This article shocked me.
I know that is click bait on my part, but you should go back and look at it. Can you conceive of an American war* in which over 2 million soldiers' lives were lost? Can you then imagine them not being remembered? A memorial to commemorate the names of the fallen would be, were it to be modeled after the Vietnam War memorial, over eight and a half miles long.
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| This memorial is about a quarter of a mile long. Picture source. |
I finished my annual rereading of All Quiet on the Western Front. It's always a difficult read, and the last fifty pages are particularly grim, if only because of the hopelessness that permeates it. The pity of war is rendered so starkly there that I feel my teaching of the topic is in some ways superfluous. Nevertheless, I feel I have an obligation to teach about the First World War with as much sympathy and detail as I can muster, if only because it is so often misremembered by America--and almost forgotten by Germany.
Not A Drill
I feel like most Americans feel that our involvement with World War I paved the way for the infrastructure we needed to fight World War II. This is not wrong, but it too often stops there, as if what we did in Europe (almost exclusively) was a warm-up, a clearing of the throat before the true performance of two decades later. This is too dismissive of the 126,000 dead and 234,000 wounded. Over 4 million Americans served in the eighteen or-so months of World War I. Their sacrifice, ingenuity, bravery, and loss ought not to be dismissed as an opening act. We participated in the War to End All Wars. Once in, we were heavily in, and I find it a travesty that more people don't appreciate and reverence those we lost in the war.
Particularly now, with every day being a centenary of something, I feel we ought to better remember. Indeed, the last three years have been an opportunity to build memories, to recommit to peace, to mourn our losses, as the last three years have been a perpetual "On this day, one hundred years ago, in World War I..." Why do we wish to, as my students often do, skip over the First World War so we can talk about the Second? What's the appeal of one version of destruction and chaos and bloodshed over another?
Not A Prequel
I stole a joke from one of my professors, who said, "You know that the Second World War is a sequel, because it had a bigger budget, more famous people, and bigger explosions." While this quip is true, that doesn't diminish the force of understanding the First.
I spent two weeks in Europe this January, studying World War II. We were supposed to make it a "World Wars Tour" and look at some of the WWI stuff, too, but it didn't work out the way I had hoped. (The largest piece of WWI history I wanted to show to the kids was Verdun, but the museum there was closed and we had enough snow on the roads that we couldn't really get there anyway.) I understand, of course, why there's a difficulty in focusing on WWI. Part of it was proximity, part of it is that whatever WWI changed, WWII changed more sharply.
And that's all the more reason I think we need to memorialize World War I more. The Great War is not a footnote to the second's conflict. Despite the fact that they're sequential, the Second didn't have to happen any more than the First. But without the First, the Second never could have happened. Sadly, we too often learn about WWI in a way that makes its beginnings unclear ("The archduke of a country was killed, so eventually Americans were dying in Flanders!"). This, coupled with the distance of time (some of my students still have living grandparents who served), makes WWI opaque. I worry that there isn't enough empathy for what transpired in that war, simply because not "enough" Americans fought/died for us to care.
But we should. We really should.
Fallen and Forgotten
We spend a lot of time in World War II looking at the Holocaust. That crime against humanity haunts us today--as it should. But the Armenian genocide ought also to be remembered. We're coming up on Easter, which means that the 102nd anniversary from the commencement of that war crime is rapidly approaching. What do we do when we forget about these things? What other tragedies do we allow when we don't hold ourselves accountable for the actions of the past? How dare we say, "Not my country. Not my problem."? I feel like the purpose of the historian is to hold the present accountable, to help all know that what we have now comes from then, and we are not given the present without the strings of shared responsibility for the past off of which we build.
This is likely an extreme view, but I don't know of any tragedy in the long, bloody history of humankind, that has not been a personal affront to me, an insult to the shared sister- and brotherhood of humanity, an egregious injury to the foundation of the human family. I oppose the killing of my brothers and sisters in all times and places. While recognizing my own ignorance of conflicts, crimes, and corruption, owning fully to the reality that I am essentially empty on other 20th century wars, I stand by my affirmation that my job as a historian is to learn the truth of our past and help in whatever way I can to ensure that such mistakes are not repeated.
I believe this because I have not forgotten what war truly costs. And I hope I never do.
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* That we could argue slavery's cost has been properly forgotten and poorly remembered is likely true, but it isn't the point of this essay.