World War I Was Pointless

I just finished Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory". The book was a review of the war though the eyes of British soldiers who survived, and some who didn't, and who left written material describing their ordeal. Eight and a half million soldiers died in that war. They died in elaborate trenches filled with, at one time or another, water, gas, dead soldiers, rats and other disgusting remnants of the carnage. The tactics of the generals was primitive and unimaginative, resulting in solders being mowed down in the 10s and 100s of thousands sometimes in just a few hours. All this horror happened with little understanding and much fantasy from the home front.

Mr. Fussel pointed out that the soldier's basic instinct was to survive so to return home to resume their life as father, brother, carpenter, teachers, and more. The conscripts were summoned to the war with little training and no knowledge of what faced them. The odds of survival was slim so a whole generation was wiped out as they tried to cross No Man's Land, that patch of territory between the trenches of the two opposing forces at war.

The Great War, as well as all wars according to Fussell, is ironic, ironic in that wars are always much more horrific than ever dreamed at the start. WWI was started with the thought that it would be over quickly and victory would be glorious, but as it turned out it went on, and on, and on. The death was staggering and the killing was technologically brutal, ripping bodies apart and leaving mutilated bodies to rot in the mud on which rats engorged themselves. All the while, the literature at home painted the picture of victory, glory and valor. Fussell at one point says that Wilfred Owen lived out in WWI "the old lie" (that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country).

War changes everything. No one can really understand what war does to the innocent until one has to step over dead bodies with care so as not to trample once "silly conscripts that are now cold marble". This was an excellent education for me. It brought to me, as close as I ever want to come, the devastation of war and what it does to human beings on both sides of No Man's Land. War's affects the short lives of the boys being sent to their death with a swift end to their short lives as well as to following generations who have to live with the consequences the giant loss to humanity. I'm changed. I now have another dimension to consider when I contemplate war as good or as evil.