Posted on 03/04/2016 8:33:58 AM PST by C19fan
There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell.
When you walk around the outside of the building you find small windows, and when you look through them what you see are bones. Human bones and skulls. Piles of them. They are the remains of more than 130,000 men who were killed here and whose bodies could not be recovered or identified and so remained in the mud, blown apart again and again by artillery shells, in what was arguably the most awful battle of the First World War.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
The Germans have World War I cemeteries in France, also. They’re very somber places. I can understand why many Europeans questioned their entire civilization after the horrors of the Great War.
The damage to France was incalculable. And later, at the Somme, the same decimation visited the English. The Great War was a game-changer in so many ways ...
My daughter and I visited 14 battlefields across northern France and Belgium last August: From Mte St Michel on the west coast over through Normandy (1944), Crecy, Agincourt, Paris, Waterloo, Dunkirk, Sommes (Fromme-Ypres) area, Battle of the Bulge, Verdun.
Even the museums showing the British losses in Belgium and the still-shell-torn woods and hills around Verdun are sobering, unsettling to read and walk through.
WW1 was the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the human race. The wholesale slaughter of an entire generation of men, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the disastrous Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Great Britain that redrew the map of the Middle East and the rise of the House of Saud gave us Hitler and Islamic Terrorism. I have no sympathy for Europe.
The link seems to be bad. I tried Googling the title and Weekly Standard and got the same problem.
I still fully believe that when western civilization finally collapses it will be seen that World War I was the beginning of the end. It destroyed the civilizations faith in itself and its institutions.
Robert Pirsig (author of the book ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE) wrote a book called LILA. In this book, he argues that WWI destroyed The Victorian Era and gave us The Roaring 20s. He wrote that the Soldiers and their families blamed The Victorians for the horrific losses of WWI. Can you imagine one nation suffering 20,000 dead in one day at one battle?
The West turned 180 degrees and started living the “Anything goes!” life.
I think there is a real correlation to this and what happened to the United States after The Vietnam War. The LEAVE IT TO BEAVER world gave way to the SEX, DRUGS, VIOLENCE AND ROCK AND ROLL world.
We see the effects of WWI and Vietnam to this day.
Perhaps the biggest winners were the socialists/communists.
In a world where anything goes, millions of dead foreigners didn’t matter.
That is why it is so important to find and develop the best military leaders. Poor military leaders affect the entire nation.
The Americans and British saw the near collapse of the French and it motivated Wilson to finally declare war on April 2, 1917. I have seen it argued - if the Americans had stayed out, the war would have ended in a stalemate shortly thereafter. Its all speculation, but history certainly would have been different.
And 40,000 wounded on the same day!
As far as I’ve been able to tell, the Great War never ended. Just 20-year pauses every now and then while the nature and technology of warfare catches up and the battle lines are re-drawn. See the Middle East.
And no, mankind cannot be “fixed.” And sooner or later it will vanish from the earth.
The poeple who in 1918 should have been lined up and SHOT:
Douglas Haig
Lloyd George
Clemenceau
“King” Goerge
The Kaiser
Paul Von Hindenburg
Erich Ludendorff
add whom else you think should have been SHOT!
Given Hitler's motivations relative to WWI and the Treaty of Versailles, it could have averted WWII. Which could have averted what we see in the Middle East today. Possibly. We'll never know.
Edwardian intellectuals were already taking the hatchet to the Victorians, usual inter-generational war. Lytton Strachey hatched his idea of his hit piece “Eminent Victorians” before the Great War stated. But the Great War took it to another level.
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Goring,
It is the definitive book on Verdun IMHO. Written back when veterans of that horrific bloodletting were still alive to be interviewed.
It's a view of the battle from the Poilus and Landsers that fought it on the ground.
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