Tom Engelhardt 43

November 10, 2013 Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, The War to Begin All Wars [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Ann Jones dedicates They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story, the first original offering from Dispatch Books, to Lieutenant Oscar Trygve Slagsvol, her father, a decorated veteran of the Western Front in World War I. She writes, “My father used to say that wars are made by men who have never been to war, men who don’t know that war, once started, never ends.” We tend to forget about the lineage of our wars. Today, Veterans Day, TomDispatch offers a vivid reminder of where they come from.  I especially wanted to thank all of you who bought Jones’s book the moment it was published last Thursday. It’s a deeply appreciated sign of your support for our new publishing venture.  Her book, on the journey of America’s grievously war-wounded from the battlefield in Afghanistan to other kinds of battlefields in this country, is as stunning an account as it's possible to imagine of the true costs of the “little” wars that are still, in many ways, the legacy of “the Great War.” If there is a day for you to think about this subject and perhaps buy her book, this is certainly it. Just a small reminder as well that, for any of you who want to support this site with a donation of $100 (or more), the offer of a personalized, signed copy of They Were Soldiers remains open this week while Jones is still close at hand to sign them.  Check out the offer at our donation page.  Tom] It was exactly 95 years ago: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the moment when major hostilities in the charnel house that was World War I ended.  In 1919, November 11th officially became “Armistice Day” in the United States.  As it happened, though, major hostilities were suspended for just two brief decades before an even more devastating global war began. In 1954, nine years after World War II ended, with the previous “great” conflict having proved anything but -- as once advertised -- the war to end all wars, and the memory of its armistice fading, the holiday was officially relabeled Veterans Day.  And so it has remained as, in the second half of the last century and the first 13 years of this one, those veterans piled up. There were the ones from Korea, Vietnam, and too many American brushfire interventions to mention, as well as -- in our no-longer-so-new century -- from the disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  (In Washington’s conflicts in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, where the “soldiers” or “airmen” are generally robots, there really are no veterans.) Everyone knows how World War I was advertised.  In retrospect, however, it could more accurately be thought of as the war that began all wars.  Admittedly, trench warfare seems a thing of the past, last seen in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.  But World War I launched the age of mass industrial warfare, with the marriage of science, academia, the corporation, and the military leading to everything from nuclear proliferation to drone warfare.  Without it, a military-industrial complex would have been inconceivable.  While the First World War soaked the earth in blood, as soldiers dug ever deeper into their trenches, it also prepared the way for future wars in which “collateral damage” moved ever closer to the center of any conflict, in which uprooted populations and dead civilians became the essence of war.  And after all these years, it’s left one wonder behind: that, given all the blood and horror since World War I began, we somehow still manage to celebrate those wars, whatever we think of them, through those we like to call our “warriors” or “wounded warriors.” With yet another Veterans Day rolling around, and no armistice in the perpetual war that Washington has been fighting at least since that other 11th, the one that occurred in September 2001, TomDispatch is returning to the origin of modern war, the almost inconceivable bloodletting of World War I.  The remarkable cartoonist Joe Sacco, in an obvious labor of, if not love, then devotion to remembering the nightmare of our last century, has done something almost unimaginable: he’s created The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme, a 24-foot foldout diorama of an illustrated book focused only on the initial day -- with its tens of thousands of deaths -- of one of the true catastrophes of that war.  As part of his book package, he’s included TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild’s account of that first day of battle from his bestselling, award-winning recent bookTo End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918.  With some pride, this website’s way of not “celebrating” Veterans Day is to offer that text and three of Sacco’s illustrations. Ninety-five years later, after so much has indeed been forgotten, denied, ignored, left in the dust, it seems almost wrong to say that we must never forget. But... Tom Veterans Day, 95 Years On  The Enduring Folly of the Battle of the Somme  By Adam Hochschild Illustrations by Joe Sacco [The illustrations in this piece come from Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme with the kind permission of its publisher, W.W. Norton, and the slightly adapted text, which also appears in that book, comes originally from Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 and is used with the kind permission of its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.] In a country that uses every possible occasion to celebrate its “warriors,” many have forgotten that today’s holiday originally marked a peace agreement. Veterans Day in the United States originally was called Armistice Day and commemorated the ceasefire which, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, ended the First World War. Up to that point, it had been the most destructive war in history, with a total civilian and military death toll of roughly 20 million. Millions more had been wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals; and because of an Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers, millions more were near starvation: the average German civilian lost 20% of his or her body weight during the war. A stunned world had never experienced anything like this. In some countries for years afterward, on November 11th, traffic, assembly lines, even underground mining machinery came to a halt at 11 a.m. for two minutes of silence, a silence often broken, witnesses from the 1920s reported, by the sound of women sobbing. Like most wars, the war of 1914-1918 was begun with the expectation of quick victory, created more problems than it solved, and was punctuated by moments of tragic folly. As the years have passed, one point that has come to symbolize the illusions, the destructiveness, the hubris, the needless deaths of the entire war -- and of other wars since then -- has been the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Click here to read more of this dispatch.