One hundred years ago today the first American troops landed
in France to fight with the Allies in the Great War, as it was later called. The Yanks were “coming, over there,” as everyone stateside would soon be singing.
They found madness, wrapped in carnage, dripping in disillusionment. In World War One alone, says a Wikipedia
entry, 17 million soldiers and civilians died from wounds and disease, including
over one hundred thousand Americans. And
in the Second World War, a direct continuation of the unfinished First, many times
more than that would suffer and perish.
In his masterful treatment The First World War, historian John Keegan writes: “…the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height
of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of
the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it
had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious
and local internecine conflict? Why …
did the combatants persist in their military effort … and eventually commit the
totality of their young manhood [and much
of their civilian populations, I would add here] to mutual and pointless
slaughter? …. How did the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, find the
resolution to sustain the struggle and to believe in [the war’s] purpose?”
We have film. We can
see the pompous, murderously-incompetent, half-decrepit generals and the effete,
smarmy, oily politicos all parading about in herky-jerky motion, full of
themselves, festooned like peacocks with their gaudy European plumes and sashes,
leading the world into war for their own petty, obscure, and erratic purposes. It was all so absurd, so comical if not so unspeakably
sad, so utterly infuriating, so unimaginably tragic.
After almost three years of this madness, revealed to the
world in newspapers, in film, in photographs, and in letters, in June of 1917 the
Americans crossed an ocean to join in.
R Balsamo
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