The First World War

[Ayahuasca]

Kitchener was under no illusion that it would be over quickly. He thought that it would last at least three years and thus organised a massive recruitment drive.

[Ayahuasca]

Fittster said:

And the reason of keeping hold of the empire was? It was already a financial burden before the start of the war.

As a source of cheap raw materials and as a market for the output of our dark satanic mills, as well as a source of additional fighting men.

[Ayahuasca]

That Rudyard Kipling lost his son in the war is fairly well known.

His short story 'The Gardener' takes two or three minutes to read and always makes it a bit dusty.

In full:

http://www.greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.htm...

[Ayahuasca]

Fittster said:

And how did Swiss cope with having land boarders with militaristic states?

Pain/gain ratio. Heavily armed citizens defending impassible mountain passes - and if you win you just get some cheese and chocolate.

[Ayahuasca]

Eric Mc said:

Instead you would have a bloody and imaginable violent Irish civil war to cope with. That would have been fun - and would have almost definitely spilled over onto the British mainland.

There were 300,000 fully armed Irishmen ready to do battle against each other and a British Army on the verge of mutiny, ready to disobey orders from the British government.

In some ways, World War 1 spared Britain and Ireland from this fate.

Edited by Eric Mc on Tuesday 5th August 18:21

How would a sectarian war in Ireland spread to Britain?

[Ayahuasca]

What happened to the line of trenches at the Swiss border at the very southern end of the Western Front?

Did they go right up to the border itself?

Was there an understanding that neither side would launch a flanking attack through Swiss territory?

[Ayahuasca]

I think some of the Blackadder type mythology has been dismantled by the recent focus in the war.

The war poets might have had a lot to do with creating the myth, not too many of those in the Second War.

[Ayahuasca]

What comes into your mind immediately one hearing the words 'First World War'?

For me, and I bet for many others , it is an image of a whistle blowing and men going over the top to be cut down by German machine guns. Gallant British losers sent by incompetent officers against a ruthless war machine, following the tradition of Isandlwana / Rork's Drift / Charge of the Light Brigade, etc. The mental image is from the Somme and is not representative of the whole war.

What is often not remembered quite as much is that we won the Zulu War, the Crimean War and the First World war by killing a lot more of them than they did us. Gallant defeats make for better poetry than victories.

In WW2, after Dunkirk, we were on the winning side most of the time so less opportunity for pale mawkish poets to colour our perception.

[Ayahuasca]

Defeat, pain, suffering, sacrifice makes for better poetry than aggression, killing, stabbing, winning and winner's guilt.

Here is a poem about winning in WW1:

Wilfred Gibson (1878-1962)
"Back"


They ask me where I've been,
And what I've done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn't I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.

Gibson did not serve in France but took his inspiration from talking to soldiers.

Here is another a 1917 poem by Thomas Hardy encouraging people to join up and regretting that he was not young enough to do so:


Up and be doing, all who have a hand
To lift, a back to bend. It must not be
In times like these that vaguely linger we
To air our vaunts and hopes; and leave our land

Untended as a wild of weeds and sand.
- Say, then, "I come!" and go, O women and men
Of palace, ploughshare, easel, counter, pen;
That scareless, scathless, England still may stand.

Would years but let me stir as once I stirred
At many a dawn to take the forward track,
And with a stride plunged on to enterprize,

I now would speed like yester wind that whirred
Through yielding pines; and serve with never a slack,
So loud for promptness all around outcries!




I think we can agree that poems about sacrifice and sorrow have a quality that the others do not, hence they have lasted longer and coloured our perception.

[Ayahuasca]

What technological developments with applications to civilian life ocurred during the war?

Obviously aircraft developed massively, and I believe that wrist watches became popular as a result of having to synchronise attacks.