In Flander’s Fields

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s now over 100 years since WWI.

We still haven’t digested it.

Some people think that the trauma of WWI is what set the West on the road to insanity. I used to think so, but it’s not that simple.

The path was laid. The war happened because the world was already saturated with hubris and progressivism, and partly the war happened because the idea of world-spanning empires that transcended nationality.

Oh, it was newspapers, and trains, and fast ships. It was conceiving of a world that could be conquered, of people that could be integrated into a great, progressive project.

Everyone blames WWI on Nationalism, mostly because the Marxists — ascendant in the aftermath — were so mad people fought for nations, and not class against class. But the truth is that the royal families who started the music and pitched everyone into the pot were dreamers of international empires that spanned the world. Kind of like they still are. (Joined in by the super rich and the pretend “intellectuals.” Same as it ever was.)

WWI was an attempt to leave traditional culture behind, to transcend, to become “civilized” and industrial, and regimented, and– Oh, what’s the use. It is what it is. A product of the time and particular knowledge that made them have a certain view of the world.

In a way they only doubled down after WWI, only then we were supposed to be communitarian, and not care about nationalism, and–

The long war of the twentieth century was a struggle to remake humans.

They’re still at it, still trying to form us into units of production or something. But we are fighting back, at last. Unorganized, and all thumbs, but we’re fighting back.

It’s easy to look back at the 20th century and mourn the loss of life, and think we wouldn’t have been part of it.

But the truth is, there was no room for pacifists. There still isn’t. Wars don’t start and end because “everyone decides to”.

And in that time and in that place, fighting Germany was the most ethical thing to do. Now, the way they fought, and how, and the ridiculous war tactics, sometimes make one wonder if it was on purpose, if eliminating the youth of Europe was intentional to make it easier to rebuild Europe in a progressive image. But the truth is they aren’t that smart. They never were. They were trying to devour each other, to conquer the world. The dead people were just a consequence of the fact that they don’t much care for individual humans. They’re not that good at planning. Otherwise we’d be in the world of 1984.

None of which means it wasn’t honorable and right for the individual men, in the trenches to fight for their land and their friends and their family. Because once the machinery is in motion, it can’t be solved if one side refuses to fight. Yes, it could be solved “if only everyone” but that’s not how humans have ever worked, ever.

We live each in our capsule in time. We can’t judge the past any more than it could understand us.

The best we can do is honor those who sleep in Flanders Fields and those since and before who fought the best they knew for freedom and a future.

For our lacunae and our mistakes, for our losses and our despair, may future generations forgive us.

And may history be kind.

Today let’s us honor those who went before, lost in their capsule in time, who had the courage to fight for their beliefs. And fell for them. Their fight is now done. Ours goes on.

179 thoughts on “In Flander’s Fields”

  1. WWI was an attempt to leave traditional culture behind, to transcend, to become “civilized” and industrial, and regimented, and…

    According to his introduction, that’s why Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils. He claims to have written it before World War I but put it aside once people saw the outcome of eugenics, enlightened socialism, and progressivism…

    …but men’s memories are unstable things. It may be that gradually these dazed dupes will gather again together, and attempt again to believe their dreams and disbelieve their eyes. There may be some whose love of slavery is so ideal and disinterested that they are loyal to it even in its defeat. Wherever a fragment of that broken chain is found, they will be found hugging it.

    There is a lot of deja vu in EaOE:

    They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph.

  2. Maybe someone’s already done this, but alternate history buffs might have fun imagining if William Beauchamp Clark had become President, either by direct election or surviving the assassination of Woodrow Wilson and his VP Marshall. He wanted to annex Canada, opposed both the Federal Reserve and entering WWI

    If I had a Time Machine…

    1. One contributing factor to why Great Britain did not go to war over the Trent was the cold realization was that there was no way on earth to defend Canada.

      1. Why not? Were Canadians disarmed back then?

        There’s a wonderful saying attributed to Adm. Yamamoto (Japanese WW2 top Navy commander), though probably not actually his: “You cannot invade the United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” Oleg Volk created a beautiful image to go with that text: https://olegvolk.net/gallery/picture.php?/7090/search/1551

        1. No, there just weren’t enough of them, with enough supplies. Force to Space ratio is a reality.

        2. They were vastly outnumbered.

          There were politicians in the government that figured that the North would give up the South to get Canada.

          1. I am now imagining an alt-history which has the North of the US plus Canada and the South as its own separate country. Could be interesting.

        3. One notes that the South was armed, and in fact had more military tendencies than the North. It made the war more ugly but not less final.

    2. You might recall the time we actually tried to take (at least part of) Canada, in the War of 1812. It did not go well.

  4. For me, Memorial Day is for remembering the men and women who gave their lives to Keep America Great; and not turn it into a 3rd world, starving and energy-less, Marxist sh*thole, marching to the orders of the U.N. & Davos Overlords.

    Perhaps “gave their lives” isn’t the right phrase; because we don’t just give them up, but to sell them for the highest price we can for them. To present our enemies with a butcher bill that forces them to leave us alone; and keeps our families and nation safe, independent, and thriving.

    And yes, some of those who died from war did so decades later from the wounds, injuries, diseases, and poisons they were subjected to.

    1. Insty did a post last night about a bunch of HamASSniks at Princeton who blocked the Memorial day parade once they saw the American flags. I’ll borrow Kim Du Toit’s Red Curtain of Blood for that.

      I think this is the relevant tweet: https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1794839231015317662?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1794839231015317662%7Ctwgr%5Eb727382f1b932f0d74be01417af1e262bbd1db33%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F649959%2F

      1. Considering how much care I had to take thirtyish years ago not to run down oblivious jaywalking Princeton students when driving through the town of Princeton, I am not surprised.

      2. I like to think of that, as I did of the Build Larger Mansions riots and the idiots lying down on freeways, as a “target-rich environment”, or “evolution in action”.

        1. It seems obvious to me that the inciter leading the cheers was not a natural born American citizen.
        2. Every one of those useful idiots appear oblivious to the fact that they are committing an act of treason.
        3. I’d really like to take a couple of big bucket loaders and start scooping them up and dropping them in dump truck to be hauled to the local garbage dump.

        2. I made a it a few seconds into the clip when a) I heard the chanter start, b) remembered that I was supposed to be checking my blood pressure, so I stopped it.

          Made me wish for that bucket or simply an urban street sweeper. The one in the suburb where I grew up had some impressive steel brushes. (Shed a few bristles each pass, and very young RCPete noticed such.)

      4. Read the excellent article “Infants of the Intifada” over at Taki’s Mag that shows brilliantly why support for Palestine is about a mile-wide and an inch deep.

      5. Happy for them to be Locked up.

        Perhaps a appropriate sentence would be another 5 years at primary school so they can learn what memorial day means, why its remembered and who America was.

        1. Better yet, send them to “Palestine” (which has no actual historic existence) and let them do direct support for the terrorists. Especially the “Queers for Palestine”; see if they can fly when thrown off roofs tied to chairs.

  5. The saying has often been said that military leadership is always fighting last war, or at least the last successful war in their memory, which fails to account for changes in technology or tactics. Thus, thousands of men running at dug-in positions when firepower range increased in range and rate in the meantime.

    The more I have been reading lately about The Enlightenment and the Modernization (both industrial and political), the more I question the modern narrative that both of these events were unqualified “goods”. Yes, there were advances, but there were costs as well. We have yet to really quantify the second ones.

    The most saddening thing, as we remember today that made the ultimate sacrifice, is that those in power who continue to send them to war seem to have learned absolutely nothing.

    1. the more I question the modern narrative that both of these events were unqualified “goods”.

      Where have you been for the last 50-plus years? You have to actively look to find narratives which aren’t at least luddist-sympathetic.

      2. Luddite-sympathetic, oh yes. Anti-Expert-ocracy not so much.

        Maybe I have been living under a rock. Nonetheless, I only recently learned that the very name of the “Enlightment” era was the 18th century “Brights”.

        Which is a hopeful thing, by-the-by. The spell is breaking, and the word is getting out.

          1. And are also wannabe mass murders, except with less honesty about it than the degrowth people.

            Politics are downstream of culture, which is downstream of technology and economics.

            You don’t get to turn back the clock to feudalism and monarchy without repealing so much tech that the only possible result is mass death.

            And that is before taking into account the social and political effects of repealing gunpowder weapons 🥶

                1. oh and you also get a return of slavery on a massive scale

                  Now that’s just slander. The monarchies of Christendom ended slavery. You want your slavery? European enlightenment is the bees knees.

                  (Have to agree about the English soi-disant enlightenment. Because they weren’t a bunch of Brights)

                  1. Rolling eyes.
                    The monarchies of Christendom? REALLY? Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells. WHAT HISTORY have you been reading.
                    The industrial revolution ended slavery.
                    The rest is slander by communists. No, it wasn’t by making everyone slaves, reeeeee.
                    The Christian monarchies enslaved moors and their enemies VERY happily. Until they no longer needed it, and it became untenable.
                    LISTEN NOT TO LIES.
                    No, it wasn’t the fault of Christianity. But “Christian monarchies.” FAUGH> They heard the mass all day, amid dallying with their mistresses too.
                    Hereditary power is evil.

                    1. Northern European. You’re probably right about Spain and Portugal come to think about it. Southern Italy, too. The temptation to dabble in the slave trade “over there” was enormous.

                      You really believe the it was the Enlightenment not the character of Christian republican monarchy in England that drove the Wesleyan movement and the British Empire’s ending of the slave trade?

                    2. No. ALL OF THEM.
                      Look, slavery ended (to the extent it ended) with two things: machines making slave labor obsolete and gun powder equalizing the power of the downtrodden.
                      That’s it. The rest is romanticism.

                    3. Nope. If only because, and it could not be more obvious, it ended (for about 3 years) under the aegis of the British Empire, whose people willing trashed, what was it? One third of their economy.

                    4. “The industrial revolution ended slavery.”

                      Nailed it. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment, leading to the Industrial Revolution, spelled the eventual end of slavery. Once technology became common it made slavery obsolete by making it unprofitable, just as it made animal transport generally obsolete. The only places today with extensive slavery are the places still living in the pre-Medieval period, primarily the Middle East (with the exception of Israel). And as you noted, firearms and other easy-to-learn high-tech weapons made the slave the equal of the slaver.

                    5. Yeah, Britain ended slavery in the 1820’s — by buying the slaves. They compensated the rich slave owners for their property, then presented the bill to the Commons. They were still paying off the loans until just a few years ago. What a glorious example of Christian Republican Monarchy!

                      For all of Lincoln’s faults, at least he didn’t force the non slave owners to pay the slave owners for their ‘property’.

                    6. Between the lives lost and the actual finances of the war and the damages of the war — buying out would have been cheaper.

                    7. Buying the slaves would not have addressed the South’s other grievances, such as the North’s abusive tax, economic and trade policies.

                  2. Industrial mechanization ended slavery. No slave society, ever, can compete with, orceven long coexist with, a free industrialized and mechanized society.

                    History provides numerous examples.

                    3. Yes, and in any competition of inventiveness between the master trying to get the slaves to work as much as possible and the slaves trying to do as little, the slaves will win by force of numbers.

                      This is, in both Rome and the Deep South, there were cases where masters paid their slaves. Incentives matter.

                  3. I wouldn’t say “the monarchies of Christendom” did it: even when it happened in monarchies, it was the pulpits of Christendom that did it. Wilberforce was all of an MP, and John Newton not even that: Victoria was simply the head of their state at the time (or was it George IV?) when those men swayed Parliament to outlaw the practice in the UK and its Commonwealth. Henry W. Beecher didn’t even have a king, but his words (and his daughter Mrs. Stowe’s) struck a chord with Senators and a President named Abraham L.

              2. (oh and you also get a return of slavery on a massive scale, that too is directly downstream of machines and gunpowder)

                Socialism is central control of the means of production.

                The people are, in the end, the primary means of production.

                Thus, socialism requires at its core, central control of the people.

                    1. Agreed. Pagan feudalism with people as livestock. Loathe it with a flaming purple passion.

                      Full disclosure: I don’t oppose monarchy as such, since clearly the good Lord allowed it (“But you’ll regret it.” Cheat codes to the Game of Universe, I tell you) and even blessed it (See King of Christendom, aka the R.C. Pope.

                      However, for my money, the idea government was passed out to our Jewish frens back in the bronze age, and the closest you’ll get to it in the modern era is a Christian republic.

              1. I am reading The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Leguto. I am still early in the book, but one of his first premises is that Communism and Liberal Democracy hold some similar premises. One is that both Communism and Liberal democracies hold a similar view of history, that of moving from less developed beliefs and economic systems to more developed developed beliefs and economics systems (be they communist or capitalist). The other is that both systems insist on ultimate control of every aspect of society, including the economy, beliefs, and indeed history itself. And while Liberal Democracy beats out Communism in terms of actual treatment of individuals and economic success, we arguably do find ourselves in the situation where the current Liberal Democracies, or at least the governments in power, demand no less almost unthinking allegiance to “modern thought”.

                And yes, feudalism was awful.

                1. One is that both Communism and Liberal democracies hold a similar view of history, that of moving from less developed beliefs and economic systems to more developed developed beliefs and economics systems (be they communist or capitalist). The other is that both systems insist on ultimate control of every aspect of society, including the economy, beliefs, and indeed history itself.

                  So he is completely full of shit.

                  1. And absolutely. These shitbirds are all over twitter beating their chest about the beauty of feudalism.
                    They’re Rosseau all over again and the only way to get their heads right is to grab them and turn them abruptly hundred and eighty degrees.
                    After that they stop their conviction that they should rule us because of their specialness. And are very, very quiet.

                    1. I try to spend as little time as possible on Twitter. So the only monarchists I know IRL are people living in actual monarchies, who like them. And that’s fine. For them.

                      The other “monarchy would be better than what we have now, even a feudal state people” I know of in other online spaces however, you have pegged wrong.

                      None of them expect to be Special Bois like our DLF pinkos. Come the revolution, they expect to be peasant farmers whose only interaction with their rulers is paying taxes.

                      They’re Man on the White Horse people or This System Will Surely Conquer Human Nature and Bring in the Utopian People ++!!

                      And I still say the kind of people who called themselves “the Englightenment” back in the 17th Century were a bunch of pool noodles.

                    2. The fatal conceit of the would-be aristocrat. “If only the -right- people were running things, it would be so much better.”

                      Nope. The fewest practical “running things” is best.

                    3. This.
                      And telling me feudalism is the opposite of communism. SPIT.
                      Yes, in theory the feudal lord had obligations to the peasants. Good ones even followed that.
                      There weren’t that many. That’s why they’re famous.

                    4. The only “beautiful” thing about feudalism is that it overlapped in time with when the very first whispers that would later become the Industrial Revolution were taking place, with water and windmills providing energy for forges and hammering and many other tasks that had always needed human muscle before.

                      The cathedrals, great sailing ships, the printing press – these are things that happened despite feudalism, not because of it.

                2. This is me rolling my eyes. Yes, indeed. having people vote is a terrible thing. Except as compared to EVERYTHING ELSE.
                  Depends on what they mean by “liberal democracy.” You do realize that is not what the Constitution is, right? A democratic republic is NOT liberal democracy.
                  I think you’re reading the usual wormtongue. “Let us in. We’ll rule wisely.”
                  They are EXACTLY the same as the Davoisie. Once foot is on neck, you’re expendable.
                  BAH.

                  1. To be fair to Legutko, he is Polish and writing of his view of both Polish democracy and the EU, not specifically the United States. Arguably for the EU (I am much less knowledgeable of Poland) this rings true.

                    Also to be fair, my perception of our opponents is that they precisely encompass the view that everything must be subjected to the beliefs of the Liberal Democracy. Which, at least in my view, smacks of the tyranny that Communism exercised and exercises.

                    1. Liberal democracy in EUROPE is jsut Social Democracy. Which is “Democratic Socialism” No SH*T it’s like communism.
                      This has nothing to do with our system, though. Stop reading wormtongue.

                    2. If eugyptius (Plague Chronicles) is correct, what he is describing is rule by Liberal Democrats. Whose salient feature is describing liberal democracy as whatever they, personally are doing or want to do to the people they rule at any given time.

                  2. “Depends on what they mean by “liberal democracy.” You do realize that is not what the Constitution is, right? A democratic republic is NOT liberal democracy.”

                    This.

                    1. I do not disagree that liberal democracy as practiced in Europe is different than a Constitutional Republic as is theoretically practiced in the United States. I note “theoretically”, as the idea that somehow what we have now is not at all similar to what the Founders intended.

                      As to not reading – again, I would politely disagree. To know one’s opponent, one needs to understand one’s opponent. And to understand, one needs to inform one’s self, which in my case is reading.

                    2. I suspect he’s also thinking of the concept of “Progress,” being common to communism and “liberal democracy.” As in, “Progressivism,” with its calls for eugenics, “efficiency,” and so forth,

          3. Our Constitution was the moderate and sane side of the Enlightenment. A rather large chunk was neither moderate nor sane.

              1. Funny that other countries managed to remove feudalism without a Reign of Terror.

                1. yeah. We were actually discussing the French Question. The French are weird. Partly because they were never a nation, but a group of nations, iwth one stomping on the others for centuries.
                  Also, FYI Russia didn’t. China didn’t.

                  1. The Enlightenment did its part to aggravate the problem. Remember that Rousseau wanted everyone to submit the General Will as freedom.

                    1. Rosseau was very much FRENCH Enlightenment. I don’t care if people on the other side looked and thought it was cool. They’re very separate trains of thought.
                      It’s like conflating European right and American right.
                      The name is the same, some people get confused. But it’s not the SAME.

                    2. As Thomas Sowell is wont to quote from Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr: “Think things, not words.” The words can confuse you. Think about the things behind the words, what the words represent. The map, as usual, is not the territory.

                  2. “The French are weird. Partly because they were never a nation, but a group of nations, iwth one stomping on the others for centuries.”

                    See also Germany, and Italy, both of which had been unified nations less than a century (Much less, for Italy) when WWI started.

                  3. “France is miserable because it is full of Frenchmen. and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.” — Mark Twain 😀

    2. Industrial Revolution I have no particular problem with; every technological advance that looked like a foulup turned out to be either something we could fix with more technology, or something of a blessing in disguise (thinking of the way the nuclear weapons bred a degree of caution among the political powers.)

      Enlightenment thought was a mixture of elaborations of concepts that already existed in the West and were worth developing, and navel-contemplating BS that brought us Rousseau and Marx. The navel-contemplating BS has some precedents in ancient thought as well (the Atman of the Upanishads, for instance.)

      1. Depends which enlightenment. French was…. a hot mess. The English is what our Constitution is based on.
        And if you’re going to diss the constitution, fight me.

        1. Don’t have a problem with the constitution, unless you think not believing it to be the product of divine inspiration is a form of disrespect. I have a lot of respect for the Founding Fathers’ abilities to strain out the good from the bad in the thought currents of their era and the eras before them.

            1. The major figures of the Enlightenment all wrote to each other and swapped ideas and were influenced by each other. Jefferson and Franklin had a particular interest in the French intellectual class, and Adam Smith was influenced by the economic thoughts of Francois Quesnay and the Dutch Hugo Grotius. From what I’ve read, it seemed like the English figures of the Enlightenment thought they and the French were on the same page conceptually, until the Terror started.

              It’s nice that Great Britain got a lot of political violence, including beheading absolute monarchs, out of its system before the Enlightenment started (or was very far advanced, in the case of the Jacobite uprisings), and that gave the English-speaking figures of the Enlightenment a certain wisdom from experience about what should and should not be done in the name of liberty. As a result, they didn’t end up with blood on their hands, and if you believed me to be saying otherwise, I understand your annoyance.

        2. Besides Montesquieu, did the French Enlightenment produce anything of value?

          1. Above, I cited Francois Quesnay, a Frenchman whose thought on economics influenced Adam Smith. Francois Immanuele Fodere wrote an early treatise on forensic medicine. de Fontenelle (a kinsman of the playwright Corneille) was a sort of popular science writer. Emilie du Chatelet corresponded with and translated Newton and developed the hypothesis of the conservation of total energy (as distinct from mechanical energy). Antoine Lavoisier was an influential chemist who trained the founder of Dupont in the manufacture of gunpowder. Honore Blanc was a pioneer of the use of interchangeable firearm components, whose demonstrations greatly impressed Thomas Jefferson and led to him and George Washington backing Eli Whitney’s work in manufacturing muskets with interhangeable parts.

            The French philosophical and political thinkers were hamstrung by their rhetorical posturing and their daddy issues; but the country produced some solid hard science and hard engineering people in the Enlightenment era.

      2. Arguably one thing the Industrial Revolution did bring us – along with the technology we all benefit from – was the reduction of the individual to the status of a part or tool like any other. The era of the craftsman – knowing the process from start to finish – was replaced by individuals doing the smallest indivisible part of labor that they could do. It helped contribute to the social science of Economics (The Dismal Science), the management of everything for economic maximization including the individual. In that sense, it set itself against the ideas of the individual as manifested in The Enlightenment.

        A problem we have not quite found our way out of yet.

        1. Dear Lord. No. This was in place in Feudalism, and heck, under the romans. Humans were interchangeable.
          And being exhausted and beaten down doesn’t make it better.
          SERIOUSLY.

          1. Sarah, I would politely disagree. Speaking as someone who works in the current economic situation, individuals are viewed as resources and individual units to be filled into job roles – precisely that. In fact, the job role one inhabits is prescribed and extensions beyond it are a bit frowned upon.

            1. Sigh. Trust someone who has read A LOT of European early documents. Like from the 10th century on.
              The Lords viewed the peasants as economic units as well. The rest is embroidery.

          2. I did some research as it seemed unlikely the civilised world just decided in the 5th century we should adopt feudalism, so the Romans mostly started with small family farms and then moved to larger farms (with slaves) – 500k Gauls for a start which is what I guess lead to feudalism. There seems to be precious little historical fiction/non fiction pre 5th century which is not about either barbarians lords/ladies, city dwellers or jews at the time of christ.

            1. Um…. There was a lot going into Feudalism. No, it wasn’t from slavery.
              It was mostly from the fall of Rome, and things breaking badly.

            2. Combined with the remnants of the tribal structure of invading Germanic warlords. Feudalism is what happens when tribal structure becomes formal, basically.

        2. The Industrial Revolution vastly multiplied worker productivity. One worker in a factory created far more value than he could as a grunt laborer. 5 men with bulldozers and excavators move more dirt than 1,000 men with shovels and wheelbarrows. Plus, women can drive construction equipment. With shovels, a man can do twice the work of a woman. With bulldozers, they’re about equal.

          Then take textiles. Pre-industrial workers with spinning wheels and hand looms put about 40 hours of skilled labor into making one ordinary denim work shirt. That’s the equivalent of around $700 in today’s economy. For ONE SHIRT. Ever heard of ‘clothes make the man’? Back then, only the rich could afford clothes. People inherited clothes when their relatives kicked the bucket. Remember Scrooge’s servants selling the sheets, blankets and bed curtains when he croaked? That was normal back then.

          Mechanized spinning machines such as the Spinning Jenny, along with automated looms, cut the cost of cloth making by 99%. Shirts went from $700 to $5. Regular folks could afford to buy them.

          Of course, some idiots opposed mechanization because they believed that meant 99% of the skilled spinners and weavers would be unemployed, assuming that demand for cloth would remain constant. Instead, the number of people able to afford clothing shot up by about 500 times. Even more skilled spinners and weavers were needed to operate the machines, each producing 100 times more cloth than they did by hand.

          1. Selling the clothes of the sick was a major contribution to mortality.

            Late 19th century NYC had many families that did not own enough articles of clothing to dress everyone. And that’s with the sweatshops running full tilt and frequently going bankrupt because the business was so cutthroat that the margin was slim.

    3. The US was the first place to see trench warfare of the modern sort, and the foreign observers universally declared that we messed up. That wasn’t “real” warfare, but a one-off that they knew better than to get into. After all, the Civil War/War Between the States/whatever was so strange that no one took it seriously as a model of what technology might do, aside from the use of railroads. Trench warfare? Pshaw. Even when the Ottomans and Russians did something like it in the early 1900s, the other powers all shook their heads because it wouldn’t happen like that between real armies.

      Reading the books and letters from the time…was fascinating in how dead set people were that WWI would be like the Franco-Prussian or Austro-Prussian War, not the Siege of Richmond or bits of the Boer War.

      1. Makes me think of the folks going out to eat a picnic lunch and watch the Congederates get whopped at Bull Run.

      2. Note that the Franco-Prussian War was more Napoleonic than the ACW, even though it came later. Sheridan commented on how they managed much better marching order — on much better roads.

    4. Don’t. English enlightment was indeed the freeing of the mind of mankind. Industrialization freed the hands of mankind.
      It is ridiculous and spitting in G-d’s face to think otherwise. Which is why all the Marxists do it.

  6. Sarah, I just emerged from a deep rabbit hole, after viewing the Swede’s history of Sabaton, then following a link to a reference of Brazilian participation in WW2. Of particular interest was the evolution of the catchphrase which translates to “when snakes smoke” which was originally made popular describing the potential, or lack thereof, of Brazilian troops participating in WW2, but when those troops were sent and fought in Italy, they adopted a smoking snake patch, and eventually the phrase evolved back home to “when snakes will smoke” to describe, as I understand it, that what is not expected will happen and will be even worse than expected. Or something like that. But you’re the expert in Portuguese language. So it circles around again to you. Because I believe that snakes will smoke soon, and it won’t be pretty.

    1. Romans said “When mules foal.”

      Every once on a great long while, they -do-. Genetic hiccup on a normally sterile hybrid critter.

      So it works for “not hardly”, and it also works for “might just”.

      Practical folks, eh?

      1. Is VERY rare… maybe once every few centuries? But NOT unheard of.

        “It’s a one in a million chance…” and all that.

        Or… if enough people grab enough straws off the camel, maybe…. MAYBE.. the camel’s back survives.

        “IMPOSSIBLE!” many say.

        Maybe so, but I still hear that defiant reply, “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!”

        And my money is on the defiant stubborn cusses. Am ox. Of course I like the stubborn cusses. Y’all show the mules what stubborn REALLY is!

            2. Probably. Although minotauri would make great armored infantry. The technological problem to overcome being making their armor strong enough that they don’t destroy it themselves.

              “What do you mean he destroyed a $100 million credit cadre powered armor?”

              “Well sir, he said he was getting a bit stiff and decided to take a stretch, and it popped every joint and connector!”

    2. Remember, well, our fallen brothers. And celebrate the great gift of Liberty bequeathed us by their hands. And never forget the debt owed, and the duty, sacred duty, to carry forward and grow that Liberty, be it our last act.

      Volens et Potens.

  7. Only One has died that all men may be brothers. And all the wars and hatred spring from humanity’s denial of and rejection of His gift.

    May each of us, individually, find that peace that passes understanding before we die.

    And may we all try to live a life that honors Him, as well as the others who fought in our place so we could be free.

  8. The fight for Freedom will always be necessary until the Second Coming.

  9. “Now, the way they fought, and how, and the ridiculous war tactics, sometimes make one wonder if it was on purpose, if eliminating the youth of Europe was intentional to make it easier to rebuild Europe in a progressive image.”

    Not intentional on the human level; but that need not, depending on what else one thinks/speculates was out there at the time, rule out intentionality by nonhuman parties. Which is to say that I think the lizard people believers version of WWI would be entertaining if nothing else.

    I always thought that if Franz Joseph had had 1). competent spies and assassins 2). that actually answered to him instead of his vast unwieldy and corrupt bureaucracy, he could have paid the Serbians back tit for tat and maybe stayed out of whatever stupidity the Prussians managed to stir up on their own.

      1. My dear sir, *everywhere* has been an abbatoir for at least three.

        (Sorry, reading Cotillion right now, the cast is kind of rubbing off on me.)

    2. When I did an alt-history WWI, I had to make the Austro-Hungarian commander more competent than he actually was. There was No Way I could in good conscience screw up as badly as he did. Fiction readers wouldn’t buy it.

      Prit Buttar’s book Collision of Empires about the outbreak of the war on the Eastern front is excellent. And depressing, because you keep thinking, “There is no way he could foul this up worse.” And then the guy managed it.

      1. I’m in the middle of the third book of Prit Buttar’s 1914-21 Eastern Front series that started with Collision of Empires. Let’s just say the Russians were the only ones in the war that could occasionally make the Austro-Hungarians look somewhere close to competent. And then only close and only occasionally.

        I like Buttar as a historical writer, mainly because he’s not a “trained” historian. He’s a doctor, as in general practitioner, who took it up because of some of his patients’ war stories. And his writing style is refreshingly direct and accessible.

        1. IIRC the Italians also gave the Austro-Hungarians a run for their money in the stupid management and waste of lives department, but I don’t remember the details.

          1. Yeah, there’s a reason there were something like fourteen major offensives (on both sides) along the Isonzo River in just over three years, and the front hardly ever moved. The only time the Italians fell back much was when the Germans got involved (I’ve read Erwin Rommel’s “Infantry Attacks,” his WW I memoir, and it’s very interesting). Likewise the Austro-Hungarians didn’t collapse until the rest of the Entente joined the fighting in the Adriatic area. The Austro-Hungarians and the Italians both did nothing but decimate an entire generation…actually, more than decimate, in the technical definition of decimate.

          1. Kindle and Audible. Yeah, I know. But when I went into the office to work and was on the road for 2+ hours a day, having those audiobooks was awesome. I figured an Audible subscription (basically one free audiobook a month) let me drop my SiriusXM subscription so I came out about $10 a month ahead.

  12. I was pleased to see a goodly number of younger people at the Memorial Day service at the local public cemetery today. Not just families of the deceased, but also others who came to pay honor to the fallen.

  13. I usually sum up the point of Memorial Day thusly:

    It is a duty of the living is to give meaning to the sacrifices of the dead.

    For some reason it often gets interpreted in ways I find strange but I don’t care any more. I know what it means.

  14. As a small kid – grade school 3-4th? – I remember going with the Grandmothers out to the local cemetery for “decoration day” and putting flowers on family plots. In an odd twist of fate both sides of my family were (for the most part) never military but worked in “vital” jobs with the railroad, Post Office, farming and such. WWII saw my Dad go overseas (Pacific/Army Air Corps), Uncles in Air Corps and Marines but everyone came home.

    My Dad didn’t really like memorial day – it reminded him of the losses when he was the squadron CO and only talked about it a tiny bit in his last few years. I found some old paper work and photos from then and he would tell a few ‘fun’ stories about the guys in the photos. Like the one who flew his P-47 through the open hanger or flying a light observation plane “backwards” down the runway due to high winds blowing just right. He never went to any of the reunion meet ups after the war and while always in love with flying never flew a plane again. We would go to local airshows when he retired and was in his 70’s – 80’s and he loved that. I still have his picture standing by “Tar Heel Hal”

    https://www.airforceheritageflight.org/news/warbird-stories-p-47-thunderbolt-tarheel-hal/

    at an airshow we went to. I miss Dad and all the people from ‘back then’ and have my American flag flying out front today to remember.

  15. Been chewing and chewing over the Memorial Day post: saluting the flag, army recruiters in schools, honoring our veterans, for some time now. The military fish is rotting from the head down, and with the best efforts of that head from the bottom up. The civilian leadership is actively evil. And our servicemen were (and many still are) so worthy of salutes and honors. And. And. And.

    Should’ve known Mrs. Hoyt would be me to it. Ah well, it’s not only Oxen who are slow. But the earth, (pace Quimbly IIRC) is patient.

  17. Way back in the 1990’s, when I was first in college, my history teacher had the very…unorthodox opinion that the First World War was going to happen, no matter what. The only big questions were when, were, and how bad things were going to be.

    Why? Simple-

    *Germany was stuck in the place of being not small enough to be a small country, but not big enough to be a big nation that their dreams thought they could be. There were no real land corridors they could take, most of the good colonial territories were already long-ago claimed, and they didn’t have a lot of the “mid-tier” materials that they needed to really make the bootstrap to the next level of nation-state levels.

    It didn’t help that they had France on one border, angry about how badly they were beaten in the Franco-Prussian War and were looking for revenge. On another border, they had a weak Russia that was spoiling for a fight to deal to deal with their internal issues, an Austro-Hungarian Empire that was nearing its expiration date, and Italy is always a chaotic mess. On the seas, they were facing the Royal Navy, who were in fits and starts fixing a lot of their issues and had a navy larger than anything the Germans could build. Oh, and their strategic-level leadership, Kaiser Wilhelm, was both overly ambitious and not the sharpest of all pencils, which threw a lot of decision making to the operational and tactical levels. So, Germany could win battles, but they never really had an idea of what “winning the war” looked like.

    *France was an economic basket case (as always), the Third Republic was a mess (as always), they were belligerently angry with the Germans (as always), and they thought that this time French glory at arms would defeat the barbarian Germans (as it never did).

    *Russia had senior leadership that was not terrible, just very bad. The Tzar was a reactionary easily swayed by people who could make him look “forceful,” economic reforms had not given anything to anyone outside of the nobility and a few allies, anarchist and socialist revolutionaries were fighting in the streets, the entire military structure of the Russian Army was a facade of modern technologies and techniques over mass peasant levies, there really wasn’t a Russian Navy (and it got beaten by Japan, an epic disaster on several levels), and it would only take one or two disasters to destroy everything.

    *The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs and it was being torn apart by nationalistic and religious groups inside that had absolutely no problem at all with accepting outside help…and then betraying their allies once the war was won.

    *Britian had come to realize just how close the German Kriegsmarine was getting to reaching parity with the Royal Navy, and technology modernization was in massive fits and starts. Some of the efforts to compensate (i.e. subverting anti-flash and anti-blast protections to increase rate of fire on their dreadnoughts and battlecruisers) were actually more dangerous to them than the enemy, but reforms were being made. The British Army was mostly a colonial army, and while there were some good things about it (namely the quality of their rifle drill and similar), it was small and somewhat fragile.

    If the war wasn’t over very quickly, the British Navy would become involved and that would bring England in as well.

    ….and this wasn’t including the United States, the rising power of Japan in Asia, China falling into serious warlord issues, South America, the Middle East, Africa…

    His theory was that the war was going to happen. There were too many things that were going to set the dominos to fall. The only question was what would set things off…and how it was going to end.

      1. I was taught the same, in the mid-1980’s.

        It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Germany had been ruled by a Kaiser with more self control and less need for self aggrandizement.

        1. The true stupidity of WWI was that damn near all of the royalty involved were related to each other.

          3. “…damn near all of the royalty involved were related to each other.”

            Which has been the case for, oh, maybe 400 years? Or more?

      2. Considering that this was a CSU in the ’90s, I had a history teacher who had tenure.

        My next history teacher was firmly in the Chomsky “America is the root of all evil, everywhere at every time” concept of historical understanding. I actually did ask him if he thought the United States had a time machine to affect anything before 1776 and he said, and I quote, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had.”

  18. Some of the communist raised Russian nutjobbery about the NSDAP (the tribal takes with no regard for choices or methods) makes a bit more sense on knowing that the Czar’s wife was originally a Gemran noblewoman, and wore a swastika as a symbol of health. Demonization of an external enemy, and demonization of a previous regime bleeding over into each other.

    I’m sleep deprived, and am not sure I have any point.

    There is perhaps an AU in the last Czar marrying a different European noblewoman.

    There are a lot of historical marriages, so in theory a lot of AUs are possible by assuming different marriages, but that may be quite a bit more great man approach to history than I think is really correct.

    1. When in nearly every case it’s mandatory that royalty must marry royalty (or at least high nobility) a few centuries of that idiocy cause the sort of inbreeding we see in European royalty today.

    2. Under Russian law, dynasts could only enter into morgantic marriages unless they married someone from another sovereign house.

      1. Not exactly your fault, or even a problem really. It’s been pretty slow, and it gives me something to listen to.

  20. The effort I put into not overthrowing the Unconstitutional parts of our government and hanging them all from sturdy oaks should be appreciated more.

      1. Lots of lamp posts, though. And they tend to be on public throughways, particularly in DC where bureaucrats and politicians are likely to see the wages of their power lust.

            1. Catch up, Ox! Rush. Hemispheres. The Trees. Ring a bell?

              Now there’s no more Oak oppression

              Cause they passed a Noble Law

              And the Trees are all kept equal

              By Hatchet, Axe, and Saw

              Damn this stupid text box — no way to insert a line break without starting a new paragraph. WPDE!

          2. Once upon a time, before Vanity Call signs, I knew (of) a fellow named of Gary Maples. Some wag at the FCC had a sense of humor and saw that he got the call sign W9OAK.

  21. They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
    Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
    They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted:
    They fell with their faces to the foe.

    They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
    Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
    At the going down of the sun and in the morning
    We will remember them.

    “For the Fallen”, Laurence Binyon, 1914

  22. God of our fathers, known of old,

    Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

    Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

    Dominion over palm and pine—

    Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

    Lest we forget—lest we forget!

    The tumult and the shouting dies;

    The Captains and the Kings depart:

    Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

    An humble and a contrite heart.

    Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

    Lest we forget—lest we forget!

    Far-called, our navies melt away;

    On dune and headland sinks the fire:

    Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

    Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

    Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

    Lest we forget—lest we forget!

    If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

    Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

    Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

    Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

    Lest we forget—lest we forget!

    For heathen heart that puts her trust

    In reeking tube and iron shard,

    All valiant dust that builds on dust,

    And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

    For frantic boast and foolish word—

    Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

    Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional” (1897)

  23. Look, y’all. It’s simple. The characteristics of government are informed by the characteristics of people. This at bottom is what Adams’s quote about who the Constitution was suited for is really saying, and why the first steps on the road to tyranny were subversion of culture.

    1. Bah.
      I say it again, BAH.
      First that quote is attributed to AT LEAST 3 different people. I roll to disbelieve.
      Second, the people by and large are moral. If they weren’t the bastages wouldn’t be getting push back. Morality is normal. Most people are normies. And btw we came out of the lock downs more religious. ALL OF US.
      Also…. any religion? Really? Would Islam do? That quote is nonsense.

      1. I’d just note that it is very likely that whoever said that was thinking Christianity/Judaism not Islam.

        1. Perhaps. But the fact is it’s a null program.
          Catholic? Baptist? Presbyterian? Very different view of the world.
          And who judges what a moral people is. EVERY people has horrendous scoundrels. We in America tend to report them more than Europe.
          That saying leads people to run around with their heads on fire saying that it’s all lost because of abortion. Well, then it was lost in the rest of the world way before here.
          America is still the most religious of the countries of the West. And in many ways the most moral.

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