Battle Without End: The casualties of Verdun

Weekly Standard ^ | March 14, 2016 | Geoffrey Norman

[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.

[Yollopoliuhqui]

The social costs of modern warfare are rarely take into account and awareness of them rarely breaks through the crust of tales of heroic exploits, strategy and blame casting. But what resulted after WWI and WWII was a generation of youth raised without fathers.

We often hear of the “generation gap” or “rebellious youth” yet rarely understand that this socially accepted norm was not always the case. After WWI you had the “lost generation” of devil may care hedonism and lack of morality which became the “roaring 20’s”, while in Weimar Berlin, libertine excess defined the destruction of a great nation and led directly to the rise in popularity of Hitler and the Nazis.

Particularly after WWII, fatherless families led to the phenomenon of “juvenile delinquency” which began to tear the fabric of our society apart and directly fed into radicalism and the Viet Nam war protest and pacifist movement that haunts us today.

And, of course, WWI gave us the Bolshevik revolution, the Cold War and anti-American cynical liberalism today.

Who to blame? Monarchy and aristocracy, the same psychology of exploitation and empire building that lives on today in the form of the Wall St. and City of London economic aristocracies, enemies of our Revolution.