chapotraphouse

Fuck, I have way too many ideas to fit into a 1200 word paper, I researched and wrote a post on a similar topic (contemporary perspectives on the first world war) in a couple of hours! It barely scratched the surface of the point I was making and it was over 1000 words, how am I supposed to fit a comparison of the infantryman's perspective to those "on the home front" into 1200?

On a related note, everyone interested in WW1 should read Poilu by Louis Barthas. He was a french socialist who was called up as part of the reserves in the beginning of the war and he lived though the entirety of trench warfare on the western front. He constantly writes of how all the higher officers are murderous brutes who order suicidal attacks without regard for the lives of their men and how the average soldier of both sides would be happy to call each other friend if only they weren't forced to murder each other.

I found one particularly powerful passage that really makes me think ww1 was the closest opportunity for socialist revolution in europe

From Poilu, pages 143 to 144

But one night, when the rain came down in torrents, the tide invaded our dugout and cascaded down both sets of steps. At the height of the storm, some of the men had to devote all their efforts to building a dam, which the water then broke through at three or four places. We spent the rest of the night bat- tling the floodwaters.

The next day, December 10, at many places along the front line, the soldiers had to come out of their trenches so as not to drown. The Germans had to do the same. We therefore had the singular spectacle of two enemy armies facing each other without firing a shot.

Our common sufferings brought our hearts together, melted the hatreds, nurtured sympathy between strangers and adversaries. Those who deny it are ignoring human psychology.

Frenchmen and Germans looked at each other, and saw that they were all men, no different from one another. They smiled, exchanged comments; hands reached out and grasped; we shared tobacco, a canteen of jus [coffee] or pinard.

If only we spoke the same language!

One day, a huge devil of a German stood up on a mound and gave a speech, which only the Germans could understand word for word, but everyone knew what it meant, because he smashed his rifle on a tree stump, breaking it into two in a gesture of anger.

Applause broke out on both sides, and the “Internationale” was sung.

Well, if only you had been there, mad kings, bloody generals, fanatical ministers, jingoistic journalists, rear-echelon patriots, to contemplate this sublime spectacle!

But it wasn’t enough that the soldiers refuse to fight one another. What was needed was for them to turn back on the monsters who were pushing them, one against the other, and to cut them down like wild beasts. For not having done so, how much longer would the killing go on?

This was December 10, 1915. He goes on to write that the officer's reaction to this was ordering artillery to fire on any gathering on men in the open, german and frenchmen alike. Even leaving the trench for any reason was to be punishable by death.