Armistice Day

Bill Bonner - Tue 11 Nov, 2003

"...In August 1914, millions of young men began putting on uniforms. These wet, furry balls were plucked from towns all over Europe...put on trains and sent towards the fighting. Back home, mothers, fathers and bar owners unrolled maps so they could follow the progress of the men and boys they loved...and trace, with their fingers, the glory and gravity of war..."

"Like a wet, furry ball they plucked me up..."
 - Rupert Brooke

In August 1914, millions of young men began putting on uniforms. These wet, furry balls were plucked from towns all over Europe...put on trains and sent towards the fighting. Back home, mothers, fathers and bar owners unrolled maps so they could follow the progress of the men and boys they loved...and trace, with their fingers, the glory and gravity of war.

I found one of those maps...with the front lines as they were in 1916 still indicated...rolled up in the attic of our house in France. I looked at it and wondered what people must have thought...and how horrified they must have been at what happened.

It was a war unlike any other the world had seen. Aging generals...looked to the lessons of the American war between the states...or the Franco-Prussian war of 1870...for clues as to how the war might proceed. But there were no precedents for what was to happen. It was a new era in warfare.

People were already familiar with the promise of the machine age. They had seen it coming, developing, building for a long time. They had even changed the language they used to reflect this new understanding of how things worked. In his book, "Devil Take the Hindmost," Edward Chancellor recalls how the railway investment mania had caused people to talk about "getting up steam" or "heading down the track" or "being on the right track". All of these new metaphors would have been mysteriously nonsensical prior to the Industrial Age. The new technology had changed the way people thought...and the way they spoke.

World War I showed the world that the new paradigm had a deadly power beyond what anyone expected.

At the outbreak of the war, German forces followed von Schlieffen's plan. They wheeled from the north and drove the French army before them. Soon the French were retreating down the Marne Valley near Paris. And it looked as though the Germans would soon be victorious.

The German generals believed the French were broken. Encouraged, General von Kluck departed from the plain; instead of taking Paris, he decided to chase the French army, retreating adjacent to the city, in hopes of destroying it completely.

But there was something odd...there were relatively few prisoners. An army that is breaking up usually throws off lots of prisoners.

As it turned out, the French army had not been beaten. It was retreating in good order. And when the old French general, Galieni, saw what was happening...the German troops moving down the Marne only a few miles from Paris...he uttered the famous remark, "Gentlemen, they offer us their flank."

Galieni attacked. The Germans were beaten back and the war became a trench-war nightmare of machine guns, mustard gas, barbed wire and artillery. Every day, "The Times" (of London) printed a list of casualties. When the generals in London issued their orders for an advance...the list grew. During the battle of the Somme, for example, there were pages and pages of names.

By the time the United States entered the war, the poet Rupert Brooke was already dead, and the life expectancy for a soldier on the front lines was just 21 days.

One by one, the people back at home got the news...the telegrams...the letters. The church bells rang. The black cloth came out. And, one by one, the maps were rolled up. Fingers forgot the maps and clutched nervously at crosses and cigarettes. There was no glory left...just tears.

In the small villages of France hardly a family was spared. The names on the monument in the centre of town...to "Nos Heros...Mort Pour La France" record almost every family name we know - Bremeau, Brule, Lardeau, Moreau, Moliere, Demazeau, Thollet...the list goes on and on. There was a bull market in death that did not end until November 11, 1918...at 11am.

For years after...at 11 A.M., the bells tolled, and even in America, people stood silently...recalling the terrible toll of four years of war. Now it is almost forgotten.

We have a new paradigm now. And a new war. The new technology has already changed the language we use... and is changing, like the railroads, the world we live in. We think differently...using the metaphor of free- wheeling, fast-moving, networked technology to understand how the world works.

We are fascinated by the new technology...We believe it will help us win wars with few casualties, as well as create vast new wealth...and a quality of life never before possible.

And yet, we are still wet, furry balls, too.

I will observe a moment of silence at 11am


Bill Bonner

PS: The effects of WWI lasted a long, long time. In the 1980s, my father got a small inheritance from his Uncle Albert. "Uncle Albert?" I remember my father saying. "Who's Uncle Albert?" The man in question was indeed an uncle...but he had been forgotten for many years. A soldier in WWI, Albert had suffered a brain injury from an exploding bomb...and never recovered. He spent his entire adult life in a military hospital.