Continuing in the National WWI Museum...
I can’t guess what percentage of people consider the cause of WWI to be the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary) on June 28, 1914. But that explanation, with all of its obvious political nuances, isn’t good enough. A much broader, and more accurate, explanation would be simply that almost all the major players in the world wanted to go to war. Ferdinand didn’t need to die, anybody could have died and the European countries would still have lost their tops. There had been a decade of patriotic pumping, empire expanding and over-terrified military build-ups. Like Charlie and Dee from “Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” these countries (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungry, Japan, etc.) were taking handfuls of steroids and washing them down with barrels of alcohol. By mid-1914, testosterone (metaphor continued: an unhealthy mix of nationalism and fear) had been loaded into a cannon three times over. Countries were flexing and crying at the same time; talking in barely contained, quivering whispers because letting out a normal voice would let out a roaring string of profanities that would embarrass Christian Bale.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was no more the cause of the First World War than the starting gun is the reason Usain Bolt can run 200 meters in the time it takes you to pick out a box of Pop-Tarts.
Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published some fifty years prior, giving politicos just enough time to skim the work and corrupt Darwin’s point as a theory on human society, not just biology. It has since become the default argument for capitalism: survival of the fittest. Competition breeds excellence, etc. On an international scale, this meant that it became time for the most efficient nations to devour the weaker ones. War, as a concept, was not a crime anymore, but rather a solution. The real crime, it was said, was to not unite all humanity under one, true, banner of righteousness. To the British, Germans and others, the world had become too small, the resources too few and so war became a cleansing.
Serbian nationalists assassinate attacked Ferdinand and that was wrong. Austria-Hungry made impossible demands for peace on the Kingdom of Serbia and that was wrong. Russia moved to protect its cultural brethren, even though the conflict was still considered domestic…and Russia was in the wrong. Germany should not have declared war on Russia and so on. Basically, only the trigger man Gavrilo Princip can be blamed for his actions; everybody else should be blamed for their reactions.
Over the coarse of the conflict, 34 countries officially declared war (often against multiple enemies) and almost all within a six-week period—which was about how long that Geico Caveman show was on the air. The museum, which various graphs and charts chronicles the major declarations but regrettably leaves out the smaller players, such as Greece declaring war on Bulgaria and Turkey declaring war on Romania.
The layout of the museum is a giant circle, so the walk is organized but area is also wide. While Matt and myself both started in 1914, we were drawn to different displays. I didn’t know what he saw at first but I took good note of the swords and guns. The size of the rifles made me wonder if the armies expected to be fighting a battalion of T-Rexes. Seriously bad ass guns.
I then found Matt at the propaganda posters and was thankful he wasn’t so convinced by them that he planned on going to war. WWI was definitely the first major conflict to make use of the media and the posters (from several countries) show a level of government intimidation unique not for its efforts but for the lack of subtlety. “What’s your excuse?” demands one poster, willing to publicly de-pant any able-bodied man.
Beyond the posters, Matt and I found a life-size recreation of a trench, complete with a couple of dummy soldiers (no offense?) playing cards. The trench had wood siding and planks put down for a makeshift floor.
-Kind of looks like a tree house, I said.
-A tree house?
-Well, underground, of course. Like a snow fort, made of dirt.
Down the way, Matt and I found more sections of the trench as it evolved and discovered by description was unfortunately accurate. Snow forts rarely lost more than an hour, and nearly same with the trenches. At least with snow though, one can climb out, be a little cold and go drink hot cocoa. WWI took a more elongated and darker turn. At any point, walls could give in and bury men in mud while they slept. If the walls stayed strong, the mud crept up from underneath and just remained at men’s knees for months on end. Weapons jammed, food tasted like mud and blankets hardened. And this was when the enemy wasn’t throwing grenades, launching shells, shooting machine guns, attacking with weaponized gases and bayonets otherwise attacking like a bunch of jerks.
The interior wall, from floor to ceiling, catalogues major events and quotes in chronological order and provides most of the reading material. Personally, I just like reading about displays that catch my eye rather than reading long passages on a wall. If I wanted to read about WWI, I get a book about WWI. However, the wall does contain several gem jokes—usefully highlighted in bright red—that are definitely worth a glance. By the first Christmas of the war, gas masks had become pretty standard and had the unfortunate effect of dehumanizing the wearer. A German soldier recounts being attacked by “creatures” in gas masks while a British soldier lamented in his journal about how life on the battlefield “is not worth a damn.”
Within minutes of walking around the museum, the chaos can become over-whelming. Food riots in Germany, fifty thousand British soldiers killed in a couple of hours, failing crops and the intentional bombing of cultural treasures in a ridiculously ignorant attempt to “break the will of the people.” I can not over-emphasis how many times in the history of mankind—and the marginally shorter history of war—an army has tried to “break the will” of a civilian population and failed. A hundred times over, even a thousand times over, attacking a civilian does more harm to the effort than good. A political leader or a general can be broke and surrender, a people never do.
5 million civilians died from the war. That’s more than Dallas, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Detroit, Boston and Denver…put together. Damn.
In the interior of the circle, there were Cultural Reflections Booths and interactive table displays. The giant table touch-screen displays immediately impressed me as some space-age/everyday cell phone technology; until I tried to use one. They weren’t so much “touch-screens” as they were displays that were supposed to move with the click of an attached laser pointer. Alas, the screen rarely reacted properly and I struggled like some lab monkey for a while until I decided to go pout in what looked like a photo booth. Unlike the baffling no-touch touch-screen table from moments prior, the Cultural Reflections Booths had real touch screens and let me scroll through music, literature and sound bites from WWI and the years shortly after.
A lot of beauty came from WWI, in that the war affected, inspired or at least mentally damaged artisans of every medium. Who knows what Fitzgerald and Hemmingway would have written in their post-WWI years if not “The Great Gatsby” and “A Farewell to Arms.” This is not an appreciation for the war, though, as I can’t say I’d save any piece of art or literature at the cost of one life. The grandest achievement for any of the literature at the time was the ability to summarize the impossibly huge concepts.
To be continued in a third, and final, segment....
No comments:
Post a Comment