off topic... "Gentlemen, they offer us their flank."
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
"Like a wet, furry ball they plucked me up..." Rupert Brooke
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...
The 20th century that began with such earnest optimism
was only 14 years old when the Archduke Ferdinand's driver
took a wrong turn in Sarajevo.
The world didn't really care about Ferdinand in 1914,
just as few people really cared much about the American election in 2000,
but events have a way of going off in unexpected directions.
Within months, Europe was at war.
Then, German general von Kluck took a wrong turn too,
and instead of a quick, decisive campaign,
like a stock market panic,
it became a war unlike any other the world had seen.
The world had entered a New Era.
People were already very 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" or "getting rolling."
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.
General von Kluck believed the French were broken.
But there was an odd detail; there were relatively few prisoners.
An army that is breaking up usually throws off lots of prisoners.
Ignoring the evidence, and von Schlieffen's strategic plan,
von Kluck decided to follow the French army,
retreating adjacent to Paris, in the hopes of destroying it completely.
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 von Kluck's error,
a 30-mile gap had opened in the German line only a few miles from Paris.
He uttered the famous remark, "Gentlemen, they offer us their flank."
Galieni attacked, using Paris taxi cabs to ferry soldiers to the front.
The Germans were caught by surprise and beaten back.
Trenches were dug, and war became a new era nightmare of machine guns,
mustard gas, barbed wire and artillery - for which, the military leaders
on both sides were completely unprepared.
For more than 2,000 years, European armies attacked each other
with massed units on horse or on foot.
In the U.S. War Between the States, notably at Gettysburg,
it had become apparent that such tactics were a ticket to the grave
for the attacker.
But WWI generals did not seem to notice.
They sent millions of wet furry balls of flesh
against the steel of machine guns and artillery.
And the furry balls fell to earth.
Every day, "The (London) Times" 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, this list got longer and longer.
Soon there were pages and pages of names.
... the life expectancy for a soldier on the front lines was just 21 days.
In towns and villages all over Europe
the tide of young men to the front lines
soon turned into an ebb tide...
... and very bad news coming back home.
The church bells rang. The black cloth came out.
... gradually, one by one, the maps were rolled up.
The fingers that had once eagerly traced the battle lines...
... up to attics and clutched nervously at crosses and cigarettes.
There was no glory left...just tears... hardly a family was spared.
"Nos Heros...Mort Pour La France"
... a bull market in death that did not end until 11 am November 11, 1918.
We have a new paradigm now...
And yet, we are still wet, furry balls, too.
I will observe a moment of silence at 11 a.m.
Bill Bonner
P.S.
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.
What happened to Uncle Albert also happened to much of the rest of the world.
WWI was fought so badly and ended so badly that people began
to despise the culture and politics that they believed had caused it.
"How could 1,000 years of culture have produced this?"
asks the lead character in Erich Maria Remarque's
'All Quiet on the Western Front,' speaking for an entire generation.
Bourgeois culture became the enemy.
In art, people won fame and fortune with grotesque,
lurid, and farcical painting styles.
In architecture, Corbusier led architects towards new designs
- completely lacking in any bourgeois charm or adornment.
The Germans felt betrayed - and rallied around an Austrian housepainter
named Adolf Hitler, with his own vision of anti-bourgeois politics.
And in Russia, the Bolsheviks staged a coup d'etat that seemed to offer
the whole world an alternative.
Like Uncle Albert, these brain damaged,
pathetic curiosities survived into the 1980s.
... this issue of the Daily Reckoning dailyreckoning.com
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