Posted on 07/30/2017 1:12:49 PM PDT by Lorianne
As the sun went down on Ypres on Sunday, the shale grey stone floor of the old Belgian town’s Menin Gate, the world’s first memorial to those who fell but who were never found during the first world war, was slowly covered by 20,000 blood-red poppies falling from its high arch.
A crowd numbering in the thousands, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Theresa May and the King and Queen of Belgium, Philippe and Matilde, watched on as the paper flowers drifted down in the still evening air. The young voices of the national youth choir of Scotland, standing below the gate’s 14-metre-high ceiling, on which the names of 54,392 of the missing are engraved, sang the Ypres hymn: “O valiant hearts who to your glory came, / Through dust of conflict and through battle flame; / Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved; / Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.”
More than 800,000 soldiers on both sides of the war died in the blood and mud of the Ypres salient between 1914 and 1918. Many marched on the way to the front lines through which the gate built in 1927 now stands. Still today, the remains of dozens of men are found every year in Flanders fields, identified initially by the colouring and markings of the boots in which they died.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
That war destroyed Europe, and for what?
Mud so deep in some places men & horses drowned in it. Such a horrible waste...
Thousands and thousand dead. For mud. A whole generation of young men gone.
Motorhead - 1916
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqFoqtpUFY8
Undoubtedly one of the most gruesome battles in an entirely gruesome War. Incredibly sad.
Went off into the fog and never to return. I remember reading that it would take several weeks at 24/7 for all the men lost marching eight abreast passing Nelson’s column. Then twenty years later ....
In the low ground west of the Passchendaele Ridge three months of constant shelling had blocked the watercourses that normally provided drainage. When rain began falling, the battlefield was transformed into a quagmire of mud making movement extremely difficult. The mud was to become one of the defining features of the battle for soldiers on both sides, and did a great deal to hamper offensive operations.
The Second Battle of Passchendaele
Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie submitted his provisional operational plan on 16 October 1917 and estimated the attack would result in 16,000 casualties
The Canadian Corps operation was executed in series of three attacks , delivered at intervals of three or more days.
By 30 October, the Canadians, aided by two British divisions, gained the outskirts of the village in a driving rainstorm, and then held on for five days against intense shelling and counter-attacks, often standing waist deep in mud as they fought. The Canadians’ victory came at the cost of 15,654 casualties, including 4,028 killed. Currie’s grim casualty prediction had been accurate.
Nine Victoria Crosses, the highest military decoration for valour awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, were awarded to Canadians for actions during the battle.
It swept away the old monarchies and stratified societies based on privilege, and thus cleared the way for WWII.
Britain may still have their Empire had they stayed out of it. They needed “Brexit” in 1914.
I get the feeling the world is preparing to do it again.
a tragic waste
and Wilson extended the carnage by 2 years
I’m not sure. Germany would have likely dominated Europe. To avoid another war, Britain would need to accommodate Germany’s new place in the world. Specifically, Britain would need to open its commonwealth markets to German goods, and allow Germany to develop markets in countries it controlled economically, like Argentina.
What was so great about France?
“Britain may still have their Empire had they stayed out of it. They needed “Brexit” in 1914.”
It would not have helped.
The British were indeed hoping to avoid war until the Germans violated Belgian territory on their way to France. Their act abrogated the treaty that mutually pledged them and the British to uphold Belgian neutrality. British public opinion changed overnight.
From a geostrategic standpoint, Britain had for centuries aligned itself with the lesser powers on the Continent, against the dominant power of the moment. For a long time, this meant alliances with various German states and sometimes the Imperial Russians against France.
All of this changed in the 99 years between Waterloo and August 1914: Prussia, foremost militarily among the Germanic states, rose to dominate industrially, dragooning all the other German states, kingdoms, and principalities into a “greater Germany” over the period 1815-1870, defeating Austria and carving chunks of territory from Denmark and France along the way.
Most of the Continental situation remained balanced from 1871-1890, due in large part to the artful juggling of Germany’s first Imperial Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Things began to head downhill after he was forced from office. Riding a surge of nationalist sentiment and pan-Germanic solidarity, Germany built up a battle fleet capable of countering Britain’s Royal Navy, while denying it was posing any threat.
German diplomatic brinkmanship - otherwise inexplicable - did nothing to reassure Britain, nor the other Continental powers (especially not the Imperial Russians, who were bested several times in a row during the period 1907-1911, and went into the Balkan Wars determined to avoid further humiliation). Neither did the expanding German merchant fleet, nor burgeoning German trade.
None of the leadership among the belligerents foresaw what disruption of international trade would mean - quite apart from the diversion of manpower and material resources into the war effort.
Isolationism was a wrong-headed response: goes double for Americans, who during 1914-1917 weren’t too proud to forgo trade with the Allies, but who deemed themselves too morally elevated, too prissy, to fight - until provoked by Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied (largely British) maritime traffic.
Public attitudes today suggest we’ve not learned much in 100 years.
Thanks to the half-baked nationalism and the forerunners of what we now call the “Social Justice Movement,” colonialism was a dead letter following WWII. None of the European colonial powers held onto their overseas possessions for very long.
“That war destroyed Europe, and for what?”
Hubris and Darwinian Scientism.
I lost the only grandpa I could have known because of that war. He had been gassed and struggled with the effects all the rest of his life. Because of it he died the year I was born. I never knew him.
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