Unfortunately that seems to be true. It seems that a significant percentage of a country’s population can be stirred up into a war frenzy by adroit propaganda… otherwise how to explain Nazi Germany, for example.
I guess there is an innate tendency to belligerence in human psychology?
IIRC there were soldiers on both sides killed after 11:00 due to faulty communication. All of these deaths on the American side were listed as occurring at 10:59.
Once again the Canadian Remembrance Day people saw fit to pointlessly translate the French portions of the ceremony into English, seconds after the English portion saying the very same thing was uttered (so that you couldn’t hear the French over the superfluous translation) . This strikes me as being very déclassé. At least they didn’t try to translate the Ojibwe.
Thousands of people were standing around for the ceremony, with the usual dignitaries. Just before the chaplain came out to pray, they invited everybody to sit down. Where, exactly? Nobody (who was on television) did so.
Tyne Cot cemetery in Belgium:
Inside the Menin Gate:
Or the nearly overnight change from isolationism to warmongering in this country during WWI. Washington passed the Sedition Act, and you could be thrown in jail for not singing along with the National Anthem. My comments above were about the civilian populations that were bombed relentlessly in WWII, including 140,000 dead in Hiroshima, 30,000 dead in the fire-bombing of Dresden, the slaughter and rape committed by Soviet troops in Poland and Germany, etc. These civilians may have been loyal to the war cause, but they were non-combatants
Do the casualty figures for military and civilians include death from disease?
I don’t think so. The Spanish flu killed something like 50 million people on its own. About double compared to those killed in the war (killed, not injured). I am not sure what toll other diseases took during the war but doubtless they were there too.
I see. Still, given the horrific conditions in the trenches, and the damage to civilian infrastructure, I expect there was an increase in disease deaths during the war.
Disease and war go hand-in-hand. Especially the further back you go before disease was well understood. In the US Civil War disease killed more people than getting shot by the enemy.
I am not sure how that played out in WWI (not counting the Spanish flu). Doubtless it was there and killed many but I am not sure how many.
There is a reason militaries these days are scrupulous about hygiene.
From the wiki article in the OP:
About two-thirds of military deaths in World War I were in battle, unlike the conflicts that took place in the 19th century when the majority of deaths were due to disease. Nevertheless, disease, including the 1918 flu pandemic and deaths while held as prisoners of war, still caused about one third of total military deaths for all belligerents.
this WWI pic gets me always …
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just the pure scale of horror that must have been going on then
Ethnic cleansing. Attacking other countries to take their land.
Those both seem like ethical issues we’d do better not to have going around much. WWI’s start was not unlike Putin’s move into Ukraine. I assume you have some issues with Putin’s ethics in this matter.
There are still places in France (at least) where scars from artillery barrages are still very evident over 100 years later. All war is awful but I think WWI is near the top of awful.
The debris of WWI is still found today in France and Belgium; bombs, mines, shells, etc.
And the Zone Rouge, where the ground is so heavily contaminated that plants don’t grow.
Rudyard Kipling pulled strings to get his son John into the military. John was killed shortly after being shipped to France. Kipling wrote this couplet shortly after:
“If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
Even Chernobyl has seen its plant life recover, and that happened in 1986.
I find it truly fascinating that threads about WWI, especially regarding 11/11, when there are disagreements, they are often conducted via poetry. I think a portion of that is due to the fact that journalism at the time very often employed verse to summarize positions. But the romantic in me also hopes that it is our inner historians wanting to transform the horrors of that war.
The first poem that comes to mind:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
An appropriate song for the occasion.
The TTBB male a capella quartet I sang with for a while could never get through this one. One of us would always break down.
Rest well, fallen ones. We won’t forget you.