Case Study: The World is Mad
"Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad." This is the quote that explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton relates in his book South! Shackleton tells the story of his expedition to the South Pole that began in 1914 as the war was starting. By 1915 his expedition had been stuck in the ice of Antarctica for over a year. When he and his men finally reached civilization again they asked who won the war, only to be told that the world is mad!
Why expectant societies were denied their promised victory in 1914 is a difficult question to answer. One explanation is that armies had simply become too big. They had grown to a size that ensured them against total defeat even if they suffered any number of local reverses. They also enjoyed great powers of recuperation through their service strengths. At the end of even the most successful campaign, the offensive faced a reconstituted defense drawn from new drafts. This was certainly the case between 1914 and 1916. Toward the end of the war all the European powers had difficulty making good their losses and, by 1918, none of them were able to do so.
Why expectant societies were denied their promised victory in 1914 is a difficult question to answer. One explanation is that armies had simply become too big. They had grown to a size that ensured them against total defeat even if they suffered any number of local reverses. They also enjoyed great powers of recuperation through their service strengths. At the end of even the most successful campaign, the offensive faced a reconstituted defense drawn from new drafts. This was certainly the case between 1914 and 1916. Toward the end of the war all the European powers had difficulty making good their losses and, by 1918, none of them were able to do so.
Guiding Question:
Every effort must be made to attack and drive back the enemy. A soldier who can no longer advance must guard the territory already held, no matter what the cost. He must be killed where he stands rather than draw-back. Joseph Joffre, From his orders of Sept. 3, on the eve of the Battle of the Marne.
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Topics for Discussion:
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Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 27 The Course of the War (Pgs. 830 - 842) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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Source: English soldier and poet Wilfred Owen describes a German gas attack (1915)
Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum et...," 1915; ed. S. Sassoon, 1920 |
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ... Dim, through the misty panes 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, 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 Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, To children ardent for some desperate glory The old lie: Duke et decorum est Pro patria mori*. [*"Pleasing and right it is to die for one's country."] |
Source : The Order of the White Feather
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In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward. The organization aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform.
This was joined by some prominent feminists and suffragettes of the time, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. They, in addition to handing out the feathers, also lobbied to institute an involuntary universal draft, which included those who lacked votes due to being too young or not owning property. While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it did spread throughout several other nations in the Empire. In Britain it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. This prompted the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they too were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, given to service personnel who had been honorably discharged due to wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform. Anecdotes from the period indicates that the campaign was not popular amongst soldiers - not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with the feathers. |
Source : English poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon lashes out at those who stayed home and sent young men off to die
S. Sassoon, "Suicide in the Trenches", td. M. Gilbert, 1970 |
. . . 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.
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Source : Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars, interview Fresh Air.
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Well, this took everybody by surprise. And there's a scholar who actually searched through a lot of British army reports and came up with some extraordinary quotes from generals writing to each other in the first year or two of the war, saying this war is not normal. And maybe soon we'll get to normal conditions, but this is definitely very, very abnormal.
And what they were referring to was that the armies were stuck in place because this system of trenches facing each other, really, for some three years, they barely moved more than a few miles in each direction. In 1915, for example, the Allies launched a number of major attacks. There were probably close to a million casualties on both sides. During the course of the year, the allies gained exactly seven square miles of territory, and the trenches evolved because the defensive weapons of the war - barbed wire an entrenched machine-gun nest and a trench in the ground - were so much stronger than the offensive weapons of the war, because to gain territory, you've got to come out of your trench, move forward over open ground where you're exposed to enemy fire. And this was something nobody had planned for, even though they could have looked at other recent wars in history. You know, there was trench warfare at the end of the American Civil War, for example, around Richmond in Virginia. But they chose not to do that because they wanted to imagine glorious cavalry charges and the like. And, of course, there were none of those glorious cavalry charges. |
Source : A German soldier writes home from the trenches (1915)
Alfons Ankenbrand in A. F. Wedd, ed., German Students' War Letters, 1929 |
Our regiment has been transferred to this dan-gerous spot, Souchez. No end of blood has already flowed.. . . A week ago the 142nd attacked and took four trenches from the French. It is to hold these trenches that we have been brought here. . . . This letter has been interrupted no end of times. Shells began to pitch close to us—great English 12-inch ones . . . One . . . struck the next house and buried four men, who were got out ... horribly mutilated. I saw them and it was ghastly!
Everybody must now be prepared for death in some form or other. . . ['Me newspapers have probably given you a different impression. They tell only of our gains and say nothing of the blood that has been shed, of the cries of agony that never cease. The newspaper doesn't give any description either of how the "heroes" are laid to rest. . . . 11.4 here . . . one throws the bodies out of the trench and lets them lie there, or scatters dirt over the remains of those which have been torn to pieces by shells. |
Source : The Devil's Bargain- Optics for Rubber, Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (excerpt)
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MORE THAN ANY previous war, this one depended on huge quantities of industrial products and the raw materials needed to make them. The Germans soon coined a word for it, Materiaischlacht, the battle ofmateriel. Among the more important goods was precision optical equipment—aerial reconnaissance camera lenses, periscopes, rangefinders, telescopic sights for sniper rifles, and binoculars. All were essential, particularly the last: when the lives of his men on the battlefield could depend on locating an enemy sniper or machine-gunner, every officer or NCO needed a reliable pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. The British military, however, was running disastrously short of binoculars. An appeal to the public brought in some 2,000 pairs (including four each from the King and
Queen), but not the tens of thousands needed. Manufacturing high-quality lenses requires special glass that is difficult to make: it must transmit light without flaws, dimming, or distortion, yet be strong enough not to crack or shatter when ground and polished. Optical factories in England were capable of increasing their output only slowly. And so, in mid-1915 just as preparations were getting under way For the big attack at Loos, British authorities turned to the world's leading manufacturer of precision optics: Germany: Before the war, German companies, like the famous firm of Carl Zeiss in Jena, had been major exporters of top-of-the-line optical goods. From London, an agent of the Ministry of Munitions was quietly dis-patched to neutral Switzerland to propose a deal. The answer from Germany was prompt and positive, and the outlines of an agreement were sketched out. The German War Office would immediately supply 8,000 to 10,000 each of two types of binoculars, one for infantry officers and one for artillery officers. "For the future," reads the dry official record of the History of the Ministry of Munitions, "they were prepared to deliver, six weeks after the signing of the contract, 10,000 to 15,000 [of each type) and they were even prepared to demobilise special work-men from the Army to enable these orders to go through quickly." Of lower-grade binoculars for NC0s, Germany could supply 10,000 to 12,000 immediately and 5,000 a month thereafter. It would also be happy to supply 5,000 to 10,000 telescopic sights per month "and to provide as many rangefinders as the British Government required. In order to obtain samples of the instruments, it was suggested that the British Forces might inspect the equipment of captured German offi-cers and artillery." And what did Germany want in return for this astonishing bounty of tools that would better aim British rifles and howitzers at German troops? One treasured commodity, vital for everything from telephone wires to factory machinery to the tires and fan belts of motor vehicles, a commodity unavailable to Germany because of a tight blockade imposed by the Royal Navy, but abundant in the Allies' African and Asian colonies: rubber. Without rubber the Germans, among many other problems, faced the prospect of using steel tires on their army trucks, which rapidly chewed roads to bits. The rubber, it was agreed, would be delivered to Germany at the Swiss border. During August 1915, the first month of this top-secret devil's bar-gain, the Germans delivered to the British even more than first agreed to: some 32,000 pairs of binoculars, 20,000 of them the higher-quality types for officers. Records that would show how long the trade continued, or how much rubber the Germans received in return, have disappeared. More frustrating, there seems to be no written trace of what was in the minds of the men who negotiated this extraordinary agreement. Did each side think it was getting the better deal? Were both British and German business executives so eager for profit that nothing else mattered? Or did the war have such all-encompassing momentum that, to better fight it, anything at all seemed justified, even trading with the enemy? |
Source: The recollections of Sergeant W. Lench, a Canadian soldier at Gallipoli, who was injured the day before the evacuation:
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There was not much sudden death, but there was slow death everywhere. The body was slowly dying from the inside. We talked to each other; we laughed occasionally, but always the thought of death in our minds – our insides were dying slowly.
The water was death; the bully beef was death; everything was death. I was afraid to eat a thing. It terrified me; it made me feel dead. A man would pass me holding his stomach, groaning in agony, and a few minutes later I would take him off the latrine, dead. The men contracted dysentery and fever every day. The bullets did not take a big toll. It was the death of germs. I worked with my men all day and all night. I was lucky to snatch a few hours’ rest in the middle of the day. The company had now thirty men to hold 200 yards of front. The sentries were posted at incredible distances apart. And for ever the patrols and the fatigues and digging day and night-digging, digging, infernal, intensive digging. |