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| Some French Soldiers with German Prisoners |
From: "The Morning of November 11, 1918"
As Paul Fussell made clear in his masterpiece The Great War and Modern Memory, the multi-layered ironies of the conflict created the war's most lasting legacies. And none of the ironies was quite as striking as the fact that those groups of politicians, bureaucrats, generals, and bankers on all sides who created the war and directed it, had had a mortality rate of zero, more or less, at least until the Spanish Flu emerged late in the war to kill with a little less social and demographic selectivity.
It is fitting to end this short contemplation of 11 November 1918 with a song that emerged from the soldiers who fought the war, performed in a recent recording by a modern musical organization that thrives on ironies, both present and past, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. The performance is a spare and thoughtful rendition of a British soldier's ditty from the war, "Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire," a reference to that little-celebrated fate of Great War fighters who made it to the killing zone of the enemy's barbed wire in no-man's-land, only to be killed by the interlocking machine gun fire which everyone knew would be zeroed in on that simple but effective obstacle.
I know where he is.
He's pinning another medal on his chest.
I saw him, I saw him,
Pinning another medal on his chest
If you want to find the Colonel
I know where he is.
He's sitting in comfort stuffing his bloody gut.
I saw him, I saw him,
Sitting in comfort stuffing his bloody gut.
If you want to find the Sergeant
I know where he is.
He's drinking all the company rum.
I saw him, I saw him,
Drinking all the company rum.
If you want to find the private
I know where he is.
He's hanging on the old barbed wire.
I saw him, I saw him,
Hanging on the old barbed wire,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.
Like many soldiers' perceptions, this simplistic view did not tell the whole truth (in most armies, lieutenants died at a higher rate than privates since they led the attacks over the top for example), and it did not extend to the political and economic structures which created the war to begin with. The German sailors in Kiel, who had by early November already started the German Revolution of 1918 by carrying out a mutiny at the Kiel naval base, understood only peace. And they called for it in the shorthand expression: "We want Erzberger!" (Matthias Erzberger would pay dearly for his courageous call for peace negotiations and his grim duty in carrying out the first step when he was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist terrorist group in 1921.)
Yet there was a kernel of truth in the cynical but simplistic perceptions of many Great War soldiers. The personal bravery and the sacrifices on all sides belonged chiefly to the soldiers. The postwar costs would be paid by societies which had had little to do with bringing about the massacres. The victory was in the hands of gentlemen in ornate rooms in the financial and political capitals of the "great powers," the representatives of the modern state, an entity which collectively perceived the results of the war as its own fulfillment.
What a fine sentence:
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Their descendants are doing quite well in 2020 as the "military industrial complex lives on in the "era of endless WAR". It is no accident that US military budget equals the total of the next 7 or 10 countries, depending on whom you read.
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