Blood in the Water, Blood on the Beach

Treść źródłowa

Anzac, the Landing, by George LambertAmong the many memoirs left behind by participants in the First World War, a ubiquitous motif is a profound sense of disorientation. The experience of the war was starkly different, depending on what node of the command hierarchy one inhabited, but enlisted men, officers, and political authorities all generally shared a sense that Europe was gripped in a death machine which had escaped the control of man. Humble infantrymen at the front experienced this the most acutely, in the intense physical disorientation that accompanied sustained bombardment by modern artillery, and also in the creeping spiritual numbness that accrued from years of siege in muddy trenches filled with detritus, rats, and corpses. For officers in the upper echelons, the disorientation of the war was characterized less by the physical disorientation of the front and its endless cacophony of gunfire and explosions, and more by the breakdown of longstanding assumptions about how to conduct military operations, with operational planners groping in ignorance for solutions. In hindsight, it is easy to write off the brutal and ineffectual offensives (particularly on the western front), as an exercise in butchery and ignorance. In real time, however, the armies of Europe were attempting to solve tactical and operational problems which nobody had ever confronted before, and nobody scored particularly better on this test than anyone else, particularly in the early years of the war. Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun all blend together into a dissipated veil of death. Given the appar…