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.
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.
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.
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.
The beginnings of the war didn't see tens of thousands killed in such short periods of time, nor did the war planners anticipate such at the outset. World War I was more about a chaotic system getting away from its designers and turning into something of its own beast.
The trench system was put in place slowly over time, each increment the designers thinking it would only be a temporary set back. The start of the war was much more mobile with land being taken quickly. Initially the Germans had planned to defeat France within 6 weeks.
When this failed Germany was having a tough time on the Russian front and the Triple Entente saw an opportunity to reclaim lost land. Yet by this time modern weapons gave the advantage to the defenders and the war was in stalemate.
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.
"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.
Aye, at least given that they are programmed to behave as though their utility function consisted almost entirely of the thrill of wielding power. So, fellow pawns? Stop voting for the damned Kings and Queens. It's a secret ballot; your instincts telling you to vote for the likely next tribal chief are wildly outdated. Vote for whoever demonstrates the most distaste for war - even if they aren't going to win this election, you'll be sending the right message instead of the wrong one.
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.
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.
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.
Games generally have a different function than teaching you history. Games are about having a fun time, so of course a game about WWI will not try to convey the horrors of trench war. (who would be into that?)
I am sure that people do understand the difference between a game and reality.
Erich Maria Remarque on his book, All Quiet on the Western Front:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war."
By reducing the suffering of those who partook in WWI to an adventure we insult all those who were destroyed by war.
Do you hold the same standard for all wars in all of history? Sure for all means, don't buy the game. But it's quite silly to say that anyone is reducing their suffering imo.
Do you not enjoy any games/movies including non-fictional wars?
Yes, I do hold the same standard. My faith calls me to uphold the worth and dignity of all people, and showing a picture of a rough and ready man smirking as he's about to bring hell on Earth to another human is not entertaining to me.
It would be disingenuous of me to say I've always felt this way. I was a Counterstrike junky in high school and I enjoyed a number of titles in the Battlefield series. So don't take my comment as a holier-than-thou indictment. But I have learned a different path and am trying to make a positive impact on this world.
If anything, I stand as a testament that that these games do not define us nor condemn us to being monsters. But I will discourage my own children from being entertained as they watch Hueys swing down over a Vietnamese village with Fortunate Son playing in the background as they bomb the shit out of a small village full of perfectly evil enemies. I did that, and I have learned that reducing the world to good and evil permeates every little interaction in our lives until it becomes exceeding difficult to live the Golden Rule of treating others as you'd like to be treated. Micro-aggressions against others dehumanizes us.
Lastly, you are correct, that imagined conflict is actually very valuable to teaching moral lessons, and there are plenty of ways to explore the idea of war with those who don't yet appreciate how destructive it is to reduce an actual conflict in our shared history to black-and-white terms.
Don't remember where I've read this - maybe it was a recent HN comment - but it went like this: the only value of past atrocities is that they should never happen again. By being too serious about them, we're granting the much more significance that they deserve, which makes it more likely they'll reoccur in the future.
I find this an interesting point of view. That said, there's also the point to be made that portraying wars as glorious adventures, we're definitely not helping to raise a generation of people who want peace.
Come to think of it, it may be that we're not showing enough violence when making media about war. I remember watching "Saving Private Ryan" as a kid. The opening scene of the Operation Overlord shook me very hard. Since then, when I think of war, in my mind I have a picture of young people dying horrible, painful and pointless deaths, crying out to their parents and God as they hold their own guts in their hands. I think this level of graphic presentation may be needed to really drive the point home.
Is there any slight evidence of this being true? As a counterexample Japan makes some of the most horrific gory horror movies around but they are one of the most peaceful societies in the world.
Personally, though I find disrespectful, as a French person, that the two nations of the Triple Entente to suffer the most casualties are "available as a DLC", my major problem with the "historical accuracy not included" attitude is that I doubt most people who are going to play that know much of anything about WWI, and this will likely lead to the same kind of myth you have about WWII (ie, "the USA and to a lesser extent the UK did most of the job on the European theater").
Yup. The US dominates the visual media - video games, motion pictures, TV series, etc. And every nation's history books play up that nation's role quite a lot. It's therefore no surprise that the whole Western world is learning seriously "americanized" history through their glass screens.
Do you find it disrespectful that the Axis can win in a game of Axis and Allies? Games are fundamentally open-ended by their nature. They cannot accurately represent history because history is not open-ended. That is in fact the defining characteristic of history, and it stands in direct contradiction to the concept of a game.
And this is an advertisement for a game. Complaining about it not being serious enough is not really that different from complaining that alcohol commercials don't show enough drunk driving accidents.
They can, however, try to accurately represent history at the beginning of the conflict (or at the first point that is shown in the game).
In truth, though, this is a very weak argument as far as WW2 (and probably the upcoming WW1) games go, because they tend to have a storyline that largely follows the actual historical development - i.e. "Axis cannot win" - but with some considerable liberties. That, yes, can be kinda disrespectful in some cases.
> Complaining about it not being serious enough is not really that different from complaining that alcohol commercials don't show enough drunk driving accidents.
It's a complaint that is biased in a particular direction. How would you feel if, in an alternate reality where Europe is the dominant power, you had a game about the US war of independence with US forces as DLC?
I wouldn't have a problem with it. (And I'm really not saying that just to win an argument.) It would be odd, for sure, but no more odd than having Abraham Lincoln fight vampires.
What is the casualty count below which it's okay to make something available as DLC? Would it have been more tasteful to have them included in the base game?
> Would it have been more tasteful to have them included in the base game?
I'd say so. I mean, well, it's like having a game about the Eastern Front in WWII with the Soviets on one side and the Hungarians and Italians on the other end, with the Germans as DLC. It may make a killing in Hungary and Italy, but it's bound to give a completely deformed version of the truth to anyone who doesn't known much about the original events.
If such a game was made by a Hungarian team, why would that be distasteful? It's pretty common for people to be primarily concerned by what happened with their own nation in history.
Look in the past week or two - the French have been commemorating Verdun, which was their WWI low point, but barely know about the Somme, which not only was the UK's low point, but also had half as many French casualties as at Verdun. Is it distasteful for the French to not commemorate the Somme? After all, the UK was France's major ally in that war, sending hundreds of thousands of it's youth to die for French soil.
Of course it isn't distasteful - the French national story is of Verdun, and they're not being distasteful by not ensuring all other major players get the same billing as they do in their own story.
Not at all. I plan on buying and playing the game. I just think they could treat the subject matter with a bit more respect -- at least cut out the dubstep -- without ruining the fun.
On the contrary, Command & Conquer Red Alert piqued my interest in WW2 and made me explore and learn more about, and the game went as far as rewriting the entire plot of WW2.
I'm not sure it's all that much of a bad thing that we retell an important part of our history in various different ways including forms of entertainment.
Where does it says this is an interpretation? How did you get the word "interpretation" in your comment? Where do they claim to be even remotely accurate? They don't, they never did, you are just looking for a reason to complain.
Because in real life teenagers aren't going to think after playing "Oh man war is surely fun" because they are not that stupid, you just pretend they are for your argument's sake.
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.
Ironically it didn't start out that way. The set was small (15ft), and the first take was reduced by virtue of the fact that the (stage) explosions caused problems for the cast. Roman refused to do another take and they were left with less than five seconds of footage to wrap the episode with.
Necessity meant that they had to run it it in slow motion and with cut angles showing the same scene; that required the addition of a somber musical addition. The cross fade to colour at the end was a stroke of genius at the end to finish it off.
But basically the resulting effect was neither planned nor written; it was an editing necessity based on the lack of footage. This helped win it the BAFTA award in 1989.
+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...'"
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.
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.
Yes - that was certainly a very ominous scene. The beginning of when my heart went out to that character.
Stephen Fry played his part brilliantly - He certainly epitomised the pompous brashness and careless disregard for the value of human life that seemed to be prevalent amongst the Generals and leaders of the time...
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.