A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch <i>They Shall Not Grow Old</i> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds</a>) - it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage really doesn't.
In the “War and Peace” there is a passage reading “having quickly finished off the injured, soldiers cleared out the gate so the [transport] could pass unimpeded”.<p>Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...<p>... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.<p>I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.<p>^ citing from memory<p>^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.
In <i>Goodbye Darkness</i>, William Manchester tells similar stories of Southerners:<p>> <i>The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.</i>
WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems incomprehensible, maybe because of how coldly logical it was. You read these accounts of charges on fortified machine gun positions across flat fields, the only cover being the mounds of bodies that eventually piled up, and you wonder how anyone could go into that.<p>I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?
> At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, visitors can see a case filled with the fearsome homemade weapons that Canadians trench raiders plunged into the faces and chests of their enemy: Meat cleavers, push daggers and spiked clubs.<p>I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely worth a visit.<p><a href="http://www.thercrmuseum.ca/en-ca/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thercrmuseum.ca/en-ca/</a>
Didn't learn about this in school. Pretty pissed at how sanitized war history was.<p>I think Canada was in a "littlest brother of the commonwealth with a lot to prove" position. Confederation was in 1867 but we weren't <i>really</i>
a country until much later. We couldn't even declare war on our own. Just went wherever England went.
I wonder why this came to be. At first my theory was that they were upset at being dragged across the ocean to fight a war they had nothing to do with, leading to a kind of personal vendetta against Germany for starting it. But that doesn't make much sense, because evidently the Australians didn't have the same reaction, and as I understand it the average German soldier was not much invested in their cause.<p>I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?
It's a little odd to characterize these volunteers as 'Canadians,' and Cook should know it. The majority of the recruits were first-generation immigrants from the British Isles. Few native-born Canadians volunteered. So whatever was going on over there was the product of that recent immigrant experience. That's interesting in itself, but puts a different gloss on this than we might get from those who would like to say something about Canadians, the Canadian mentality, and Canadian nationality from this.<p>Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.
It's a classic piece written by a Vietnam War veteran: Why Men Love War (1984) By William Broyles, Jr. <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/" rel="nofollow">https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...</a><p>Boyles is a screenwriter who was involved in writing in the movies like Apollo 13, Cast Away, Jarhead, and Saving Private Ryan.