The Great War and me

As it is Memorial Day, I thought I would write about the "Great War" that is the First World War. We don't hear about it much in America because our involvement was relatively short, compared to the European nations. Of course, now it's 90 years ago, and I think the last I read there are only 30 surviving US veterans of the Great War still alive. So, you don't hear about them much, Tom Hanks hasn't played a Great War hero in a movie, and its rarely on the History Channel.

I've kind of made a study of the Great War. I was almost always interested in history. My first interests were of World War 2- I wanted to know why it happened and if you do a deeper study you will always end up at the Great War. Thus began my fascination.

Anyway, I'm reading a book about it now called "The Unknown Solider"- the book profiles three soliders of the Great War, one British, one German and one American. I have already read about the German solider, Paul Hub, in another book about the war, that's how much of a goober I am- I read arcane history books so much I run into the same historical sources. Anyway, It was good to encounter Paul again. The reason he is such a good souce is that he was such a good descriptive writer and a total bad-ass and was in Ypres, The Somme, and Verdun and survived...this is an incredible feat. I'm not far enough in the book to have met the American, but I met Alec Reader the British solider who joins up at barely 18 to "do his bit" in the war. We get to know Alec and Paul through their letters home. Both were very good writers. You feel as if you know them. Paul is a little older and a lot more mature and very solid. Alec is what you would expect an 18 year old to be- excited, flighty, funny and ultimately scarred by the horrific trench warfare he experiences. Rather sweetly, noticing his mother is beginning to worry, he tries to write more cheerful missives and downplay the horror he is experiencing. I came to really like Alec. He is hoping for a transfer, but while he is waiting his unit is called up for battle at the Somme. The British are debuting their new war weapon- the tank. Alec and his unit drill endlessly how they will march across no man's land in formation following the tanks. Meanwhile, Paul with the German army on the other side of the battle are enduring constant bombardment by the British to "soften them up" for the attack. Paul writes of men crying and drooling and going completely insane from the constant bombardment. The Germans burrow in deeper.

There are four tanks that attack ahead of Alec's unit. Four tanks. Three of the four either stall out on the terrain or experience mechanical failure. Alec and his unit proceed across no man's land. Many to be mowed down by German machine gun fire- Alec dies that day. He was 19. Many thousands of his comrades do also for a few extra yards of French territory.

Paul is "lucky" he survives the Somme. He writes to his fiance a depressing letter about sitting on a mound of corpses to be out of the mud.

So much of the Great War stories are like that- men were cannon fodder- the strategy seemed to be throw more men in, and when that didn't work throw more in- from a strategy/tactics standpoint I always feel that it was a complete cluster-fuck. Yet, no one seemed to be able to stop the meat grinder.

Anyway, I was reading the part in the book where Alec dies on Saturday and I thought I have to put this down, and go to the grocery store. I'm at the Safeway just thinking about how horrible the battle was and how sad for Alec. It occurs to me as I put the cream cheese in my shopping cart, after all these years of study, I will probably never know "why"- I may cling to a theory about it, a political explanation or some such thing. Maybe just getting to know Alec and Paul is the point and remembering them that maybe at least in part the historian's job.

I keep searching history for some sembelence of progress to a better humanity and feel like I come up short. It occurs to me as I'm reading about Alec on Saturday, there is some 19 year old young man in a Humvee in Iraq and he is blindsided by some roadside bomb and dies. He is the 21st century Alec Reader. His name will appear in the "crawl" at the bottom of the CNN news. They used to show the pictures and the names of the guys who have died. They don't do that anymore- at least not as much as they used to. Iraq is now our "white noise" we know 6 or 7 soliders die every week there, its been going on like this for three years now.

I suppose if you gain anything from history it is the constantcy of human nature. There have always been wars. There have always been soliders like Alec and Paul. The Great War is perhaps one of the more obscene examples of a type of warfare that was new for it's time and no one seemed ready for it. I believe the Great War did not end in 1918, there was a 21 year truce and the war finally came to an end in 1945.

I plan to finish the book. I already know that Paul dies in 1918 a few months before the war is over. I don't know the American. I'm looking forward to reading his story. It's amazing to think that Alec and Paul were in the same battle at the Somme and 90 years later their story is told in the same book. I'm sure they could not have dreamed that their letters- carefully preserved by Rose, Alec's mother, and Maria, Paul's fiance would become a historical record- and that people would know so much about them.

Perhaps that's why I'm so interested in history- its all stories about people and their place in huge events that change the trajectory of humanity. If I never can answer the "why" at least I can understand the events from the human stories wrapped within them.