[C19fan]

The accounts of what soldiers went through at Verdun at unbelievable.

[BenLurkin]

[jumpingcholla34]

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.

[IronJack]

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 ...

[PIF]

Lantern of the Dead - entrance to tower and surrounding ossuary. Note: muslim graves in surrounding cemetery face mecca

[rey]

The link seems to be bad. I tried Googling the title and Weekly Standard and got the same problem.

[drbuzzard]

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.

[blueunicorn6]

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.

[PGR88]

There had been warning signs at Verdun. (French) Troops there, in the last days of the battle, had taken to bleating like sheep as they marched toward the front line.

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.

[TTFlyer]

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.

[2banana]

S little bit of history not many people know of: -------------- The Germans were thus well aware of his plan and prepared for Mangin's attack, which came in the spring of 1917 and failed with heavy casualties. Nivelle had promised that if the attack were not immediately successful, it would be halted, and his men would return to their trenches. But after the initial failures—and some 100,000 casualties—he pressed the attack, pushing French troops to the limit and, then, beyond, until at last .  .  . they mutinied. There had been warning signs at Verdun. Troops there, in the last days of the battle, had taken to bleating like sheep as they marched toward the front line. They had, again and again, been thrown carelessly into attacks that had no chance of success. Now they were refusing to go back into the line and into the attack. Nivelle was relieved, with Pétain appointed in his place. He was the only general the soldiers trusted with their lives. He was also exhibiting the first symptoms of the defeatism that would eventually consume him like a cancer. But he was the indispensable man in France's time of need. He steadied things and gradually brought order and discipline back to an army in which almost half the divisions had shown symptoms of what was euphemistically called "collective indiscipline." Some 500 men were brought up on charges and sentenced to death, though fewer than 50 were executed. There is still uncertainty about the episode. The French covered it up very effectively, for understandable reasons of security in the beginning and for reasons of pride and shame, one assumes, after that.

[US Navy Vet]

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!

[NFHale]

If you haven't already, read Alistair Horne's "The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916".

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.

[animal172]

I remember visiting the site back in 1957 when I was only 9 years old. My French friend and I went around the back of the building and looked through the ground level windows and saw nothing but human bones. Chilling. All around the battle field there were still weapons sticking up out of the ground.

[Chainmail]

Absolutely staggering. The downrange gene pool effects are unimaginable.

[Billthedrill]

Falkenheyn is considered one of the better German commanders of the war, and his plan here, cold, calculating, and horrific as it was, might have worked if he hadn't been countermanded by his own superiors. He calculated he could destroy the French army if he managed a 5:1 casualty ratio, which he was nearly getting before Crown Prince Wilhelm (among others) decided to take the thing seriously and press on for a victory involving the taking of ground. That wasn't really the idea, and it turned the casualty ratio back toward 1:1 by exposing the German infantry to the same debilitating artillery fire that Falkenheyn had planned to do his work for him. It was, ironically, the taking of Fort Douaumont that motivated German senior command to go over to a real, all-in offensive, to feed both armies into the meat-grinder instead of only the French. Falkenheyn was, essentially, trapped by success.

This was the beginning of the era of massed artillery, which provided nearly 85% of the casualties in WWI. They called what resulted in human physiology shell shock, which is a better name that post-traumatic stress disorder in this case because the trauma was incessant and ongoing. Men were literally shelled into insanity by the ceaseless bombardment; nowhere to hide and both advance and retreat impossible. One thing that Petain did do that helped a great deal was rotating French units in and out of the front lines on a fixed schedule offering limited exposure to the incredible violence. One might hope to survive that.

The ensuing mutiny is scarcely worthy of the name - the mutineers were scrupulous about not harming the officers, they simply declined to return to the trenches, rather in keeping with Petain's stated intention to "wait for the tanks and the Americans". The Etaples mutiny within the British army that occurred around the same time was a bit darker, but even in that case no organized effort to flee the front was made, which was what terrified senior command. The German army displayed no such behavior, but the German navy did somewhat later during the last full month of the war, declining to participate in what was essentially a suicide mission in the Kiel mutiny.

[DoodleDawg]

I went to Europe with a friend the summer between graduate and under-graduate school. He was a history major who wanted to tour the World War I battlefields. We started in the north and worked our way south; Somme battlefields, Ypres, Passchendaele, Argonne, on down towards Verdun. He tried to explain what the Verdun Ossuary was like but it wasn’t till I saw it that it really hit home.

[Afterguard]

Highly recommend Winston Churchill’s wonderful five volume history of WWI, “The World Crisis” He was directly involved as the First Lord of the Admiralty, and after the debacle of Gallipoli, as a field grade officer in the trenches. it is a superb general description of the war from a man that had direct input to its prosecution.

[LonePalm]

Even though he was an American citizen, my maternal grandfather volunteered and served for just over two years on the Somme as a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

He said it was the most difficult part of his life but satisfying because of the lives he was able to save who otherwise would have died. I have a commendation of his hospital signed by King George V.

"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[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.