Date: 2016-07-01 06:03 pm (UTC)
They were frozen with fear and wanting to lash out, but there was no escape, and no way to lash out but to advance into battle as ordered. Many who survived went mad. But the soldiers of WWI on both sides believed in the holy righteousness of their cause, and in the life eternal awaiting them after death if they died in performance of their duty.

It could be proposed that such beliefs are an inoculative form of madness, without which the greater madness of war would be untenable.

There is an excellent article in the Atlantic today: 'The Lessons of the Somme' (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/somme-centennial/489656/):

"See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. … This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. … All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald


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