by hand, and hoped the wind would carry it over the French lines. It did (though it also poisoned a good number of Germans) - it devastated the soldiers in the front lines, and caused a huge gap to open in the lines. But the Germans weren't prepared to exploit the opening - they didn't have reserves ready to attack, whether because they didn't think the gas would work that well, or because they were as afraid of it as the French, I don't know. In any case, the hole opened, but by the time the Germans attacked, the Allies were able to close the gap. And just like that, they were back to regular trench warfare, and the battle continued another month and another 100,000 or so casualties for both sides.

On a tactical level, it was WWI in miniature - a new method of attack that did, in fact, break the stalemate, but that couldn't be exploited, followed by endless repetitions of the same tactic, that couldn't work again. Almost from the start, certain Canadians realized they could protect themselves from the gas by pissing on cloth and breathing through it - it didn't take long for word to get around, and then for gas masks to be distributed. These defenses were never enough to prevent the horrors of gas warfare, but they were enough to negate it as an offensive tactic. It just became another horrible way to die. And everyone kept doing it - the Germans tried again on the 24th of April, with some success, but never enough to break through. After that, everyone started using gas, but it was never decisive again. Just another method of killing, that usually caused as much trouble for the attackers as the defenders (since the gas hangs around in trenches, and you have to advance through it). It is one of the many things that made this war one of the most horrifying things human beings have done to one another, made trench warfare a sustained hell on earth. And, after April 22, 1915, never really accomplishing anything of military importance.

Armistice Day 2014

Today is Armistice Day again. The 100th anniversary of the Great War is on us - I am taking a class, and so have been reading, thinking and writing about WWI all fall. Today, 100 years ago, November 11, 1914, was just another day. Part of the first battle of Ypres - in fact, it was part of what would turn out to be the last German push of that battle. The Germans attacked near the town of Nonnebosschen; they broke through he British lines, but were stopped by reserves. Both armies were pretty well wiped out by then - Wikipedia's account notes that Haig's I Corps had lost 90% of its officers and 83% of its enlisted men by then - and after this, there wasn't much fight left in anyone. When the attack on Nonnebosschen failed, the Germans backed off - began transferring men to the Eastern front - and winter came in.

That's 1914. The end of the Battle of Ypres basically locked both sides in place - this is where they all finally dug in for real, when trench warfare took over the whole western front. There would be a few months of relative calm at the end of 1914 into 1915, before both sides started trying to figure out how to get through trench lines. We will have four more years to see how that would go.

And 4 years in the future, it would end. The Germans would be fought to the point of collapse; the German government would collapse (after the Russians collapsed); the Allies would still be functional - so they got to win. But this isn't about winning.

No one really won anything in World War I. Millions of people were killed, and who gained? Japan, probably; the Bolsheviks; Serbia, I suppose, got what they wanted (despite being invaded and wrecked and nearly obliterated by the war). There were some interesting secondary effects, like women's suffrage, which appeared in many countries after the war - probably not a coincidence. But the thing itself, even by the standards of warfare, was a pointless and depressing affair from beginning to end. Marking its ending thus becomes something of a symbol for the hope that humans could learn from it, figure out the futility of war. It's something of a vain hope, but a worthwhile hope anyway.

A news story about the commemoration of the First Battle of Ypres:

Cedar Creek (and Ypres I)

I've been terrible in keeping up with my Civil War posts lately - but need to put something up today, the anniversary of the Battle of Cedar Creek. When last we left U.S. Grant, at the Battle of the Crater, he had failed, yet again, to break through Lee's lines outside Petersburg - and he was about to stop trying. He settled down to hold Lee in place, and look for ways to win the war elsewhere - the trenches let him do that - though they also let Lee send some of his men off to try to win the war elsewhere. Specifically, he sent Jubal Early to the Shenandoah Valley, to see what mischief they could make. They made their share - marching up to Washington, firing on the city itself, causing panic and fear in all but Lincoln and Grant (Lincoln went to see the fighting, and terrified the Union Generals by peering out at the rebels over the parapets.) Grant sent an army corps (the VI corps - which by this time was probably the best unit in the army); later he sent Phil Sheridan and most of their cavalry, and sent them to do their worst to Early. They did quite a bit - thrashing the Rebels at the battle of Winchester in September - then a couple days later at Fisher's Hill - this left Early's army in ruins, and Sheridan set out to make the Shenandoah Valley waste. Anticipating Sherman's march to the sea, Sheridan marched through the valley, burning crops, destroying barns and mills, turning what had been a major source of supply for the Confederacy into ruins. At the bend of this, thinking that Early was done, Sheridan went to Washington, and started planning to bring the Army of the Potomac men back to Grant.

But Early had other ideas. He had been reinforced - and he knew he had to do something, since he was running out of supplies - so he attacked. In the event, the attack went splendidly - he found that the Union army was not keeping close watch on their left flank: the ground was rough, they though it would discourage the Rebels - but Early was an old Jackson underling, and took that kind of situation for an opportunity. So they attacked, and caved in the Union left, and forced the whole army into retreat. There was heavy fighting, especially when the Rebels ran into the VI corps - but the Federals were drive steadily back.

Meanwhile, Sheridan was in Winchester, a dozen or so miles away. By 9 in the morning (after 3 hours or so to it), he heard enough of the noise to decide to get moving - he rode south, and as he did, realized there was a battle going on. So off he went, at full speed, arriving somewhere around 10:30. He found the lines fairly stable - the VI corps was holding their lines; the rebels had called a halt to their attack, to regroup - to recollect their men, who had been looting the Union camps. Sheridan set about organizing a counterattack - it was ready later that afternoon, and when it came, it was overwhelming. He attacked on the flanks with cavalry, then straight ahead with infantry - there was a period of heavy fighting, then the Rebels collapsed, the cavalry got into their rear, and the rout was on.

And that was that. This was the end of Confederate efforts in the Valley - it was always a strategy doomed by long odds: the Union had very large advantages in numbers, everywhere - so when the Confederates sent away men to fight elsewhere, Grant could send away more men. The very trenches that allowed Lee to dispatch parts of his army to try to find other opportunities allowed the Yankees to dispatch more men to beat the Rebels in detail. Which is what they did - here and elsewhere. Whenever the Confederates came out of their trenches in 1864, they were thrashed mightily. They were outnumbered, and increasingly outgunned - the union cavalry was starting to carry repeaters, and starting to operate as a powerful offensive force on their own. The cavalry itself was becoming a decided Union advantage - especially here, in a fairly mobile warfare, where cavalry was deployed as an offensive force. Their mobility, their firepower told.

It might be enough to make you think that cavalry was still a viable arm of the military! A delusion we might want to visit again in the next couple days - 50 years after the battle of Cedar Creek, the First Battle of Ypres started, October 19, 1914. That would mark the end, really, of mobile warfare on the Western Front - or more precisely, the end of warfare in the open. But we can come back to that - the Battle of Ypres lasted for a month. But I will end with this - no one in Europe paid much attention to what happened in the Civil War; if they had - they probably would have looked at battles like Winchester and Cedar Creek, with their decisive cavalry actions, and saw vindication for their ideas about offense. What they would not have noticed, since they never noticed it, is that what really started to separate union cavalry at the end of the Civil war, was their firepower - Sharps, Spencer and Henry rifles, breechloaders and repeaters - which would change everything, more than anyone could conceive in 1864, and, tragically, even in 1914.

Another World War I Post

100 years ago today, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, after Germany invaded Belgium. Britain had signed a treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality (as had Germany) - Germany had decided they had to go through Belgium to invade France. Britain issued an ultimatum (lots of ultimatums were issued in the days leading up to the Great War) telling the Germans to get out of Belgium; Germany kept on coming. And so England joined the war.

There are lots of places where the war starts - July 28, when Austria attacked Serbia; July 31 when Russia mobilized; August 1 when Germany responded to that, and declared war - and of course the 4th. August 4 might make some claim to being where the Great War became a World War - without Great Britain, the war would have been mostly continental - maybe some colonial squabbling, but nothing like what would happen when England joined. It brought in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, for example, brought in India; it made the war more of a naval affair; it brought countries like Japan in. It also probably sealed Germany's fate - however long their odds of beating both France and Russia, they were considerably worse with England involved. Whatever ideas they might have had for their navy, for instance, became moot. It undoubtedly changed the shape of their submarine war. It made their position quite difficult.

Should England have fought the war? it is controversial - some claim that they lost far more than they could have ever gained by fighting. That is undoubtedly true - though the question is, exactly how long would they have been able to stay out? if they hadn't fought in 1914 - would Germany have provoked them to fight in 1915? what if Germany had won in 1914? would that have been a disaster? obviously not the disaster it would have been - and was - when Germany won in 1940 - but not likely to help England much.

The truth is - most arguments about WWI, and who should have done what, tend to founder on the course of the ear, and the aftermath. The war itself developed into a pointless bloodbath. The peace proved to be a disaster for all concerned. You keep looking for ways they could have done something different - not gotten into it, dug in and stayed dug in without trying to break the stalemate; Versailles is pretty easy to improve.... But it's kind of pointless. Everyone went in - well, it's the opposite of what Renoir said: everyone had bas reasons. Except, maybe, the British - there is something to be said for honoring your treaties and defending the national and territorial integrities of other countries. None of it did anyone any good - but the Germans (and Austrians, and in some ways, the Russians and even the French) are going to have their war come what may - and odds are everyone was going to get sucked into it. The US would get sucked into it eventually - I imagine the UK would haven even if they hadn't defended Belgium.