This is an interesting take on World War I

If World War One Was A Bar Fight. This Is Perfect.

It's essentially true. And it gave us the Lost Generation, killed millions, and set up things for World War II and beyond. We're still dealing with the mess, in some ways, especially if you throw colonialism into the mix.

Lest we forget

The Tragic Futility of World War I: A century on, we're still paying the price.

If you find human behavior discouraging today, consider what happened a century ago. A Martian might have gazed down upon Europe in 1914 and seen a peaceful, prosperous continent with a shared culture. Pretty much everyone had enough to eat. The English listened to Wagner, Germans savored Shakespeare, Russian aristocrats mimicked the French, Mozart and Italian opera were loved by all. Then, Europe imploded.

Ten days before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, prompting the descent into the Great War, “people everywhere were working, resting, eating, sleeping, dreaming of nothing less than of war,” a British political scientist wrote in The Atlantic the following year. “War came upon them like a thunderclap.”

I particularly like this paragraph:

It was a sad, pointless war, for which we’re still paying a price. A hard-hearted peace treaty and a ravaged economy produced a “lost generation” of young Germans and led directly to the rise of Hitler and an even uglier worldwide conflagration. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement reached by Britain and France in 1916 drew arbitrary boundary lines across the postwar Middle East—around Iraq, for instance—that are returning deadly dividends to this day. The toppling of the Russian monarchy and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a balkanized Europe that, as recently as the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over strife-torn Ukraine, pains us still. The world was a nastier place after the war than before it.

100 years since World War I: Could it happen again today?

One hundred years ago today, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in retaliation for the assassination one month earlier of his heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian pan-Slavic nationalist. What might otherwise have remained a regional conflict between the dying Hapsburg Empire and one of its former holdings instead became, through a tangle of alliances and a global power imbalance, two world wars that began in 1914 and ended in 1945, with a 21-year intermission for the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Civilian and military casualties for the two wars approached 100 million – roughly the entire population of the United States as of July 1914.

3 important lessons learned from World War I

The hallowed ground of World War I, then and now uses an interesting technique to show pictures of the time, and swiping to pictures of the same areas now.

World War One: Every Man Remembered database launched

The Royal British Legion has started an online campaign to gather tributes to every Commonwealth serviceman and woman who died in World War One.

A total of 1,117,077 service personnel from what was then the British Empire died in the war, which began in 1914.

The outbreak of the First World War reminds us why we need a peace movement

Today marks one hundred years since Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. And so began four years of hell in Europe. The failure of diplomacy to prevent war and the inability of elites to prophesy its cost was an indictment of absolutism. Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia – whose combined ambitions in the East largely engineered the war – were monarchies in which too few people of too little calibre enjoyed too much power.

My first thought when I the news of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 broke was of the Lusitania. The thing about being trained as a historian is that you think in patterns, in waves of repetition, and analyse the similarities and difference in historical events. I may not remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but my historical memory is long, and the things other people forget over time seem very real to me.

I'm not saying we'll be drawn into the Ukrainian conflict like we were into World War I, or that our world is heading for another World War. But there are things that historians hold their breath for when they encounter them in the present, wondering if diplomacy will hold, wondering if we've never quite escaped, as the one piece put it, nations 'in which too few people of too little calibre enjoyed too much power'. There's a general unrest among the have-nots these days, and the haves seem to get fewer and more out of touch from the have-nots. There are fine, noble people using their wealth to better humanity and our world--but increasingly it is less about wealth of individuals and more about corporations. Our food, our water, our very lives, are controlled by corporations that flood our political agendas with money for their own good, engineer our food, frak our resources, market to our children, and in many ways they own our leaders. And so in many ways, today's world has a much scarier potential for conflicts to escalate than we have seen in years. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I remind myself of the good in people, of those who hold to peace. But things that seem to repeat history or which can act as a flashpoint still trouble me greatly.

The last of those who fought the war to end all wars

Last World War I combat veteran dies at 110: Claude Stanley Choules joined the battleship HMS Revenge in 1917

Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died Thursday at a nursing home in the Western Australia city of Perth, his family said. He was 110.

Beloved for his wry sense of humor and humble nature, the British-born Choules — nicknamed "Chuckles" by his comrades in the Australian Navy — never liked to fuss over his achievements, which included a 41-year military career and the publication of his first book at the age of 108.

"We all loved him," his 84-year-old daughter Daphne Edinger told The Associated Press. "It's going to be sad to think of him not being here any longer, but that's the way things go."

He looks so young in his recruitment photo, but then he was just fourteen and one month old when he started training with the British Royal Navy

Chouldes was the last combat veteran of the war. One more veteran remains, Florence Green, another Briton, was a waitress in the Women's Royal Air Force. She, too, is 110 years old.

Despite the fame he achieved because of his military service, Choules grew to become a pacifist who was uncomfortable with anything that glorified war. He disagreed with the celebration of Anzac Day, Australia's most important war memorial holiday, and refused to march in parades held each year to commemorate the holiday.

"He didn't believe in war," Edinger said.

"He always said that the old men make the decisions that send the young men into war," said his son Adrian Choules.

"He used to say, if it was the other way around, and the old ... were off fighting, then there would never be any wars," Adrian Choules told local media.

He was fortunate in one way--his wife lived to 98, dying in 2003, so they spent 76 years together. His three children--all in their 70s and 80s, are still alive. He stayed in good health, not even on medication, for a long time, although he'd recently grown blind and nearly deaf. But he pretty much died of old age. His secret to living so old was simple: 'Keep breathing.' :)

His book is on Amazon indirectly, with sellers offering the new hardback at about $125. The audio book is about $20. It's called The Last of the Last: The Final Survivor of the First World War.

I know it was yesterday that we honoured the fallen, past, and present veterans

but I found this on another blog that I read, and I thought it was a fitting tribute, even a day late, especially for those whose sacrifices gave us this day as Veteran's/Remembrance/Armistice Day--those who fought the War to End All Wars.



PS In the comments, Bob suggested this, the Finbar Furey version of the same song. The video is very well done, and the singing chilling. I'm not sure which version I prefer, really. But they're both well worth a listen.


Furey's - Green Fields of France
Uploaded by Lunethique. - Explore more music videos.

Also in the news

Last British Army WWI veteran dead at 111

Harry Patch survived the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his companions died, during the War to End All Wars.

Patch didn't speak about the war until he turned 100, the Ministry of Defence said.

"He tried to suppress the memories and to live as normal a life as possible; the culture of his time said that he was fortunate to have survived and that he should get on with his life," a Ministry of Defence biography says.

"That suited Harry; he could 'forget' his demons, the memories of what happened to him and to his close friends."

In 1998, a television producer with an interest in the war talked to Patch, who then made the decision to speak of his memories, the Ministry of Defence said. He took part in a documentary on the war and began gradually to open up.

It wasn't long before Patch became a spokesman for his generation, speaking about the horrors of the war as well as his own emotions and reactions, the Ministry of Defence said.

"In speaking about his experiences, Harry began at last to come to terms with his war, and was at peace with himself and his memories," the Defence Ministry said. "His thoughts then turned to reconciliation, to the long-term effects of suffering and coming to terms with that suffering."