WE belong to a generation that has been exposed to every conceivable atrocity of war, torture and
aggression. We no longer take very much notice of summary executions; even the beheadings so
graphically transmitted on television have somehow become part of contemporary life. Our sense of outrage has been dulled; we tolerate or ignore that which was once intolerable.
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IT was not so during the First World War. The nations at each others throats were developed nations, colonial powers, the rulers of every continent. That was the world of the Titanic, the world in which men had for the first time begun to fly. The air hummed with radio signals and Marconi was a household name.
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AMONG the aristocrats, the rulers and the upper reaches of the middle classes, there remained a veneer of humanity and an outward show of honour and decency. To them, gallantry and chivalry were still the coinage of polite society. Yet they were the leaders who ultimately waged the deadliest war the world had seen.
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THE art of “playing the game,” even during war, was in stark contrast with the carnage of the trenches in which tens of thousands of men died in the mud. It was no wonder that poet soldiers like England’s Rupert Brooke, killed in France at the age of 28, reflected the shock and horror of a war that even today strains reason and logic and belief.
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YESTERDAY was Armistice Day. As often quoted, the armistice between Germany and the Allies came into effect at 11am – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The agreement was signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, 65km north east of Paris. In 1940, during WWII, Adolf Hitler forced the French to sign an armistice on German terms in the same railway carriage.
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PERHAPS the ultimate comment on the futility of war – the “victors,” Britain and the Empire, France, Russia and the United States spent approximately US$125 billion; the “defeated” states of Germany and Austria-Hungary lost some US$60 billion. The WWI military action death toll alone was about 16 million people.
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– Dee Nesenolis