A post a about the ethnic warfare of WWI:
Of course the baddest of the baddies on WWI were the Young Turks, who escalated insane Sultan Abdul Hamid’s massacre of the Armenians into fully pledged genocide. As the war made clear the end of a multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, its replacement with a Turkish Anatolian homeland meant more ethnic cleansing: now for the Assyrians and the Greeks. Some ground-level views of the Turk’s massacre of the Greeks at Izmir: a young Aristotle Onassis’ life spared because he’d become a Turkish officer’s catamite. Entente forces ships deigning to not render aid to Greek refugees swimming away from the slaughter, with the exception of one Japanese ship (the Japanese had come to the Mediterranean to gain experience in naval warfare for future reference.)
The Austro-Hungarians were major ethnic offenders as well. Despite having a slew of slavs in the population, their Ruthenians were deemed too close to the Tsar’s Ukranians, and they were herded into concentration camps; initially no more than open fields in the winter of 1915-15 surrounded by wire and machine guns.
The Austrians, and especially the Hungarians, ran riot in Serbia, taking revenge on man, woman and child for the death of Franz Ferdinand (hard to ascribe to anything besides bloodlust, since Franz and the Hungarians despised each other). The photos they proudly took were the equal to WWII’s Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph.
Perpetrators of multiple war crimes in Belgium and France, the Germans were only planted the seeds for future. Over 10,000 German Jews gave their lives for the Kaiser, so they weren’t a target. Slavs were killed with impunity, in keeping with the ancient Teutonic crusade of Drang nach Osten (drive to the east). In the West they also saw themselves as racial crusaders. I’m unable to find it online, but there was a color propaganda postcard of a handsome German uhlan on horseback, leading his Senegalese prisoner away by the neck, protecting mother Europa against the polluting French.
Not to let the Entente off the hook. The Russians were enthusiastic murders of German and Austro-Hungarian Jews as they occupied their territories. The British squandered hundreds of thousands of lives for the greater good of their empire: disposable Indian troops and African bearers. France, the birthplace of liberté, égalité, fraternité, dragooned thousands of Vietnamese villagers into labor gangs; most never to return home, identified with serial numbers painted on the skin of their backs in acid.
In the pre-radio era, there were entire battles fought after the ends of wars. The Battle of New Orleans famously took place several weeks after the signing of the peace treaty, as did several US Civil War battles.
Yeah. The idea of worldwide synchronization of action is real recent. Back in the Age of Sail it was expected the fresh news was a month or two old. And that any request/response loop might take 4+ months with a decent chance one or the other message would never get there.
We’d be as lost in their world as they would be in ours.
Mike O’Shea, coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, doesn’t like the CFL playing play-off games on Remembrance Day.
I guess poetry was rather more prominent in intellectual life up to the early 20th century?
Not sure how seriously it is taken nowadays. Rather like classical music, it splintered into increasingly experimental forms like free verse (compare the 12-tone movement) and petered out in the sands of apathy.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it’s " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
Local papers here ran a retrospective of one casualty: Cpl Tommy Bowlt, aged 22. Died May, 1915. Served in the Princess Pat’s Light Infantry.
Many French military deaths that occurred on November 11 after the treaty had been signed but not put into action were ‘officially’ backdated to November 10.
I can’t live with myself, until this correction is made:
I might well have been wrong with this post: error in fact (“EIF” in the proofreader’s merciless red pen).
In fact, the Austro-Hungarians lent a division to the Germans who were hard-pressed to defend the Saint-Mihiel salient. A 15-minute YouTube video tells their story .
So many questions. The New York Herald notes 350 A-H prisoners taken , but no mention of their inflicting casualties on the Americans. Did they know they were there, or was there any confusion when, expecting enemy soldiers in gray uniforms, they encountered figures in pike blue similar to the French?