The Years Undone

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

In the scattered files on this computer — and partly in handwritten notebooks in my office closet — there is a halfway written novel called The Years Undone.

It’s about the Red Baron — No, not the one where he’s a dragon shifter. I don’t know why I have two completely different novels with the same historical person. It’s not the first time, though — and therefore by extension about World War I. Or at least the aftermath of WWI. It is actually not a coincidence that I have two novels with that character, and another novel planned set in an alternate World War I.

For years, World War One was one of my reading obsessions. (The French Revolution too, but I had to give that up, because it made me so depressed there was nothing to do.)

World War I is the glitch in the matrix that haunts most historians, the place where it looks like Western civilization went wrong. The place the thread broke that was leading us through the labyrinth of barbarism towards the light.

Oh, it is an illusion, you know? It looms that large because it’s close up and in our face. humans have done stupid, inexplicable things before, and there have been many times where history seemed to stutter, veer off from a course that made at least some sense and go howling in the wildnerness for a while, at a cost of the some large percentage of the population: the English civil war, the 100 years war, the Moorish invasions, the–

To us it is World War One that looms large, partially because it hasn’t been fully digested. In historical terms, world war one was yesterday. We witnessed what seemed like senseless carnage on a massive scale.

Western civilization has been bleeding out from a wound sustained on the fields of Verdun.

But that’s not important right now. Or maybe it’s the only important thing, but it can’t be approached full on, or we can’t face it. So we must pirouette and tiptoe and dance a gavotte towards it.

Which is why the years immediately after WWI make such rich reading: histories, biographies, mysteries (which by their nature are a literature of the quotidian, at least cozy mysteries) and books of musings.

I found the title “The Years Undone” in poem by one of the poets of WWI. I no longer remember the poet or the poem, except it was a musing on how he wished the years undone in which he’d fought in the trenches.

Heinlein had a remarkably similar sentiment in Time Enough For Love. The file clerk that passes for my memory is confused today but I believe Heinlein called WWI “the War where both sides lost.”

And that’s a good way to see it. Another way to see it is that humanity lost. Afterwards, the world took a path of ever increasing government power, increasingly more regimented life, and a drive — partly fed by Russian imperialism — towards ever more “internationalism”.

Erase that. That’s what you’ve been told, but it’s not true. WWI was the first gasp of internationalism. All those royal families with their tentacles reaching into other countries, all the striving of cousins and brothers, uncles and nephews.

And the dead in the fields, the cadavers of young men piled in French and Belgian fields only fed the internationalism because somehow what propaganda made of that senseless war was that the fault was of NATIONALISM and of individual striving.

Which brings us back to the times. The times were the apex of the industrial revolution, when mass industrial production, communication, even art reached its peak. There was nothing anyone could do to fight that. You see, I’m not a materialist. I know there’s more to the world than the material, money, how we live.

But I also know that men — and women too, if you’re one of those that doesn’t realize men is inclusive in this case — live according to their understanding of the world and their material culture at that time. Elizabethans believed in a clockwork world, and primitives believed in a universe that worked by sympathetic magic. Some days I suspect we still do, but that’s something else.

The world of World War One and the dawning 20th century was one of increasing concentration of resources, and standardization of resources and manufacturing and, really, all production. Which brings us to the wars and what led to them….

The “systems” of the 20th century were systems that treated humans as widgets, as groups, as playthings. Communism, fascism and the dilute versions of both that the West installed in its supposedly free societies were all attempts at top down control, at “scientific” governance that controlled everything from the economy to the daily life of every human under them.

…. They’ve been falling apart for 100 years, and it’s become obvious they were falling apart at least 50 years ago. Because humans aren’t widgets and humans don’t work well when treated as widgets.

The country that retained the most freedom was the US because that was how we were founded, from the beginning — and our very founding is an affront the rest of the world will never forgive us — and we were also the most productive and the most innovative.

Even hampered by the fascist shackles that FDR clapped on us, we’ve produced enough to keep the world going through the delusional hell of the 20th century. We’ve innovated enough in all fields to show that the idea of top down control is a delusion. A dangerous one. And now we’re shaking off the shackles and the morbid dreams of the past.

We’re going to have to invent our way out of this, to pave the road so other countries can follow. But that’s okay. That’s what we have always done. (And what other countries can’t forgive.)

Do we wish the years undone of the 20th century, the years when we’re now finding, in many ways we were fighting ourselves in the dark and the fire? Or at least financing those who fought us and hated us?

I don’t think it can be undone. As with mistakes in individual lives, the mistakes made in the long history of humanity are part of who we are, what we’ve learned and who knows where we’d be without them. What we did was because that was how we understood the world. And now we understand it differently, but we wouldn’t be here now if we hadn’t been there then.

Or if you prefer, supposing the US had stayed out of WWI? Would that mean that the bitterness of the 20th century wouldn’t have touched us? Oh, hell no. It means we’d probably have come up — as the rest of the world destroyed itself — with some ultra special, invincible philosophy of mass, top down governance that actually destroyed us and what remained of humanity.

Sure, we could have sat out of WWII and let someone else come up with atomic weapons and– And the first use would be likely to be mass industrial and truly devastating.

Even through the cold war, by existing, we gave hope to the world, and we created a doubt that the USSR was inevitable. Oh, sure, we too fell to their lies, and we supported them in their fight more than we should have.

But had we not done that, I suspect the USSR would have eaten the world. We’d all be Africa in the late 20th century (And there’s fodder for nightmares.)

Of course, there might be a path through that got us to where we’re now without the horrible losses, the psychological damage, the hampering of the 20th century.

Only I doubt we could find it, because it would require us to be perfect and have perfect knowledge. Until humans are angels, that will never happen. When humans are angels, we won’t need that.

It is silly — and facile — to say that we live in the best of all possible worlds. that’s not the way the world works.

To say “if we hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t have this good thing” is a fallacy. It’s the survivors bias. We survived, therefore this is the best of all worlds.

But here’s the thing, worse things could have happened. Far worse. It won’t take much thought to realize it.

And the path where nothing bad happened requires than we know then what we know now.

The Years Undone is a time travel novel. Where the characters are pulled forward, unwilling, and then miraculously find a way to travel back with the knowledge.

This is because, when it’s finished, it will be a work of fiction. In reality we’re not granted such things.

And therefore we don’t know how things will end. Human society is a series of experiments, surging forward and falling back, then learning, integrating and moving forward again. The same way a human lives and learns and grows.

It’s not ideal. It’s a consequence of what we are and how we work. And we can’t be other than we are.

So, what can we do? We can fight, with words, with deeds and, yes, sometimes with weapons for what seems to maximize the potential of humanity and our capacity for good: Individual liberty and small, responsive political units. (Partly because small political units means that there is less damage when things go wrong.)

We write, we fight, we think, we speak in favor of humanity and against the hatred of all that’s human. We write and fight and stand for liberty and its fruits: free creation, love and a lot of fat and healthy babies. Oh, and beauty, which frankly is an attribute of all of that.

And we go on. Where we are, with what we know. Sure, maybe in 20 years we’ll realize we were wrong, and our goals unworthy. But then we readjust and fight again.

Because it’s our only hope, the hope for the future. The hope for humanity.

Go. Forward only. The past is a dead country and those battles not worth fighting over.

In the future there’s hope and there’s glory. Oh, peril too, but if you don’t overcome peril, what is triumph worth it.

We are living in a very exhilarating moment where the horrifying darkness of the twentieth century mass everything and top down control is receding.

Stand in the light and fight for freedom.

196 thoughts on “The Years Undone”

  1. funny you should choose WWI. My father, and later I, administered a trust set up by my Great Grandfather for my great-aunts that had never married because the men of their class had died in the war. 40% of the gentry class of military age is the number that sticks in my head. 40%

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      1. It was indeed. And it tells us why, 20 years later, most Brits in the late ’30s were desperate to believe that “peace in our time” meant it wasn’t going to happen again.

        And despite recent Brit insanities, they showed during the Blitz that the British character might have been wounded in WWI, but it wasn’t destroyed. And FWIW, I still have hope for them if they can get around the current invasion issues and regain their senses.

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        1. There are some indicatioms that the Saxon is learning to hate, growing polite, and setting up copybook altars…

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  2. I was surprised the first time I read “Rilla of Ingleside” to realize that people, reasonably intelligent people, actually believed that “War to End All Wars” nonsense. Of course I came to it after more than 50 years (a century now) later, with plenty of wars and rumors of wars in between, and always looking ahead to WWIII (and long may we continue looking).

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    1. It’s only nonsense to those who didn’t live through it, I should think. The whole thing was so ghastly, so horrifying, so pointless, to literally everybody at every level of western society, that the very idea that anyone could even consider participating in another one was incomprehensible.

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      1. One notes that the Americans had plenty of pacifist sentiment before WWI. Perhaps the War Not To Be Discussed Here caused the same trauma here.

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        1. Quite possible, but also the general American mood was “don’t get involved in stuff that’s not our business”, which also was overwhelming (and highly annoying to the progs in government, who tried and somewhat succeeded in branding it as racist, or at least pro-Nazi) prior to Pearl Harbor.

          Indeed, it was recurring through all US history. The Spanish-American War was adventurism by the government, propped up by unrelenting propaganda, e.g. When wars didn’t come to our soil, the average American was against getting involved, and had to be socially bullied into accepting it.

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          1. Which is happening again with Ukraine. The anti-Ukraine propaganda bothers me, but so does the, “I stand with Ukraine!” (And if you don’t, in every particular, you’re a Russsian asset) variety.

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            1. It’s not our fight. The main reason we’re involved is that Ukraine was the money laundry for the elite class for a decade. (Well, and Biden stupidly telling Putin it was okay to take it.)

              It does have the positive benefit of getting Russia to expend blood and treasure in a limited theater. But, again: not our fight.

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              1. Yeah, and all the Biden bleating about how Trump and MAGA were committing treason ‘in a time of war’ when WE were never at war. Two countries on the other side of the world were at war, which had little to do with us until the Democrats went and stuck Uncle Sam’s dick in the hornet nest so they and their cronies could get rich off the graft. Hundreds of $billions in ‘Ukraine Aid’ have gone ‘missing’ and it’s not much of a mystery where they went.

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              2. There is the small advantage (lol) of keeping Russia penned into its own borders, versus its tendency to see lots of other nearby folks as its natural servants or provider of whatever it thinks it needs today.

                Again and again and again.

                Just for that, and for all the times Russia effed the USA, it is worth supporting Ukraine. I don’t much care if Ukraine is currently helmed by charlatans and/or shitbags. The Russians are worse, and are a proven threat to the well being of the USA, time and again. (and anyone else)

                And I will also point out that the current shitbags of Russia drove -Finland-, the most independent country on earth, into NATO. The Soviets did not do that. Putin’s merry little band accomplished that.

                Russia joining NATO, or a similar fallow-on org, is the solution to Russia’s invasion fears. Else they will slowly “empire” their way to the Bay of Biscay, one bite at a time, same old same old. Because China -cannot- take on that sort of org. Right now, the only thing keeping China out of Siberia is uncertainty of how many Russian nukes are still operational. Unless Russia gets out of the failed conquest business, that number will soon reach “low enough” to get their far east eaten by their neighbor.

                it is not in our interest to face either a united EuroCaliphate or a united EuroRussia. Lucky for us, some folks over there have seen it, and are taking steps. I suspect in 50 years we may be dealing with a Greater Poland. They are one of the few countries making the right moves.

                Russia lost the Ukraine war on day three. They have been trying to get us to declare them the victors ever since. No. Don’t do that stupid thing.

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                1. There’s a fear Trump is, perhaps inadvertently, justifying Putin (implying Ukraine started things; personally I think the remark they’re citing is typical Trump imprecision). Even those folks are admitting Zelensky screwed up his personal relations with Trump and now it’s coming back to haunt him. Doing campaign events with Harris (autographing shells in PA for example) was, we’ll, dumb.

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            2. Honestly, speaking as someone whose family was “deported” from the area in the late 1930s, there are days when I cheer for the body count.

              Hasn’t been 7 generations yet. Not nearly…

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        2. “The Late Unpleasantness” had some effects, yes. Several religious denominations became pacifistic because of being caught between both (all?) sides. Plus there was a large influx of Mennonites, Dunkards, and other Anabaptists when conscription became mandatory on the European mainland. (This was a topic in one of my grad classes. I don’t think I kept those books, though.)

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  3. One second per second, positive.

    Alright, with Einsteinian mechanics and sufficient speed or gravity you can tweak that… a bit. Sort of. But your own clock will still go…

    One second per second, positive.

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    2. I discovered this video last night, independent of this post, while looking for other music by Sabaton. It’s beautifully done, but an emotional kick in the gut, especially for those who have friends and family who’ve served or are serving.

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      3. I saw the video for “No Bullets Fly” and was hooked. 5 CDs later and over half of my trips to town (40 minutes each way) have a Sabaton soundtrack. (More to come sooner or later.)

        OTOH, it’s the only band where I copied the lyrics so I can understand them. Rather substandard hearing might possibly have something to do with it. OTOH, they don’t use sopranos, so that part of deafness isn’t a factor.

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        1. Joakim’s accent is a bit different, and it is in his singing. But he grew up with two languages in the home (his Mom is Czech) plus learning English. Though he sings clearer than a LOT of others out there.

          Par, Chris, and Tommy (who just left the band. New Majestica release the other day) sound far more Swedish. Hannes sounds a bit less so, but I wonder if Floor has curbed that some with her Dutch. I’ve only heard Thobbe say a bit but he sounds as Swedish as Par in that “Audition” video (Thobbe was the previous guitar player Tommy replaced)

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    1. I saw it, and had some of my students see it for extra credit if they were so inclined, plus a different teacher took his entire class. It’s fun. “Soldiers of Heaven” creeped the kids out. Those of us over a certain age also laughed during “Christmas Truce” and the youngsters didn’t get it. (The photobomb, and who is grumping off in a corner.)

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      1. I limit my videos because of bandwidth limitations, but “Soldier of Heaven” is moving. Mother Nature gets a vote, too.

        Have to find the individual videos for CT and SoH. Streaming the entire thing, not practical. I just watched the two above. Room got a bit dusty during “1916”. (I have lots more bandwidth if I use it between 2 and 8 AM. Didn’t used to be a morning person, but incentives rule.)

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  6. I recell reading a short that involved a fellow obtaining time travel to go back in time and prevent the wreck of Greater Germany in the late 20th. Wound up enabling some obscure failed painter instead.

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    2. The Red Alert video game series is built around this sort of thing, but using our timeline as the starting point. Einstein goes back in time and gets rid of Hitler. And now it’s the Soviets invading Europe instead.

      In the third game, a Soviet general travels back in time to get rid of Einstein (who has been developing super science weapons for the Allies), and ends up causing the rise of Japan. And also inadvertantly causes the Soviet’s nuclear arsenal to never be developed.

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  7. Wow! Thanks for that. It gave me one of those head slapping moments. Of course, it was internationalism not nationalism that led to WWI! How did I not know that? On the arts front, people look at Weimar, but they should look at Dali and Picasso, at the rejection of the celebration of the individual, at the final, bitter fruit of the Enlightenment that all crescendoed into that apocalyptic war. No more Hector, no more Thor, no more Siegfried, no more Roland, no more Henry V, just masses of faceless pawns sacrificed as machine gun fodder, not for victory but for some bureaucratic rung-climbing.

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  8. The Great War (is any war ever “great?”) has always fascinated me as a modern history geek, because even as country after country got dragged into the abyss by the international system of alliances and treaties, their populations were absolutely screaming in approval. There’s a famous picture of a certain Austrian-emigre painter and semi-homeless guy cheering in the crowd in Munich in August 1914. Even the British were all for it and overwhelmed the recruiting offices when Lord Kitchener called for volunteers. It was total insanity.

    Four years later, the best of a generation were destroyed, the spirit of Europe was totally enervated, and the way was open for said Austrian-emigre painter to carve his way to power. The First led in a straight line to the Second, led in a straight line to the Cold, and now leads in a straight line to a Europe that is unable and unwilling to defend itself.

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    1. I don’t remember if it was The Metatron or Lindybeige who had a video on how war was viewed.

      Prior to WWI, war was generally seen as an exciting thing and an opportunity for advancement. Mechanised warfare greatly increased the speed, sudden mess and arbitrariness of warfare.

      This was first seen in the American Civil War (hence Lee’s “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it”) but Europe, while shocked at the sheer violence of it, also seems to have collectively dismissed it as ‘those crazy barbaric Americans’ rather than really internalizing that this was what wars were now.

      So when WWI began, they all marched into it with dim memories of the Napoleonic wars, and this expectation that war with civilized nations would be this chivalric knightly thing.

      Leven that with a leadership who’s only real combat experience was against barbarian tribes, rather than peer competitors, and you have a recipe for a giant ugly mess.

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      1. My mom was a kind of ACW nut, and had a whole shelf of books about aspects of it. One of those was by an English historian (B L Hart, maybe?) on the strategies of US Grant. The historian noted that practically every technological element which turned the WWI battlefields into such a hellscape was present in the ACW. Trench warfare, aerial recon, rapid deployment through railways, gun technology very close to machinegun capability … all of that. The European powers looked back to Napoleonic war tactics and methods, totally ignoring how Grant and his generals had advanced on them in accordance with technological developments.

        I’ve always been ambivalent about a WWI setting for my own books. I dread writing about how the optimism of the 19th century all came crashing down in 1914-18.

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        1. People tend to forget that there was a significant episode of WW I-style trench warfare in the ACW, and that was the Siege of Petersburg. That was trench warfare for 8 or 9 months broken by occasional attacks, it even featured mining (which led to the massacre at the Battle of the Crater). But once those trench lines broke, it was only less than two weeks until Lee surrendered. That couldn’t happen in WW I…the armies were way too large, the lines much deeper, and the technology of death fifty years more advanced.

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            1. True. Both cases where the army could not maneuver. Vital though entrenching was — troops would refuse to march without carrying their shovels — there was still plenty of room for marching about.

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                1. Yep. And once the Union finally did crack Petersburg’s defenses, it only took a little over a week until Lee surrendered. They didn’t even try to defend Richmond because they couldn’t. Initially in WW I at least on the Western Front, the generals still thought they were going to do something like that…break the trench lines and pour out into open country. They didn’t think about what a defense would look like when the armies had five times the manpower and twenty times the lethality any of them had ever imagined.

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        2. Yeah, I remember reading the Wizard of Oz book that started with, essentially the last big meeting of the kings before WWI got going and being a bit freaked out by the unintended implications.

          I’m actually trying to think of any novel I’ve read that was set in WWI, and I just can’t think of any.

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          1. John Buchan’s best-known Richard Hannay novels are set before and during WWI. Well worth searching out.

            The Thirty-Nine Steps, Green antlers and Mr. Standfast.

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            1. I’ll have to give them a look. For whatever reason (probably the vast quantity of WWII pilot auto biographies in my Dad’s book pile) WWII aviation was what caught my eye for the longest time.

              But when I was doing a lot of VR flight sims, I ended up finding that WWI air combat was probably the best setting for VR.

              I’m not sure it is a setting I’d enjoy being in, though. WWII pilots, if something when wrong, you could usually bail out, but WWI, you usually just die.

              Porco Roso, interestingly enough, really captured that dichotomy. He loves the sky so much he cannot help but go back. At the same time, every one of his friends are dead and gone because they were pilots too. Only he remains. And though he doesn’t talk about it, it weighs on him, visibly.

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          3. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels explore the post-war period. Peter has what we would call PTSD from being buried alive and a character in one of the novels is so “shell-shocked,” he’s unable to work.

            Then there’s the detective agency composed of spinsters, implying there’s a shortage of marriageable men.

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              1. Yes. In Busman’s Honeymoon the Dowager Duchess tells Harriet how Peter was so damaged he couldn’t make even the simplest decision, but Bunter appeared and took over, managing his routine so that he didn’t have to make one until he was ready. And how Bunter reported the morning Peter told him to take away his usual breakfast and ordered something different with great excitement, because it meant his Lordship was starting to heal.

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                1. I believe it goes further back than that. As I recall he was caught in a trench collapse and Burner was the guy who dug him out of the cave-in. After that he told him if he ever needed anything to come find him, and after the war, Bunter apparently showed up looking for a job as a gentleman’s man.

                  I suspect Bunter was not undamaged either, and taking care of Peter was a way of dealing with his own demons.

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            1. I believe it was The Emerald City of Oz. Looks like it was published in July 1910, and the funeral of Edward VII was in May 1910, and it opens with a royal gathering that mimics the pimp and glamour of his funeral, minus the funeral part.

              The thing is, I read it right after reading The Guns of August, which opens with the funeral of Edward VII. So when I’m seeing their big royal pageant, I’m seeing the run up to WWI, even though that part hadn’t happened when the book was written.

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          5. The Singing Tree

            Ella of All-Of-A-Kind Family

            Rilla of Ingleside

            All of which were children’s books, all which were — unsurprisingly — about the home front — all of which featured a major character going MIA. Only Rilla had a battlefield fatality, though.

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        3. I in Wiki that Gatling guns played a small role in the ACW, and were private purchases. They got officially accepted in 1966.

          I’ll skip the full link “Gatling_gun”, see US and South America in the history section.

          When I subscribed to Home Shop Machinist, there were a couple of outfits that sold plans for a .22LR working model of the gun. I have neither the skill nor the patience to try, but it’s interesting. (I believe there are/were some commercially available versions around, still in .22LR. A shop in Mountain View, CA had one, until burglars got it.)

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          1. General Custer had, I think, 4 Gatling guns assigned to his command. He left them behind one day, because hauling them along to deal with a ‘minor Indian uprising’ would be too much trouble.

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            1. Yes. Wiki mentioned that as one of the “minor” goofs Custer made. I’m not familiar enough with the details of the battle to be sure, but I wonder if four Gatlings would have been sufficient for his survival.

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              2. I’ve walked the Little Big Horn battlefield. I’m not sure how much the Gatling’s would have helped. The terrain is uneven enough to give lots of protected areas of approach for individuals and small groups, but, in the location of the final stand, not a lot of protection for setting up gun emplacements (assuming they had time). Operating in the open from their carriages would probably have been less that optimal.

                After walking that ground, I came to the conclusion that all graduating classes of the military academies should be forced to do a walk through of the entire battlefield. See all of the solitary markers where soldiers bodies were found. The lessons: minor, Custer was an idiot; major, This is defeat. Avoid it.

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                1. White markers, with known names, for the Calvary soldiers. Red markers for the 40 defenders of the village.

                  The historical maps and markers throughout the roads and walking loops (the two we *walked) do a great job describing the battle field to even this non-historian.

                  What amazed me, even being surprised, was how fast the village defenders made it up the steep slopes from the village, surrounding, moving Custer’s command to their final stand. Custer lost despite having the surprise and the high ground.

                  (*) We did not get off the paths and walk the full battle field. One, they ask visitors to not do that because of the prairie. Two we had my small service dog with us. I did not realize that the high dry desert prairie has a lot, I mean a lot, of low ground cactus, with big spines. Not sure her boots would have kept her feet safe. She’s small, just not carry far, small. In addition the possibility of running into the prairie rattler was a non-starter, no matter how little most visitors see them. They are still seen. They are still there as a hazard. She was kept to the middle of the path.

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                2. “Custer was an idiot”

                  Egotistical idiot, at that. My husband visited Custer’s military, uh… fort? when he was a teen, and one of the things that is noted is that they had very specific standards for all the military buildings at that time.

                  So he just scaled it up a bit. Looked the same, but was something like a foot bigger in all dimensions inside.

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                  1. Custer not only got “268 7th Cavalry soldiers, civilians, and Indian scouts” killed at the battle, but 5 members of his family, including himself, 2 brothers, a nephew, and a BIL. All but Custer are still buried with the rest of the 7th Cavalry in the mass grave at the site above where Custer’s immediate command fell.

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                3. What the US Army didn’t realize was that they were giving their opponents a first-rate, hands-on education in US Army tactics and procedures.

                  The Indians also had them out-gunned, with modern repeating rifles instead of the clumsy single-shot rifles Custer’s men had.

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                  1. Only about 1/3 of Custer’s opponents had modern repeaters, a mix of Spencer carbines, Henry 1860s, and Winchester 1866s. (possibly a few 1873 Winchesters). 1/3 had single shots or muzzle loaders, and the remainder had traditional bows and lances. Various handguns here and there.

                    Note: a force of skilled bowman on horseback is going to eat the similar sized opponent with single-shots after the first volley. Decent horse-bowman can fire several shots per minute, up to 10 or so, accurately out to 100 yards. If they carry 20-30-40 arrows, they out-rate the sustained fire of pistol-caliber repeaters until you get to box-mag guns.

                    It is fairly easy to draw yet another arrow on horseback. It is a bit of a skill to reload a Winchester while moving. After shooting out the magazine, one is usually better off putting in one round at a time via the open action, versus stuffing the loading gate, unless there is a pause in the festivities.

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            3. At the point Custer left them behind so as to not constrain his mobility, Gatling guns were treated as artillery, on heavy horse drawn carriages with basically an artillery crew serving them.

              The postwar U.S. cavalry playbook leaned heavily towards using troopers as mounted infantry, getting to contact mounted but then dismounting and fighting on foot, actually kneeling or prone taking advantage of breechloading rifles and lever guns if present. They trained cavalry horses to lie down on command to serve as instant cover. Cavalry still trained and used mounted charges and pursuits, but fighting seriously was on foot.

              And his mission was a pursuit, chasing after tribes that had moved into the open plains.

              Given the mounted infantry stuff, as well as the absence of roads and such to make hauling multiple gun carriages around the plains any easier, it was fairly reasonable for Custer to bias towards a pursuit-to-contact loadout so the Indian tribes didn’t just outrun him.

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              1. Custer was chasing what may be the finest light cavalry Earth ever developed.

                In addition to the heavy carriges for the Gatlings, he would have needed the wagons of ammunition to feed them. One of the reasons Custer’s men were usign single-shots is the brain-rust of the US Army Ordiance Coprs did not want to manage the wagons needed to feed repeaters. Lincoln overrode them for the obviosu war-winning advantgage, but his successors went along with a swtich back to single-shots and “forcing the men to conserve ammunition”.

                (spit)

                Those arrogant assholes got a shitload of people killed with that idiocy. Note that in the age of freaking belt-fed machineguns, they still mandated -magazine cutoff switches- in infantry rifles to limit them to single-shots “to force the men to conserve ammunition”. Note that this was still being argued while Wermacht forces were moving around -machinegun- squads using infantry riflemen to protect the essential MG teams. -Finally- sanity prevailed and we adopted the M-1 Garand. (and oh what an unpleasant surprise to our foes was the M-1)

                Liked by 1 person

                1. It is pointed out on general conditions at the Little Big Horn battle field that a high number of that light cavalry defenders had newer multi shot rifles …

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              2. The 7th’s Gatlings were either .50 or 1 inch bore; I haven’t found a reliable source for which. If they were 1 inch, they were definitely “artillery” and would have been treated as such.

                Custer’s group was Cavalry; ride far, strike fast, maneuver swiftly. They wouldn’t have dragged artillery around unless they foresaw a specific need for it.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Both of those options are big heavy cannon-sized guns that are typically mounted on artillery caissons.

                  Gatlings are superior to grapeshot and cannister, but lack the options for explosive shell and honkin-big solid shot that an equivalent field gun or howitzer provides.

                  Custer was blessed with a bunch of prior events that favored bold impulsive charges at critical moments. His impulsive nature thus won the day repeatedly, earning promotions, Eventually, of course, one meets a setup that requires some forethought and recon, and well, luck is a fickle, fickle b-word.

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                  1. Being a cavalry officer who has never really absorbed the value of recon, one of the primary purposes of cavalry, kinda sets one up for an eventual big fall.

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          2. The first Gatling Gun was a cap-n-ball, using a tall “stick” magazine of loaded barrel stubs that were pressed against the breech end of the rotating barrels. They were effectively very stout steel cartridges.

            I have fired a modern reproduction of this gun. It is easily capable of firing more tha 4-5 shots per second. With a crew to swap the magazines, you can sustain 200 to 300+ rounds /minute pretty much until crew or ammunition exhasution.

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          4. The commercial versions were removed from sale when ATF started interpreting them as actual machine guns, even though all they were was a frame for a pair of Ruger 10/22s, a cam that fit in the trigger guard to pull the semi auto trigger, and a crank. Fit the Rugers with an after-market 25 round magazine, and voila.

            I also saw one scaled up for the Ruger Mini-30, but that one wasn’t commercial.

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            1. The one I saw (before it got stolen–I wasn’t there, don’t have it, never touched it) was a true model of a Gatling gun. 6 (?) barrels, multiple stick magazines, and so on.

              Years ago, I read articles on scale models (working, NFA) of machine guns. One was a Browning 30, using .22 rimfire in a cloth belt, while the other was a half scale version of an M2. That one used 5.56NATO ammunition. I think they were commercial, doubt many were sold.

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          5. Mechanically hand-cranked gatlings are -not- “full auto” thus are not restricted under the National Firearms Act. One can buy them like any normal firearm, presuming one has a rather large budget for toys. There is a current manufacturer, Tippmann Ordinance, of a 9mm Gatling that that takes the big 33-round Glock magazines.

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            1. Mechanically hand-cranked gatlings are -not- “full auto” thus are not restricted under the National Firearms Act.

              You’re right. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the government actually followed its’ own rules consistently.

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        4. And David Weber uses all of it in the Safehold series, the near WWI tech with echoes of Civil War battles and generals.

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        5. I’ve long maintained that the War Between the States was at once the last war of the 18th century and the first aar of the 20th. The old Dover Encyclopedia of Battles, which I have somewhere around here, lists more engagements for tWBtS than for WWI, and another Dover book, which I no longer have, states that the armies at Gettysburg together fired more rounds of shot, shell, and cannister than all of the armies in all of the battles that Napoleon ever fought.

          Grant is criminally underappreciated by the populace, and especially by high school history.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. The Ron Chernow biography is very good, and pretty much underscores that all of his failures in life seem to have been from trusting people too easily. (His autobiography came about because he’d been scammed out of his life savings, and he was dying of throat cancer and wanted to leave his family with something. Mark Twain even had to keep him from signing a bad publishing contract, instead granting him one that would leave his family solvent.)

            Randomly, the picture they used for the cover made me regret that Robin Williams didn’t live long enough to star as Grant in a movie. He was better at drama than you’d think.

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        6. British Army tactical thinking around war between states in the run up to WWI was centered on Stonewall Jackson in the Valley. Their experience was mostly in frontier war and their war with the Boers only cemented their canonization of Jackson and to a lesser extent Lee. They discounted the more industrial war of Grant and Sherman.

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          1. Kipling had quite a few things to say about the shortcomings of the British Army during the Boer War. 😏

            The Lesson
            1899-1902

            (Boer War)

            Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
            We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.


            Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,

            But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again,

            Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite.

            We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right ! .

            https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/lesson.html

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        7. The Union hired Hessian mercenaries. There were also “observers” from various Germanic polities, specifically there to check out the military use of various new technologies.

          Some of what they learned was implemented in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but the rest was ignored, as the generals (who were mostly elderly and set in their ways) weren’t in a hurry to adopt new technologies and tactics.

          “Fix bayonets and charge emplaced machine guns” was the norm for WWI until they started running short of troops.

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          1. One German general was particularly interested in the use of trains. He had been making plans for their use.

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      2. They certainly never expected to spend 3 years huddled in muddy, shitty trenches while artillery shells pounded down on their heads.

        Then they expected World War 2 to be more of the same, not realizing that Guderian, Rommel, Goring and Yamamoto had changed the entire landscape of war.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Which is ironically funny, because both Guderian and Rommel credited Fuller and Lidell-Hart as inspirations….. who were both British.

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          1. I don’t think it’s fair to say the British Army expected to refight WWI. The French did, that’s what the Maginot Line was after all, but the British had built a motorized army designed for open warfare. they wanted to avoid the trenches. that’s also what was behind the bomber force in the RAF. Anything to avoid the trenches.

            Liddell-Hart’s influence is probably overstated. Fuller, probably understated. Wavell gets lost, but he probably had more to do with it than most. he was among the most progressive officers in the army but was cursed to serve in a series of hopeless campaigns during the war.

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            1. You can see the static versus mobile in the evolution of the Greek style Phalanx to the more open, maneuverable, and more adaptable Roman Legion formations.

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            2. One other guy who’s forgotten in that list is Mikhail Tukhachevsky. His ideas for the Red Army were every bit as forward-thinking as Fuller or Guderian but he had the misfortune to run up against a couple of Uncle Joe’s old buddies from the Russian Civil War in Timoshenko and Budyonny. They started buzzing in Stalin’s ear, and next thing you know, the Marshal got his nine-gram lead pension, and the theory of deep operations got put on the back burner for a few years until Zhukov and Vasilievsky brought them back.

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      3. Europe has a warning. There was a war that doesn’t get mentioned much in history classes in the late nineteenth century between France and Germany. One of my history teachers did mention it, and described it as the Germans arrived, set up their machine guns, and slaughtered the French army.

        i can’t vouch for the accuracy of that description. But while the scale was smaller than WWI, that brief war should have sounded an alarm in European military staffs.

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        1. And the lesson the French took from that loss was they needed increased elan, so as to charge the Germans more enthusiastically.

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        2. Franco-Prussian war. We’re talking about Horne below and I can recommend his The Fall of Paris. Mostly about the commune but it does cover the war.

          one thing, the Prussians didn’t have machine guns, the French did, the mitrailleuse in typical French fashion it was kept so secret that no one knew how to use them. French had better rifles too. Prussians made fewer mistakes and trapped two French armies, including the Emperor and that was that.

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        3. The real problem with that war was that the Germans thought they could replay it.

          Notice it was after ACW. Hence, there was some reason to believe that its lessons were not universally applicable. (It’s just that they were to WWI.)

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  10. The world of World War One and the dawning 20th century was one of increasing concentration of resources, and standardization of resources and manufacturing and, really, all production.

    And there were many sensible people who thought that would make war impossible. See Rudyard Kipling:

    The Peace Of Dives1903

    “Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings?
    “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings,
    “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred,
    “Every masked and midnight word,
    “And the nations break their fast upon these things.

    “So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space,
    “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
    “Where the anxious traders know
    “Each is surety for his foe,
    “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.

    “Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my Wit,
    “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit.
    “But behold all Earth is laid
    “In the Peace which I have made,
    “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”

    https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/peace_of_dives.html

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    1. Dr. Gatling thought his primitive machine gun would make war so horrific, everybody would give it up.

      Today’s wars are fought with several variants of the Doctor’s invention: the M-134 Minigun, M-61 20mm Vulcan cannon, GAU-8 30mm cannon, GAU-19 .50 BMG chain gun…

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Wasn’t that also what Alfred Nobel thought about his advanced explosives? And what our nuclear physicists told themselves in the run-up to our dropping nukes on Japan? (At least that’s what I’ve been told that they told themselves.) Ha!

        Well, they were *almost* right about nuclear bombs…it didn’t stop warfare, but we did finally invent a weapon so terrible that nobody dares to use it. That’s good enough, I guess; MAD does seem to have kept a lid on things over the past ~80 years.

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        1. Nuclear weapons -will- be used whenever

          someone believes they can get away with it,

          they calculate “acceptable losses”

          they do not care what happens after as long as they get to hit first,

          they are insane and relish the consequences in a belief it advances some other desireable event.

          Note that -any- country with a power-plant sized reactor and a decent industrial base is a nuclear power in six months if they put major effort into it. The basic device is that easy to make once you know the initial engineering tricks, all of which are published widely.

          South Africa had an small nuclear arsenal before the collapse of the prior regime.

            We are -way- overdue.

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            1. The Reader believes that one of the outcomes of Trump’s diplomacy with regard to Ukraine will be that Poland decides to become a member of the nuclear club. Eastern Europe is perfectly capable of handling Russia on a conventional basis. The Reader doubts they want to bet Warsaw on the idea that none of Russia’s nukes work.

              As an aside, both Israel and Taiwan aided South Africa in their development of nuclear weapons.

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            2. I keep saying I expect Iran’s first nuclear test to be on Tel Aviv or Riyadh. Or possibly Paris or Frankfurt, on the, “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up,” principle.

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              1. NYC, it is the heart of their evil Idol. Note I said their evil Idol, what they fight against. It is also a straw dog image for them. A focal point of their hate. In truth they are fighting against reality and losing power. Iran is nothing more than a collection of little slave masters who want to rule the world in their own image. They will do it in the name of heaven, because their faith in their own religion is so weak it can not stand up against the other religions, so the other religions must go. If they truly had faith they wouldn’t care what others do or said. Their actions speak louder than their false pious words.

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                1. Agree they’d love to hit NYC (or possibly DC), but question the logistics. I believe convincing the world that nukes should be delivered by missile has helped a bunch. But if Tehran can deliver one that works via container ship or as air cargo, we’re screwed.

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                  1. I was posted to Boston ten days after 9/11 to cover the airline’s station there. (Our on-site mechanic got called up.). Got the willies looking at Boston harbor and postulating a container-borne device cooking off.

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                  2. If you do not want the plane back, any number of air-cargo configured aircraft can deliver a single-stage nuke. One can reconfigure a passenger plane to haul cargo.

                    The biggest portable multi-stage thermonuke weapons anyone ever produced will fit a 747 Cargo.

                    A cargo -ship- can deliver a gigantic non-portable “Tzar Bomba” multistage weapon..

                    The Iranians have enriched uranium (admitted) at about 60% 235. That is easily weaponized, if a bit wasteful/heavy. They probably built the gun-type warheads before they had the fuel. Too easy to make.

                    Since Tehran also has plutonium producing reactors, they can make implosion weapons from reworked core plutonium.

                    They need another 20% refinement to get to efficient thermonuke secondaries. But if they are willing to ship them surface, they probably have a deliverable right now.

                    The dilemma for Iran is that the IDFAF can deliver their not-admitted nuclear weapons in sufficient quantity to reduce Iran’s major cities and bunker complexes to a largish Trinitite parking lot with some scenic craters. And if they manage to annoy the USA sufficiently, we can reduce their whole nation to scattered radioactive ash.

                    There are still enough Iranians, in positions of power, who want to survive to prevent Mullah stupidity. If we (or someone) nudge the sane into cleaning out the mullahs from any positions of power, we defuse the most likely nuclear conflict. If the mullahs get froggy before that happens, I would not want to live downwind of Iran. Corium fallout will ruin your whole day.

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                2. ummm….. their faith is pretty strong. It’s notnthat Islam can’t survive exposure to other religions, it’s that it orders they be destroyed by whatever means available.

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              2. This, tbh. And if it ever does happen, I hope we have the intestinal fortitude and ability to make Iran a stark warning to future generations.

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          1. From my reading the general lesson the UK public took from The Great War was basically “should have stayed clear of it”.

            Which makes the 1930s gymnastics to try and avoid round two of the greater European civil war more understandable, as well as the hostility directed towards Churchill when he was saying the next round was inevitable.

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    3. Just finished Alastair Horne’s The Price of Glory, which is his history of Verdun. It’s part of a trilogy of French/German history, the first volume being, The Commune and the third, To Lose A Battle, which cover the Franco-Prussian War and the Battle of France in WWII respectively.

      Horne is a Brit and all three volumes are taken from the viewpoint of a mildly left, “rational,” Brit who sees it all from that slightly detached British viewpoint. Definitely worth the read.

      But the story of Verdun ranges from comedy (Petain’s aide having to hunt him down to a Paris hotel, where he finds two sets of shoes outside the general’s door) to the utterly horrible (multiple explosions in confined spaces and the absolutely French tendency to try and solve problems by throwing more bodies at them). And yes, he brings that, “humans as expendable widgets,” theme to awful life, as it was done by French and German alike.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I just finished the audiobook version last week! Excellent history, and it really shows the utter stupidity of both the French and German commands. It definitely doesn’t do anything to dispel the classic “lions led by donkeys” trope of WW I.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. I recommend Horne’s A Savage War of Peace about Algeria to round it out. That was the end of the old France, even more than WWII.

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        1. I have it, but got bogged by depression early on. The French just don’t make good historical decisions.

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      3. I’ve read “To Lose a Battle”. It’s an enjoyable read. But it gets disheartening when – every single time when the French can make a good choice or shoot themselves in the foot – they shoot themselves in the foot.

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    4. I’m currently reading The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien, and right now I’m in the middle of the verse he wrote during WWI. It’s fascinating to see glimmers of the Legendarium here and there, yet there’s also a shadow stretching over everything, as if his subconscious were somehow anticipating the horrors of the decades to come, but the conscious mind could only glimpse hints.

      BTW, Joseph T. Major’s first indie novel, A Man and a Plane, is an alternate history in which the Red Baron survives due to a random chance event which keeps him from taking the flight in which he was killed. In that world, he takes a prominent role in postwar aeronautics and politics, stabilizing the Weimar Republic at a critical moment and making sure a certain failed painter never gets his hands on the levers of power.

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    5. It is silly — and facile — to say that we live in the best of all possible worlds. that’s not the way the world works.

      To say “if we hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t have this good thing” is a fallacy. It’s the survivors bias. We survived, therefore this is the best of all worlds.

      I agree, yet I don’t. You took a look at this with that excellent and weirdly titled (“Yellow Pickle”?) John Lennon short story.

      I think survivors bias is legitimate. It may lead one astray as one’s own opinion about why one survived may very well be wrong (luck, St. Christopher’s medal, special insight, etc…), but it is much the same as “the future belongs to those who show up”, which is also silly and facile, but has truth in it.

      Some folks feel/think/believe that horrors in the past prove that time travel is not possible. The reverse is also _possible_: Our history has been rewritten/reexperienced any number of times and this timeline really is the best anyone could make happen. It’s rather depressing (really? A million years between fire and industrialization?), but there is no way to disprove it (yet).

      Ultimately, I don’t think it matters. Best world or not, it’s the one we must deal with.

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    6. I have always thought that WW1’s horrors were the dividing line when the “smart” people realized that just because we CAN build something maybe we should not have …

      industrial sized warfare with artillery, automatic weapons, chemical warfare … the ability to kill at such a long distance had never before been experienced …

      the “smart” people then came up with the Geneva Convention to try and put that Genie back in the bottle …

      of course the “smart” people today are again trying to find a way to violate the spirit if not the letter of Geneva (see COVID and probably others ways) …

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    7. At the risk of sounding like what Devon would call a Spergdunker, I would argue that the top down widget mentality existed *before* WW1, and it’s implementation was an attempt by the old aristocratic elites to return to, or at least retain something not unlike, the old feudalist model.

      I would also say that, as you also note along the way, the Soviets wouldn’t have gotten half as far as they did, without our sponsorship. They would’ve crashed sooner. Now, whether the world that resulted would’ve been a better one? We’ll never know.

      All of that having been said, I agree with the broad strokes of what you say here.

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    9. So apparently a bunch of idiots on Reddit are demanding to unleash the 1789 French Revolution on MAGA.

      Somehow, I do nto think they have any familiarity with how that went, and who did what to whom. (Those that are not merely ignorantly programmed bots)

      A quick check of the balance of forces shows “adverse in the extreme”, for them.

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      1. A core belief on the Left is that the mass of the population is with them, or would be if they understood the Left. To disprove that basically invalidates everything that the Left believes.

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        1. Yep, the Left believes that “Evil Masterminds” (Like Trump) prevent the People from supporting the Left.

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          1. Well, of course! They can only see their enemies as twisted reflections of themselves, they have ‘Good Masterminds’ telling them what to think, so obviously…

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        2. Which is why they will never believe it, no matter how conclusively you prove it with evidence and logic. Democrats are in deep denial of all the polls that show overwhelming support for closing the border, deporting illegal aliens and NOT giving them ‘free’ money, digging the rot out of the government and doing something about election fraud.

          How can a majority of Americans be ‘outside the mainstream’ according to Democrats?

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        4. Any number of the idiots believe “We will just ban your guns, and jail or kill any who oppose.” Yet they themselves do not plan to comply.

          Those folks who just smile at you like you were some sort of retarded nincompoops? Not a good sign. Interpret as “FAFO”. It is like “Bless your hearts” without the warning.

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          1. Yeah, a tiny minority suffering from unreasoning gun-hate is going to take 600 million guns from 180 million cranky curmudgeons by force. FAFO? More like 3S. :-o

            As the Keldara say, “And here we have shovels.”

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            1. Thinking too small. Signs at entrances to a few ranches “Private Property. We have bulldozers and we know how to use them”.

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      3. Yeah, a little lacking in historical awareness when the side with the majority of the elites wants to unleash a “behead all the elites, and when we run out of them, everyone else” revolution because one guy is rich.

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        1. Time and again, the American pseudo-Marxist misses the essential point: College folk are Bourgeois, not Proletariat. Thus they are enemy to be used and exterminated by their class foes, the workers.

          LOL!

          Liked by 1 person

          1. This ties nicely back to CBS Margaret and her “free speech Nazis” – when teaching the received Marxian Truth, teaching any actual historical events leads to inevitable “wait, if that happened, what the heck…” questions, so they obviously leave out everything but the Received Truth That’s On The Test.

            This is why these educated nowhere-near-working-class dolts are in favor of “French Revolution Two” when they would be a prime target of same, and why Margaret feels free to spout one of those obviously false Received Truths (she got that test question correct, darn it!) on national teevee.

            When all you ever got is the Cliffs Notes version you don’t know how stupid you sound.

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            1. Someone posted an amusing, “Violence never settled anything,” meme, where the speaker opens a history book.

              “Uh-oh. Uh-oh. No. No, no, no, no… “

              Liked by 1 person

      5. I saw someone say that the left is under the illusion that the right is already maximally escalated. I’m not sure I entirely agree but it explains some of their behavior.

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        1. That is because Leftroids go straight to Maximal Escalation at the slightest hint of disagreement. They can’t imagine anybody can have the least vestige of self-control. Therefore, the fact that we haven’t killed them all and pissed on their mangled corpses means that we’re too weak to ever do it.

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          1. What they are going to find, is a whole bunch of people who know how to kill quietly. Discreetly.

            Go to the Camp Perry National Rifle Matches. Watch hundreds of folks hitting a 12 inch 10 ring at 600 yards. Contemplate the implications.

            Now, visualize ten million people with pocket pistols in small caliber. The report of a .22 can be masked by typical urban traffic noise. Contemplate the implications.

            No riot. No fuss. Just “shit happens” over and over again. Facelessly. Not mass terror. Selective, individual, personal terror.

            Crazies, please, step back from the Abyss. Its -right there- in front of you.

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    11. The theme to “go forward” is very personal to me. While this discussion is about people, nations, government and freedom – there is also the individual one person perspective.

      The wonderful Mrs. passed away on 02/08 and just short of two weeks now I am dealing with massive change and a new life. The call to look forward is one I must listen to and have been able to embrace. The ‘past’ will be there for a foundation but tomorrow is where I am going and thus must prepare for that. “We” or the collective population also have a chance today to look forward and to build on the new opportunities being presented and while not forgetting the past, work for the future. Thanks for a wonderful article.

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      1. “The wonderful Mrs. passed away on 02/08“

        –

        My condolences.

        Mom still takes one day at a time. Anniversary of dad’s death is March 25th. Sixteen years ago.

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    13. I stopped my academic research at 1933, so I would NOT have to mess with what came after WWI, aside from technology and doctrine. Fast forward to 2012, and I discovered that I was having to read all kinds of (depressing) stuff about interwar Central Europe, then about the dreadful absence of ept among the Austro-Hungarian high command. I know I heard the Author laughing at me. I managed to write a hopeful story even so, but it took a lot of work and some judicious fiddling with history. (Alt-history, but with references. I’m Odd.)

      One area that really took a beating was Christianity. Between the Russian Revolution/civil war (went from 20% of Christians lived in the Russian Empire to less than 2%, if the numbers are right), the loss of trust in the institutional state churches, and the impulse to toss tradition because nothing was worth keeping and “G-d was dead.” (Nietzsche was right about what would replace G-d in the human mind and heart. Nothing good.)

      I wonder if, looking back, it will be seen as the cultural break point along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War for Central Europe. Both ripple in ways that I’d never thought about, since the US skipped the Thirty Years’ War and had a “good” WWI (as in lost no land and far fewer men in proportion to the overall population).

      Liked by 1 person

    14. people, reasonably intelligent people, actually believed that “War to End All Wars” nonsense.

      And Wilhelm II, who started the war, died of old age, in comfort, in a castle in Holland in 1941.

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      1. Well, not exactly…..

        A Death-Bed

        1918

        “This is the State above the Law.The State exists for the State alone.”[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,And an answering lump by the collar-bone.],Some die shouting in gas or fire;Some die silent, by shell and shot.Some die desperate, caught on the wire;Some die suddenly. This will not.

        “Regis suprema voluntas Lex”[It will follow the regular course of–throats.]Some die pinned by the broken decks,Some die sobbing between the boats.Some die eloquent, pressed to deathBy the sliding trench, as their friends can hear.Some die wholly in half a breath.Some–give trouble for half a year.

        “There is neither Evil nor Good in lifeExcept as the needs of the State ordain.”[Since it is rather too late for the knife,All we can do is to mask the pain.]Some die saintly in faith and hope–One died thus in a prison-yard–Some die broken by rape or the rope;Some die easily. This dies hard.

        “I will dash to pieces who bar my way.Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!”[Let him write what he wishes to say.It tires him out if he tries to speak.]Some die quietly. Some aboundIn loud self-pity. Others spreadBad morale through the cots around…This is a type that is better dead.

        “The war was forced on me by my foes.All that I sought was the right to live.”[Don’t be afraid of a triple dose;The pain will neutralize all we give.Here are the needles. See that he diesWhile the effects of the drug endure….What is the question he asks with his eyes?– Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]

        https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/death_bed.html

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        1. Kaiser Friedrich, father of Wilhelm II, died of throat cancer in 1888. He was already terminally ill and rendered voiceless when he took the throne, and reigned just 99 days. Kipling seems to have been anticipating, likely quite eagerly, that the awful fate of the father would be visited upon the son. As poetic license goes, it barely moves the needle.

          Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

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    15. FWIW, the precipitating cause of WWI was nationalism—Serbian nationalism, specifically. A Serb nationalist shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife in Sarajevo. The A-Hs wanted revenge on Serbia (which, before it became “gallant little Servia” was about as popular in Europe as Gadaffi’s Libya was in the 1980s in the US, and for similar reasons), the Serbs screamed for help to Russia, which wanted “warm water ports” and wanted to be a big protector to the Slavic peoples (insert bitter Polish, Ukrainian and Czech laughter here) and that threw the perfume into the soup. “Internationalist” feeling was confined to left-wing intellectuals, who confidently expected “the workers” they so idealized to shoot their upper-class officers and run across no-mans-land to embrace their worker brothers on the other side. The fact that this never did happen did a lot to discredit classical socialism. Had an extremely virulent form of socialism not seized power in Russia, socialism would be classified with free silver and other failed nostrums of the past.

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      1. The “South Slavs” were there basically because in the 400s to 500s they banged up against the Roman frontier after invading southward across the Danube – They are described in Procopius. The issue is they live in what became the boundary between first the Eastern Romans and the great migration barbarians that killed the Western Empire, and then the Caliphate and the Europeans, so they got run through one way or the other for a thousand years, leaving a patchwork of borders and a millennia of grievances.

        The Black Hand was just the latest instance of “some damn thing in the Balkans”.

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    16. World War I/The Great War was a disaster that was years in the making. At the very least from the formation of Germany as a nation-too small to be a large country, too large to be a small country, and all of the easy colonial territory being taken.

      Throw in the dying feudalistic nations of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Japan in the East, the French never forgiving Prussia for their fuckups during the Franco-Prussian War, Britain trying to figure out what next, the United States starting to rise, the general failure of offering any viable alternative to the seductive siren songs of socialism and communism…

      The Great War was always going to be a disaster. Weapons technology on the defensive had grown far too capable, there were few viable ways on land to generate a successful offensive. It was the first time that truly peer European powers had fought with the weapons that let small armies defeat hordes of barbarians. Everybody thought it was going to be just the Napoleonic Wars writ large and were terribly wrong.

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      1. I’d argue that WWI started due to the dying Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires both losing their grip at the same time on their common interface region, combined with the efforts to prevent European Wars by the powers establishing webs of interlocking alliances and treaties. Absent either there would have been no start to general war.

        But once it got going, the industrialization effects meant it would grind down to the bitter end of the available military age male population, so the only way to “win” was not to play.

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    17. I don’t know that WWI really changed a ton _in the US_, although Wilson changed things a lot in the US, before we even got into it.

      I’d say the ACW and WWII were more formative/fracturing for the US.

      I mean, most of the WWI fiction in the US was stuff about biplane aviation is cool. There were whole magazines of that stuff, for years and years, whereas the literary sads stuff was an outlier of fiction.

      (Air Stories, Dare-Devil Aces, and Wings. Probably some others. Some included SF elements, as a sort of alternate history/secret weapon version of WWI, and then there were future war stories too.)

      Obviously this might feel different in states or towns that had bigger casualty counts. Dayton didn’t lose a ton of people in either WWI or the Spanish flu, so there wasn’t any reason to feel like everything was different now.

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      1. I’d agree that the ACW and WWII radically changed things in the US much more than WWI. Perhaps the literary scene rather theatrically took on a “woe-is-us” posture of war-weariness. But there was a huge interest in aviation stories – I had a couple of vintage magazines with stories along that line.

        I believe that a lot of the public felt that we had gotten sucked into a European war which was really not much of our business, and fooled by a lot of atrocity stories. On the other hand, a lot of bad feeling also attached to German Americans in the 1920s, which was when a lot of German-language publications and institutions switched over to English. And a lot of German-Americans purposefully anglicized their surnames.

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        1. To my reading a lot of the British Empire’s general population also thought they’d been sucked into, and bled for, a continental fight that was not really the business of the maritime British Empire. More so outside the upper classes.

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          1. Postwar, that is. Once the wartime propaganda stopped.

            I have not read any British postwar apologia going into “Of course we had to support France, here are the reasons why…”

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    18. Btw, it turns out that the Oliver half of Josh and Olly (of the JOLLY and Englishman in South Korea channels) is the great-grandson of an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Norman Kendal.

      To stay on topic, the guy was in the Cheshire Regiment in WWI and was wounded at the Battle of the Somme.

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    19. (Fairly good reply about the postwar view of the intertwined upper classes in the U.S. and Britain vs everyone else on what all that blood was shed for, if I do say so myself, lost to the WP backspace thing. WPDE.)

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    20. Speaking of “years undone”, of late I have been haunted by the possibility that I have NEVER actually worked a “real job” by conservative definition and have basically wasted my entire adult life in the two most disreputable professions on the planet: journalism (2 weekly papers and 1 daily) and government work (state agency). I loved what I did when I was doing it, and I never had an “agenda” or narrative to push; I just wanted to hear people tell their stories and find out why they did what they did, and where their ideas came from. I never had any desire to work for a big city paper or national news outlet. And yet now I feel like I was wrong to ever have considered journalism as a career and was just suckered into propping up a corrupt system. I took a state job 18 years ago because it paid well, had good benefits and because the agency that hired me seemed to be performing a worthy function (reviewing proposed regulations to ensure they are within statutory authority and in the public interest.) I’m too close to retirement to change things up now, and we made too many bad decisions that ran up a bunch of debt for me to quit and try to find find a “real” job now. Maybe it’s just an exaggerated sense of guilt by association but it is what it is, I guess.

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      1. Despite what a bunch of people in those professions have made of them, there’s nothing intrinsically immoral or illegal about either of those professions.

        Which means there’s nothing wrong with the mere fact of having practiced them

        As for how you’ve conducted yourself in them, that’s a matter for your own conscience.

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      2. Regard yourself as a survivor, instead. I have a degree in Journalism (because the university tucked technical writing into J-school and then made me take magazine layout, news reporting, etc) and while I had a few “real” jobs after graduation I did 32 years in the Federal civil service. Despite the bad press, the 20% of folks who quietly do their jobs are carrying the rest and, just incidentally, keeping at least some of the system working on its actual duties. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t let the loudmouths (a lot of them wouldn’t last six months doing your work) get you down.

        And BTW, note Musk is pointing this out, too.

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      3. It was only leftist corruption that brought those professions into disrepute; they’re both absolutely necessary and can be done honorably. Heck, if your job is/was to make sure regulations are within statutory authority and in the public interest, you can do the hipster thing and say you were doing the DOGE thing *before* it was cool.

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        1. Despite my repeatedly expressed disdain for its more recent product, there was nothing wrong with j-skool back in the ancient times of mid-last-century. It was overtaken and corrupted from within in the same long march through the institutions that corrupted the rest of academe, into its now-sorry state of simple political indoctrination.

          Nothing wrong with graduating from journalism school back when they taught journalism.

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    21. I’ve had second thoughts about this overnight. I don’t think that WWI matters _at all_, now. There are influences, no doubt, but it was too long ago. Over a hundred years. That is well beyond living memory – let alone memory of anyone making decisions.

      I’m not even sure that WWII matters. Other than “US nuked Japan” and “there was this Hitler dude”, it doesn’t directly influence anyone.

      While I despise their theory for philosophical reasons, the Wave people (The Fourth Wave is the current book) take on this issue with their focus on generations. Aside from a few very old senators, no one in a policy position remembers WWII, let alone WWI. Any lessons learned are long since lost.

      Much to my chagrin, “institutional knowledge” is not actually a thing. For example (especially for BGE), see option trading and interest rates. Many, many influential people in the trading world were around the last time we had high interest rates (1970s/80s), yet OMG! rho is non-zero! The world is ending due to the novelty of real interest. WWI was long before 1980.

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      1. I look at the larger cultural picture – why is X so different now than in [date]? Why did Europe take such a different path in religion than the US? Why did immigration laws change so drastically after WWII? That sort of thing. In those cases, WWI and then WWII really do matter, and have downstream effects that can be traced.

        *Shrug* YMMV.

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    22. I think the biggest change of the world wars was how many monarchies fell. In 1910, most of humanity lived in a powerful hereditary monarchy. All of Europe save Britain (which had been dominated by Parliament since the English Civil Wars) and France (which finally got rid of the monarchy in 1848). Russia, China, Japan. All monarchies. Eastern Europe – the part of Europe Napoleon didn’t conquer – still had serfdom! The internecine war of Victoria’s grandchildren destroyed all that. By 1960, all the monarchies were gone. Overthrown or reduced to figurehead status. Serfdom was finally gone. Only then could the modern world emerge.

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      1. The change is smaller than you think. by the 1960s most of the “good families” were in charge again, a lot of them now claiming to be communists. I think you have to grow up in Europe to SEE that.

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