"1917," A Warning and An Endorsement of Sorts

I taught a course on American diplomatic and military history for about 25 years. I thought of it as an important course.

The American place in the world, especially since World War II, is unlike any other in world history. Even with two oceans separating much of the,  rest of it, the world has fallen under the influence of America for about 75 years. That it is now precariously shaky is the result of more than 45's incompetence and arrogance. This has been coming for a while now.

But it's just as important to see how we got where we are. And that had a lot to do with the fighting of wars themselves--how it was done, how it has progressed (if that's what you want to call it), and the aftermath.

I spent much of the course, I admit an imbalanced amount of it, on World War I. I described it, and I still do describe it, as one of the five most important events in human history. The world pivoted upon it and went into a totally new direction, one in which the United States was involved more deeply than at any other time, and remains so. And I told the students, and still believe, that World Wars I and II will someday be taught as a single war with a 20-year pause necessary for both sides to rearm and increase the carnage. All our problems in the Middle East begin with the First World War and the settlements that accompanied it.

The Vietnam War's foundation took place at the Versailles Peace Conference, too. Ho Chi Minh was there. He wanted his people to catch a break. The French wouldn't let him.

So when I saw the film "1917" the other night, it was with a fascination about how realistically Sam Mendes was going to portray what the soldiers had to go through on the Western Front. The answer: Very.

It helped that I had gone over the book All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, many times before seeing the film. Though Mendes utilized his grandfather's accounts of the fighting to create the ghastly set, it could have evolved right out of the text of All Quiet: the utter devastation of No Man's Land; the endless barbed wire; trenches built like fortress cities after months of stalemate; the first tanks, considered unstoppable but also difficult to drive over large holes in the earth caused by endless shelling; dead horses and men with rats feeding upon them (the rats won this war, as I was fond of saying); soldiers killed by shells that dislodged enough dirt to bury them as well, then were dislodged again by other shells. I was almost disappointed that there weren't any gas attacks, except by 1917, three years into the war, both sides had neutralized each other with gas and had decided to pretty much forego its use.

At any rate, it helped for me to imagine what No Man's Land would look like. The phrase "utter depravity" can't explain it adequately. It hit me about as hard, if not more so, than the first twenty minutes of "Saving Private Ryan," which demonstrated the incredible slaughter of the first invasion wave hitting Omaha Beach on D-Day. And I knew what was coming, there, too, having read Stephen Ambrose's work D-Day.

The date of the story, April 6, 1917, was the date that Congress declared war on the Central Powers. The film's script doesn't mention it the next day, when a major attack was to have taken place; it's entirely possible that no one knew (I say this without a spoiler alert, because it will be pretty much irrelevant) or much cared. Their world had evolved to mass murder in a very small place.

Regardless, it would be nearly an entire year by the time a very unprepared American army would have managed to enter the slaughter. Even with the preparation time in which few Americans would be killed, we lost 115,000 dead. The armistice took place on Nov. 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Doing the math, we still lost 190 killed per day. The British, French, Germans and Russians lost far more. The total reached about ten million. At the Somme, the British got 20,000 men shot in one hour.

You may easily say to yourself: Why didn't anybody stop this butchery, propelled not by some sweeping political concepts like democracy (though Wilson claimed it, U.S. trade was the point) against fascism, which drove World War II, but by simple national pride and the conjured sense of being slapped in the face? Except once it began, everybody knew that it was about the empires that existed and that, if their armies lost, would be lost or drastically reduced--which is exactly what the Versailles Treaty did, and led to the Second World War in an attempt to regain them.

Once it began, though, it was all being sucked into the vortex of the principle of meaningfulness: If we're going to lose this many guys, we'll have to continue on to win so it will have been worth it. And so they went on. Nobody could gain an edge; those reinforced trenches were both an indication and a symbol of the stalemate. Nobody was getting anywhere. It all lost its meaning.

"The war has ruined us for everything," said Paul Baumer, the storyteller of All Quiet on the Western Front. In a sense, that ruination continues to the present day--its utter nihilism, its insistence on the cheapness of life, its mockery of anything civilized, its cruel demands. The world has grasped some semblance of rectitude since, but it hasn't shown any signs of stopping the enormous buildup of armaments, including nuclear weapons, that by their very nature create the scenario of some kind of ultimate showdown, some Armageddon. It isn't a straight line, but it hasn't disappeared. And we have always been the leaders in that buildup.

So if you're going, get ready. If you haven't read up on it, take a friend. Heck, take one anyhow and discuss it. You'll see how it all began. It will, at times, be hard to watch. It should be.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark