
Help Me to Die, O Lord - benbreen
https://medium.com/century-magazine/help-me-to-die-o-lord-524aa0164b30#.rgwfa71dn
======
gyardley
As far as I can tell, my great-grandfather's older brother committed suicide
with his own infantry rifle rather than go over the top of the trenches again.

The report from the military court of enquiry makes for some sobering reading
- the statements of his platoon mates make it sound like he'd already been
mentally ill for weeks.

------
DominikR
From todays perspective it's really hard for me to understand how different
society must have valued their own young men to sacrifice 20.000 within 90
minutes without knowing for sure or at least having a high probability of
succeeding. (Keep in mind that populations were generally everywhere much
smaller than today)

Today even the strongest militaries in the world are terrified of the
possibility that they could loose a few thousand men within a few years of
war.

Maybe it's because we in the West have become so productive that we value
every member of society much more. If it is so then it'll mean that eventually
as every society gets richer over time it'll see these mass killings and
sacrifices as pure insanity and refrain from it.

I believe we would have less of a mess in the Middle East if there was
economic stability and the young men there would have the means (and attitude
which is often missing) to reach their goals without resorting to violence.
After all it must be obvious even to the crazy people running ISIS that the
state they are trying to build cannot be sustainable on the long run only
through looting and killing their neighbours, even if they were to win every
single battle.

Eventually they would run out of neighbours that they can loot and what then?

Edit: I criticise the attitude of men from the Middle East because since we
have now many refugees and immigrants here I had the chance to meet many of
them. I've not met a single one that didn't come across as a free loader to me
so this leads me to believe that this is nothing unusual in their culture. So
it's no wonder to me that they are generally poor over there while countries
like Germany are rich.

~~~
tremon
_Maybe it 's because we in the West have become so productive that we value
every member of society much more_

I think it's less a matter of productiveness, and more a matter of
connectedness: it's easier to send thousands to their death if they're not
your peers. The increased mobility of our society (both social and physical)
has blurred and removed many of the old divides (class, vocation, religion)
and we're still working on removing others.

Also, the increased transparency of wars and accountability of institutions
plays an important role.

~~~
DominikR
As far as I know the number of friends or connections a person has has been
relatively stable in the last few centuries.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

It is not absolutely uncontested but I haven't seen any evidence that the
number of connections people have nowadays has increased.

> The increased mobility of our society (both social and physical) has blurred
> and removed many of the old divides (class, vocation, religion) and we're
> still working on removing others.

I see more of an atomisation of society into ever smaller groups of minorities
that fight each other and more class divide than ever. One other symptom of
this is the radicalisation that we see particularly with young people.

20 years ago it would have been unfathomable to me to even imagine that
teenagers born in the West would decide to join some crazy group that cuts of
heads and throws gays off tall buildings.

------
cyberferret
An incredible essay. That closing poem moved me deeply. What a terrible,
terrible time in the history of mankind.

~~~
plug
Indeed. I heard some of the Somme Commemoration on the radio the other day,
and I was moved deeply by Charles Dance's recital of Siegfried Sassoon's
"Aftermath"[1]

> Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

It's impossible to imagine the horror - even pondering the numbers of fallen
in the first day throttles the imagination, let alone the horrific ways in
which these men were murdered in swathes.

All the more tragic that many of these young men left their homes to see the
world and experience the adventure of war. They had no idea what was in store
for them.

[1]:
[http://www.potw.org/archive/potw160.html](http://www.potw.org/archive/potw160.html)

------
rwallace
[http://celtic-lyrics.com/lyrics/225.html](http://celtic-
lyrics.com/lyrics/225.html)

"For Willie McBride, it all happened again, / And again, and again, and again,
and again."

And still humans choose war when we could have chosen peace, and follow war
leaders when we could have impeached those leaders and thrown them in prison.
Probably there is an anthropic selection effect in that this conversation only
happens between descendants of killer apes, but that does not excuse us from
the last stage of the Great Filter.

Will we learn in time?

~~~
james-watson
Ah, but there is great payoff for the Kings and Queens.

Not so much for the pawns.

~~~
im3w1l
Raping and looting though. Couldn't you also be rewarded with land or was that
only for the higher ups?

~~~
jpt4
Every Roman legionary post-Marian reforms received a plot of land after their
25 year service [0], officers monetary rewards, and auxiliaries Roman
citizenship for their children.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_reforms#Marian_reforms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_reforms#Marian_reforms)

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Incidentally, that was because before Gaius Marius every legionary had a plot
of land. Marius introduced recruiting from the 'capite censi', the
propertyless citizens.

Rome fought off Carthage with just its small farmers. Probably did not have
many urban poor at the time, either.

~~~
jpt4
Which shift in socio-economic demographics was only accelerated by the
formation of latifundia [0], enormous aristocratic estates consolidated from
small farmholds, at least partially due to the latter's failure when their
owners were at war for more than a single planting/harvest season. This
increased agricultural productivity employed slaves to fuel its economies of
scale, at the expense of inflating the class of landless peasant citizen, who
migrated to cities and became the urban poor. These were then recruited into
the army, which conquered new territories and enslaved new peoples to work the
lands from which their soldiers' lineages had been driven.

This same dynamic repeats itself in Byzantium [1], though with a more
explicitly feudal flavor.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynatoi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynatoi)

~~~
jpt4
Edit: landless peasant citizens

------
SubiculumCode
Moving essay.

------
et1337
As a game developer, it saddens me that this[1] is our industry's
interpretation of WWI.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7nRTF2SowQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7nRTF2SowQ)

~~~
reddytowns
If no one got hurt or died in war, it actually would be really fun

~~~
aplummer
Sitting in the mud? Wasting the best years of your life digging a tunnel by
hand? Marching and malnutrition?

~~~
reddytowns
You're playing war to win, I'm playing it to have fun. Roll tanks around and
shoot at stuff.

The internet has killed imagination.

------
venomsnake
An (un)surprisingly great tribute to that madness is the last episode of
Blackadder goes forth (Goodbyeee). I honestly think that the last 5 minutes of
Goodbyeee are the greatest piece of television ever filmed.

~~~
cyberferret
+1. I enjoyed the first three Blackadder series as a rollicking laugh, but BA4
had an overall much darker theme - and that last episode, especially the last
5 minutes filled me with more sadness and tears than any other war drama movie
ever did... The time lapse of the field at the end after everything falls
silent...(excuse me, I have something in my eye!)

Captain Darling: "rather hoped I'd get through the whole show; go back to work
at Pratt & Sons; keep wicket for the Croydon gentlemen; marry Doris... Made a
note in my diary on my way here. Simply says... 'Bugger...'"

~~~
dghf
Darling gets a couple of good bits in that episode. The part where a car comes
to take him from his desk job at HQ to the front, and you see the driver only
from the long shadow he casts on the office floor, is chilling.

~~~
venomsnake
I think that the best was - "We lived trough it - the great war of 1914 -
1917" ... and suddenly you feel like punched in the gut.

~~~
cyberferret
Yes, that brief glimpse of hope that was brutally torn away seconds later...
The Cpt. Darling quote I mentioned earlier had that 'punch in the gut' feeling
for me too, because it somehow brought to light how large his life was outside
of the war...

I began to wonder about Pratt & Sons - did Pratt have sons or other employees
in the trenches too? Same with the Croydon gentlemen - how many of their 11
will die in the war and never play cricket again? Who is Doris and is she
waiting anxiously at home for him? What will she do when she gets the telegram
telling her he will never come home?

After laughing at Darling as an idiotic, simpering, one dimensional character
in the earlier episodes, it was awfully gut wrenching to see him here as a
more complex personality with a full life, who was quite simply terrified at
the inevitable prospect of having that very life ending in a few minutes time
when they went over the top.

'Bugger' indeed...

