De Eerste Wereldoorlog

Lest We Forget
Posted November 11, 2008
Could the First World War have been stopped?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th November 2008.

Like most people of my generation, I grew up with a mystery. I felt I understood the Second World War. The attempt to dominate and destroy, to eliminate the people of other races - though raised to unprecedented levels by the Nazis - is a familiar historical theme. The need to stop Hitler was absolute, and the dreadful sacrifices of the Second World War were unavoidable.
But the First World War, which ended 90 years ago today, seemed incomprehensible. The class interests of the men sent to kill each other were the same. While Germany was clearly the aggressor, the outlook of the opposing powers - seeking to expand their colonies and to dominate European trade – was not wildly different. Ugly as the German state was, no one could characterise the war at its outbreak – with Tsarist Russia on the side of the Entente Powers – as a simple struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Neither did this resemble the current war in Iraq, in which legislators send the children of another class to die. The chances of being killed were at least five times higher for men who had been students at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 than they were for manual workers(1). The First World War was an act of social cannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered their own offspring. How could it have happened?
On July 1st 1999, consumed by the urge to understand the war before the century was over, I visited Thiepval on the Somme. This was the anniversary of the first great attack on the German salients, which caused devastating losses for British and Irish troops. Men carrying flutes and dressed in orange sashes – commemorating the Ulster Division – paced about. Beneath the arches of the Lutyens memorial a circle of evangelical Christians hugged and screamed and ululated, while a little boy dressed in combat gear played around their legs with a plastic machine-gun. I goggled at the names on the monument – the 73,000 commemorate only the British and South Africans who fell on the Somme and whose bodies were not recovered – but I couldn’t grasp the scale of what I saw.
Dizzied by these conflicting sights, unable to connect, I wandered behind the old German lines and into a field of sugar beet. Walking between the rows, trying to clear my head, I noticed a spherical pebble. I picked it up. It was strangely heavy. Then I looked around and saw that the field was covered with the same odd little balls. Almost every stone was in fact metal. Within a minute I picked up more grapeshot than I could hold. I found shell casings, twisted bullets, fragments of barbed wire, chips of armour plating. I stopped, overwhelmed by shock and recognition. It was a field of lead and steel; and every piece had been manufactured to kill someone.'

Lees verder: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/11/lest-we-forget/