When Hell came to Earth
By Michael Browning, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 11, 2002
Outside the white, wooden, gingerbread-style Gibson Inn, at the foot of the John Gorrie Memorial Bridge in Apalachicola, is a small granite monument that is one of the most poignant memorials to World War I in Florida. Its inscription:
In Memory of
Lieutenant Willoughby
Ryan Marks
Commanding Co. C 61st Inf.
5th Division U.S.A.
Who Showed Extraordinary Valor
And Sacrificed His Life In An Attempt
To Save A Comrade
Killed in "The Argonne"
October 12, 1918
Marks, for whom the Apalachicola American Legion Post is named, was a local citizen who was killed less than month before the end of "the war to end all wars."
World War I was a gigantic conflict that beggared every war in human history before and claimed 9 million lives, 116,708 of them American, not counting 204,002 American wounded, before it ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Nov. 11, 1918. This used to be known as Armistice Day and has since become Veterans Day.
A.J.P. Taylor recorded how utter strangers, men and women, seized each other and made love in the streets of London, in the dark, blindly ecstatic at being alive.
Winston Churchill looked outside his office where he was in charge of munitions and heard the bells ringing, saw the mobs celebrating. He felt somber. The war had scarred him. One of its greatest defeats, Gallipoli, had been his idea. But Churchill summed it all up better than anyone else in his six-volume masterpiece, The World Crisis:
"Germany having let hell loose kept well in the van of terror.... No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: The dead moldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam.... Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected on their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea.... Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran."
World War I was so enormous that the New York Public Library could not grasp it. For years, all books and papers dealing with the conflict were catalogued under the heading "Great European War." No librarian imagined there would be a World War II.
Predisposing factors
World War I made the events of Sept. 11, 2001, possible, even inevitable. The modern Middle East was set up on the ruins of the dismembered Ottoman Empire after World War I. The states of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Palestine -- what is now Israel -- did not exist before World War I. The United States, the last, reluctant combatant in World War I, now lives daily with the results and repercussions of the settlement of the Middle East imposed by France and Great Britain, the victors in World War I.
The global influenza pandemic of 1919, the most deadly outbreak of disease in human history, was a direct result of World War I. Ironically, it might have been brought from America to Europe by fresh reinforcements from the Midwest, who might have picked it up from an avian or bird-borne virus there. In all, 40 million people died. In all the world, only the tiny island of Mauritius was spared from this plague. If the death toll from this pestilence is added to that of the war itself, World War I theoretically becomes the deadliest calamity in human history.
The lightning strokes of World War II, the blitzkrieg, the D-Day landings, the terrific battle of Midway, the twin atomic bombs, have lent the latter war a brilliant, decisive flash and glamour celebrated in movies and books. The homage paid to the men who waged it -- a debt to bravery that is certainly owed, but which tends to blind us to the nightmare nature of war -- has overshadowed the great lesson of futility taught by the earlier conflict. War is not a solution, but a dissolution: That is the lesson of World War I.
World War I is the archetype, the original, far closer to the truth. It was a huge, homicidal paralysis of mud and parried blows, a fight that aimed to solve everything and instead solved nothing.
At its height, Col. B.H. Liddell Hart acidly observed, "The British nation was paying over several million pounds a day for the pleasure of watching and occasionally tapping on the locked gates of the German front." At its end, corporal Adolf Hitler, temporarily blinded by gas and lying in a hospital, decided to dedicate himself to politics. Some historians see World War II as simply a continuation of World War I, after a 21-year truce.
Glossary from war
World War I has entered the language in such phrases as "over the top," "in the trenches," "trench coat," "shell-shocked," "firing line," "behind the lines," "No Man's Land" and "souvenir" (before so many British soldiers went to France, souvenirs were called "keepsakes").
Wristwatches came into vogue during World War I, because they were easier to look at and synchronize for attacks than pocket watches.
German shepherd dogs were temporarily called "Alsatians," out of patriotism. Dachshunds were hunted down and killed by jingoistic mobs.
The tank, the hand grenade, the flame-thrower, poison gas and fighter aircraft all came out of World War I.
The huge throw-weight of the shells caused horrific injuries. Henri Barbusse, in his World War I classic, Under Fire, wrote of "men squashed, cut in two, or divided from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by a blow with a club."
In hospitals, in the rear, women volunteered as nurses, among them Vera Brittain, who found herself tending to wounded German prisoners:
"Nearly all the prisoners bore their dreadful dressings with stoical fortitude, and one or two waited phlegmatically for death. A doomed twenty-year-old boy, beautiful as the young Hyacinth in spite of the flush on his concave cheeks and the restless, agonized biting of his lips, asked me one evening in a courteous whisper how long he had to wait before he died. It was not very long; the screens were round his bed by the next afternoon," Brittain wrote in her Testament of Youth.
In 1916, Jarrold & Sons of London issued The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Gift Book, whose last chapter, "The Kingdom of the Blind," was meant to perk up the home front. Soldiers blinded by gas attacks were photographed, learning to weave baskets, mend shoes and feed chickens at St. Dunstan's Hospital in London.
Crannies of conflict
The war went on in strange places. The German sailors aboard the cruiser Koenigsberg spent the war in a strange, hellish river in East Africa, unable to go to sea because the British navy would have annihilated them. So they turned the cruiser into a jungle base and went out and fought British soldiers on land, like guerrillas, and returned to their mysterious jungly ship at night.
Perhaps the strangest World War I experience of all comes from a man who never saw any of it. He was at the southern tip of the planet. Ernest Shackleton, after a harrowing, failed trek to reach the South Pole, emerged at a whaling station on South Georgia, in Antarctica, in 1916. He describes the experience in his 1919 classic, South. He greets a whaling captain named Sorlie.
" 'My name is Shackleton,' I said.
"Immediately he put out his hand and said, 'Come in. Come in.'
" 'Tell me, when was the war over?' I asked.
" 'The war is not over,' he answered. 'Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.' "
The United States, whose President Woodrow Wilson declared we were "too proud to fight," eventually joined the war after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the revelation of the notorious Zimmerman Telegram, sent by Germany to Mexico, promising Texas to Mexico if Mexico would declare war against America. American commanders who would become famous in World War II -- George Marshall, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Joseph Stilwell -- won their spurs in World War I. Harry Truman commanded an artillery battery.
On the German side, Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian, Friedrich Paulus, Erich von Manstein and Hermann Goering, all of whom became Nazi generals, fought in World War I.
Outsider stance
After the war, America refused to join the League of Nations, and today the same distrust of its successor, the United Nations, seems to animate American foreign policy as it prepares to wage war on Iraq.
It's a development that saddens Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory, a fascinating examination of how World War I still echoes in history today. Fussell, himself a World War II veteran with a 40 percent disability from combat wounds, thinks it ironic that the process of warfare has become cushioned by euphemisms and dulled by amnesia.
"We don't call it the War Department anymore. We call it the Department of Defense," he pointed out. "Very few people in Congress today have actually served in uniform or heard a shot fired in anger.
"I'm fascinated by how little the people who are urging this war, Bush and Cheney, know about war itself. Americans seem to think we can win this by tiptoeing across the sky and dropping a few smart bombs. I think it is going to take five infantry divisions on the ground to beat Iraq. A lot of high-school-aged kids are going to be killed, and the veterans hospitals are going to have to be enlarged. I fear we are going to have a massive population of young people with no arms, no legs," Fussell said.
"World War I was the first war in which massive conscription played a pivotal role, and we don't draft people anymore. This has served to distance us from war and its consequences."
The Veterans Affairs department listed 59 World War I veterans still alive in Florida in 2001.
Art of memory
The war made and murdered artists and poets. Wilfred Owen, whose poems are considered the most poignant of the war, died only a week before the Armistice, like Willoughby Ryan Marks of Apalachicola.
Joyce Kilmer, whose poem, Trees, used to be memorized by schoolchildren, was killed July 30, 1918, at Ourcq, France. Rupert Brooke died of typhus, aboard a troopship bound for Gallipoli.
Author Robert Graves of I, Claudius fame got a bullet through the lung but survived and went on to write a World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That.
Siegfried Sassoon was wounded in the head in the Somme offensive but lived. He never got over the war, though:
"Do you remember the rats;
and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the
front-line trench --
And dawn coming, dirty-white,
and chill with a hopeless
rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it
all going to happen
again... '
Do you remember the stretcher-
cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling
heads -- those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once
were keen and kind and
gay?
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the
green of the spring that
you'll never forget."
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