All those years ago, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns finally fell silent. Millions of soldiers, massed against each other in Belgium and north-east France, in the Trentino and Venetian plain of Italy, in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and in the Balkan Peninsula stopped slaughtering each other. Today some of the last surviving veterans of the World War I gathered in London to commemorate the deaths of so many friends and foes in a war that settled... nothing.
In the United States, Vietnam veterans have rightly questioned the wisdom of the war they were conscripted to wage against an enemy whose cause was probably, historically, right - that is, besides fighting for Communism, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were fighting for the right to determine their own destiny, free from foreign interference. But it's not the case that the Vietnam veterans fought for nothing, it's just that they were fighting for a bad cause, and that the United States was defeated. Their sacrifice wasn't meaningless, it was, as was that of the Confederate soldiers, misguided.
In contrast, the man who fought in World War I has every reason to question the meaning of his sacrifice. To what purpose the hideous deaths of millions, the mental scarring of millions more, the mangling of western civilization for four long years? Was it all for a practical stalemate where all participants, save the United States (and possibly Japan) were losers, and where the groundwork was laid for a far more destructive rematch a mere twenty years later? All the horrific places of slaughter - the Somme, Verdun, the eleven battles of the Isonzo, the frozen fields of Galicia and Poland, Gallipoli, the storm-tossed Atlantic Ocean, the skies above Flanders - where men died in vast numbers, in ways in which Hieronymus Bosch himself could scarcely imagine in his worst nightmares - were they sown with blood and sweat and flesh to produce only the seeds of racist Fascism a scant generation later?
Did these brave and terrified men die in vain? Worse, did their deaths contribute to the wholesale slaughter of innocents in numbers too great to reckon during the Second such great war?
It's Veterans' Day again. Let us honor the courage of men who take up arms to fight for causes they deem noble. Let us also reflect upon the follow of the governments who use such honorable men to wage war for dishonorable causes.
Suicide in the TrenchesI knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.--- Siegfried Sassoon, 1918
4 comments:
The one good thing about war is that those who actually fight in one realize what a bad thing it is, and not something to enter into lightly. If only G.W. Bush knew that.
Of course george bush new, he served "honorably" in the national gaurd during the vietnam war.
You both are people with whom I shared my concerns over the Bush war against Iraq, and I find it interesting that you both also have strong libertarian tendencies to my strong leftist ones. I suppose that while our politics may differ, our cynical disdain for the established powers causes us to agree on some fundamentals - for instance, "Thou shalt not commit men and women to combat on the basis of lies, you moronic schmuck."
Wow, I thought I was the only person who had the same libertarian tendencies. I no longer feel so alone in the world. I enjoyed reading Jennifers blog. Well written and thought provoking. She probably watched the x-files, like all of us them there intelligent people do.
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