A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch They Shall Not Grow Old (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds) - it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage really doesn't.
In the “War and Peace” there is a passage reading “having quickly finished off the injured, soldiers cleared out the gate so the [transport] could pass unimpeded”.
Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...
... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.
I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.
^ citing from memory
^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.
It's possible he was echoing the callousness by not expounding on it. I don't think word count is the best way to measure importance in literature. Understatement is a tool authors use.
In Goodbye Darkness, William Manchester tells similar stories of Southerners:
> The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
> How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
Strategy, logistics, own warriors who were not actually cowardly either and did actually fought and killed too. Also, military discipline is an advantage overall I heard. Soldiers eager to break it in order to get to few kills are oftentimes less of an advantage.
WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems incomprehensible, maybe because of how coldly logical it was. You read these accounts of charges on fortified machine gun positions across flat fields, the only cover being the mounds of bodies that eventually piled up, and you wonder how anyone could go into that.
I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?
You know how people today generally can't wrap their head around data driven results and AI generated photography/AR lenses? They treat it like magic or as not relevant to them.
Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.
They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.
> At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, visitors can see a case filled with the fearsome homemade weapons that Canadians trench raiders plunged into the faces and chests of their enemy: Meat cleavers, push daggers and spiked clubs.
I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely worth a visit.
Didn't learn about this in school. Pretty pissed at how sanitized war history was.
I think Canada was in a "littlest brother of the commonwealth with a lot to prove" position. Confederation was in 1867 but we weren't really
a country until much later. We couldn't even declare war on our own. Just went wherever England went.
Canada was actually the big brother of the Commonwealth. It was considered to be the "Eldest Daughter" of Britain. Remember, all the other dominions were in worse positions than Canada.
I've always been of the opinion that Canada didn't really become a country until the Suez canal crisis. That was the first time that we took a principled stand on the world stage in defiance of the highly immoral actions of our mother country. We didn't merely quietly disagree with Britain and abstain from public comment. We loudly and publicly lead the international effort against Britain and its allies, and helped peacefully resolve the situation.
Mentioning the Suez crisis is actually relevant to this discussion. The architect of the Suez peace, Canadian foreign affairs minister Lester Pearson, had spent his First World War career (and nearly the entire duration of that war) as a volunteer field medic. He spent his formative young-adult years seeing the immediate aftermath of modern battles that result when leaders fail to engage in good-faith diplomacy.
They did teach it, they just weren't callous enough to teach the moral judgement you've just made about the conduct of your anscestors while entire nations were trying to kill them.
I also remember being taught the British sent Canadians into battles the British didn't want to do - the worst battles where casualties were expected to be high.
I wonder why this came to be. At first my theory was that they were upset at being dragged across the ocean to fight a war they had nothing to do with, leading to a kind of personal vendetta against Germany for starting it. But that doesn't make much sense, because evidently the Australians didn't have the same reaction, and as I understand it the average German soldier was not much invested in their cause.
I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?
I think Canada implemented conscription much later than the European countries, so in a lot of cases it would be volunteers versus conscripts. I wonder if Canada also had a less visible/rigid class system than Europe back then, that could cause a lack of sympathy for enemy soldiers who realistically had little choice in what they were doing. And obviously Canada isn't going to be holding on to any European territory, so the accomplishment of moving borders around would mean even less to them than the others.
> One theory was that Canadians were perpetually avenging the “Crucified Canadian,” a battlefield rumour of a captured Canadian officer that Germans had supposedly crucified to a barn door near Ypres. The crucifixion was almost certainly fabricated.
From what I've read America went through a compressed repeat of all the mistakes and what the other allies had learnt 1914-1916. Were it not for the brief excursion into Mexico in the years preceding, they'd have opened with cavalry. Even so they still formed a cavalry division in 1917. Learning to deal with the arrival of machine guns, gas and the stagnancy of trench warfare before proper mechanisation was challenging to the generals and tactics of the day.
I imagine their soldiers had just as tough a time of it as others. Life was cheap, WW1 was brutal in the extreme.
I think one cannot overlook that a great many Canadians were farmers, foresters, and miners at a time when workplace safety wasn't a thing. My grandfather recalled men being ripped in half by the snapped lines from the log pulls, of being squished by errant logs. Similar horrors were commonplace in Canadian life of that era, along with starvation, disease and winter.
This is perhaps a better explanation than the Crucified Canadian: Another (theory) was that Canadians had never forgiven the Germans’ first use of poison gas in 1915, of which Canadian units had been some of the hardest hit.
According to the book Vimy Ridge by Pierre Berton the Canadians were taught from the start of their training (in Canada), by Currie, not to take prisoners unless specifically instructed to do so, say to obtain information under interrogation later. It was official policy not an emotional reaction. Currie was very self-made as a military man and may have come up with that policy on his own. Or not.
I’m not sure how much it counts for, but the federation of Australia was barely 13 years old at that time. Furthermore it’s flag was also the Union Jack.
When WW2 rolled around, the point was moot, with offensive forces literally on the doorstep - Darwin was bombed, and there were submarines inside Sydney’s harbour.
It's a little odd to characterize these volunteers as 'Canadians,' and Cook should know it. The majority of the recruits were first-generation immigrants from the British Isles. Few native-born Canadians volunteered. So whatever was going on over there was the product of that recent immigrant experience. That's interesting in itself, but puts a different gloss on this than we might get from those who would like to say something about Canadians, the Canadian mentality, and Canadian nationality from this.
Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.
I wonder where that comes from: outside Canada, a perception I'm aware of is a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities: clubbing seals for fur, biggest exporter of asbestos to third world countries, shamelessly, sponsor of trophy hunts on Canadian soil, and so on. Very confusing set of seemingly contradictory facts? I don't know how to think of it.
[+] [-] ericd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|6 years ago|reply
https://kottke.org/18/12/against-peter-jacksons-they-shall-n...
[+] [-] drtillberg|6 years ago|reply
Davis, Into the Silence, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (2012)[3]
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30285/30285-h/30285-h.htm
[2] https://librivox.org/how-i-filmed-the-war-by-geoffrey-h-mali...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11602442-into-the-silenc...
[+] [-] DenisM|6 years ago|reply
Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...
... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.
I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.
^ citing from memory
^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.
[+] [-] programmerdude|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
There was no one coming to heal them. Modern medicine wasn't invented. They were spared hours of slow death.
[+] [-] OnlineCourage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|6 years ago|reply
> The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
[+] [-] watwut|6 years ago|reply
Strategy, logistics, own warriors who were not actually cowardly either and did actually fought and killed too. Also, military discipline is an advantage overall I heard. Soldiers eager to break it in order to get to few kills are oftentimes less of an advantage.
[+] [-] rangibaby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rebuilder|6 years ago|reply
I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?
[+] [-] kkarakk|6 years ago|reply
Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.
[+] [-] trevyn|6 years ago|reply
They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.
[+] [-] jt2190|6 years ago|reply
I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely worth a visit.
http://www.thercrmuseum.ca/en-ca/
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
I think Canada was in a "littlest brother of the commonwealth with a lot to prove" position. Confederation was in 1867 but we weren't really a country until much later. We couldn't even declare war on our own. Just went wherever England went.
[+] [-] Naga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] checktheorder|6 years ago|reply
Mentioning the Suez crisis is actually relevant to this discussion. The architect of the Suez peace, Canadian foreign affairs minister Lester Pearson, had spent his First World War career (and nearly the entire duration of that war) as a volunteer field medic. He spent his formative young-adult years seeing the immediate aftermath of modern battles that result when leaders fail to engage in good-faith diplomacy.
[+] [-] DKnoll|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexarex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackermailman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appleiigs|6 years ago|reply
"Canadians were drawn from the Empire’s outer reaches and viewed as rugged northern warriors, if ill-disciplined."
"The Canadians did, however, earn their fierce battlefield reputation on the Western Front."
"the Canadians were viewed by their allies and enemies as shock troops to be thrown into the fiercest battles to deliver victory."
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-canadi...
I also remember being taught the British sent Canadians into battles the British didn't want to do - the worst battles where casualties were expected to be high.
[+] [-] nerdponx|6 years ago|reply
I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?
[+] [-] PowerfulWizard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curtis|6 years ago|reply
> One theory was that Canadians were perpetually avenging the “Crucified Canadian,” a battlefield rumour of a captured Canadian officer that Germans had supposedly crucified to a barn door near Ypres. The crucifixion was almost certainly fabricated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucified_Soldier
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
I imagine their soldiers had just as tough a time of it as others. Life was cheap, WW1 was brutal in the extreme.
[+] [-] dleslie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|6 years ago|reply
This is perhaps a better explanation than the Crucified Canadian: Another (theory) was that Canadians had never forgiven the Germans’ first use of poison gas in 1915, of which Canadian units had been some of the hardest hit.
[+] [-] Nomentatus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jboles|6 years ago|reply
When WW2 rolled around, the point was moot, with offensive forces literally on the doorstep - Darwin was bombed, and there were submarines inside Sydney’s harbour.
[+] [-] ShlomoS|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] visiblink|6 years ago|reply
Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
Boyles is a screenwriter who was involved in writing in the movies like Apollo 13, Cast Away, Jarhead, and Saving Private Ryan.
[+] [-] staticautomatic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncphillips|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonhansel|6 years ago|reply
In an alternate universe...
[+] [-] carrozo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteretep|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dhdidhdu|6 years ago|reply
That’s not polite. That’s an internalized response to avoid interacting with others.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|6 years ago|reply
Canadians are polite. But they're not apologetic. Your comment misses the mark.
> a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities
Add up all the clubbed seals and exported asbestos, and a single ICE automobile is worse.
It seems like anybody can have an extreme opinion with no supporting logic.