In Flanders Fields

“take up our quarrel with the foe”???

I prefer Wilfred Owen’s take:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Well,
I have a different association:
Versailles versus Greece.

German fury, so to say, has something to do with paying reparations from WWI until October 2010.
Did You know?

Paying debts, sorry to say, is a much more persistent aid to memory than larks flying high above, or whatever.

So choose your sorrows wisely.

Ofcourse the Greek also remember the atrocities of the Germans, and currently refrain demanding reparations.

Maybe I missed the point.

But the dead are haunting us.

They are forgiving or demanding.

Just as we make them to be.

Here’s the full poem:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 – March, 1918

There are causes worth dying for. The Powers That Be spend much energy and capital telling us what those causes are. Sadly, most of us believe them. Here’s to Christmas In The Trenches.

For the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.

^ Ugh! Ian, never mind; after very little thought, I came up with a bunch.
But they would be against us, not of us.

Ian Welsh:

Some wars are worth fighting, WWI was not one of them.

I would differ with that assertion. If you believe that WWII was worth fighting, then you must realize that WWI was just the prelude to WWII. The German aristocrats’ aims in WWI fell only a little short of Hitler’s. They implemented a Brest-Litovsk peace in the East, and they were planning a similar “peace” in the West as well.

The problem with WWI was that we suffered through WWII because WWI was not fought to completion, to an unconditional surrender and unequivocal German defeat. Because German soil had been untouched by foreign armies, Hitler and the German Right were able to argue that Germany hadn’t been “really” defeated (sort of their version of Rambo in regards to US involvement in Vietnam) and it took the sight of British, American, Canadian and Soviet tanks driving through the streets of German cities to convince them that “Yes, you really did LOSE the war”. Likewise, the lack of a demilitarization and “de-Nazification” effort after WWI by the conquering powers left the Right in control of the German army, the courts, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary which also helped mightily in Hitler’s subsequent rise to power. We took the whole damn system apart after WWII and ran the government ourselves until it could be handed over to the democratic elements in Germany (which were native and which existed).

-StewartM

My Boy Jack
1914-1918

Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?: ”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind–
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

-Rudyard Kipling

(Of course Kipling was terribly gung-ho for war until his son got killed. Then he wrote this.)

Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That notes that the suicides in the trenches he knew of firsthand, were not recorded as such. So heaven only knows how many there really were.

StewartM

groo

As a German myself I am constantly puzzled by the happenings ca 1914 to 1929.

Germany had a democracy in the interwar period, but powerful institutional forces remained in the German government which were dead-set against democracy. Worse the new Weimar Republic had to rely on these from its inception (particularly the army). These were all-too-willing to crush Communist and leftist insurrections and strikes but all-too-willing to accomodate rightist ones. There have been studies done on the sentences for insurrection during the early 1920s; the right-wing judges routinely handed out death sentences for left-wing agitators but right-wing ones (like Hitler’s and Ludendorff’s attempted 1923 putsch) got slaps on the wrist because the judges obviously felt “their hearts were in the right places”.

That is why it was so important to de-Nazify Germany after WWII and rid the government not only of ardent Nazis, but of right-wingers in general.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, I wondered if the new Russian democracy would be a replay of Weimar for that reason (same situation, the new democratic government is saddled with authoritarian antecedents). It’s no wonder why Russia ended up as a “managed democracy”.

JM Keynes was very influential in the Versailles treaty.

I respect Keynes, but he did a huge disservice by his book calling it a “Carthaginian peace”. Versailles was no such thing. It was a far more lenient peace than the German government had planned if the shoe had been on the other foot (their plans in the West–annex Belgium and much of eastern and northern France, giving the Germans access to Calais and Channel ports and reducing France to a Vichy-like state just like WWII). The Germans in WWI planned an empire that would effectively stretch from the English Channel to the Ukraine. Their territorial plans were not terribly different than those of WWII, though in admission they didn’t have genocidal plans like Hitler. (Repression and persecution yes, genocide no).

Versailles by contrast only gave to France Alsace-Lorraine (which was overwhelmingly in sentiment French) and the Polish-speaking region of Posen of eastern Germany to the new Polish state, and a few other odds and ends to Denmark and the new Czechoslovakia. Germany’s total territorial losses were minor and justifiable, and some of the areas lost were due to the matter being decided by the resident populations by plebiscite.

The result of Versailles was possibly the best fit that Europe had ever achieved matching political boundaries with ethnic and language demographics. “Draconian?” “Carthaginian?” Give me a break.

Not that Versailles was perfect. The whole reparations issue was a needless disaster based on antiquated economic ideas and we avoided that mistake after WWII. And the new rump Austrian state should have been allowed to join Weimar via plebiscite. Finally (and this ties into the fact that the war was not prosecuted to a proper conclusion) there was no attempt to build a new European political order where Germany would not be simply bidding its time waiting for revenge. The result of the post-WWII world ended up with the French and Germans being allies. Without such an order, with US and British involvement, the French became understandably paranoid.

But the problem that Keynes helped feed was the mistaken notion that (particularly in Britain) that Germany had gotten a raw deal at Versailles. Hitler exploited this notion to the maximum in the period from 1936 to 1939, and won many bloodless concessions because the French did not believe themselves strong enough to oppose Germany alone while the British seemed to have guilt feelings about Versailles and “those poor Germans”. If the Versailles treaty had been properly supported and enforced, even Hitler admitted that a display of an earnest attempt to enforce the treaty would have stopped him in his demilitarization of the Rhineland and his other early moves. He would have had to back down.

StewartM

groo,

there is a deeply ingrained meme, which is trying to persuade us:
‘war gives us meaning’.

In fact, Chris Hedges rips that to shreds in one of his books whose title is almost exactly those words (“War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning”).

Funny how what was originally thought of as a pro-war poem is now held to be anti-war.

And Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time” is now standard fare for nostalgic English jingoists. There’s nowt as queer as folk indeed.

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour:
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

My god, how I grow infuriated all over again when I think of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Yoo, and that whole criminal pack.

I still think back to when my father was on his death bed, and I was able to tell him, “Dad, guess what? Rumsfeld resigned today.”

His eyes grew huge. “No!”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“That son of a bitch! Now we just have to get rid of the rest of them.”