The costs we'll bear
As a suburban dad, you bet I have a favorite war. I’ve always been fascinated by World War I for many reasons, one of which was the numbing repetitiveness of it all. How could the people of so many nations sit there and absorb such casualties, week after week, month after month, year after year, for so little strategic change? It made no sense.
The human cost of World War II may have been much higher (and contrary to modern conception the American public, at least, was growing tired of the casualties well before the war’s conclusion), but at least when you look back at it you can see the ebb and flow. You can see the expansion and then contraction of the Axis powers. It was a war for territory. For many countries, such as Russia — which lost over 20 million people — it was a war of survival. In many ways, the losses were unavoidable.
But that really wasn’t the case in the first World War, not on the Western Front anyway. The first few months were indeed a war of movement, with the highest casualty rates of the entire campaign, and at many points each side could reasonably consider themselves on the cusp of victory. By late 1914, though, the digging in began, and for the next four years, despite one massive offensive after another, little was gained and much was lost.
The frontlines were so well defined that it was possible for civilians relatively near behind them to go about their lives — not “as usual,” of course, particularly as Allied dominance of the shipping lanes led to widespread hunger in Germany during the middle years of the war. But it was indeed possible for a citizen of Paris to go about their day without being overly concerned with what was happening at the front. They could go to work or school, eat at cafes, walk the dogs. Meanwhile, soldiers were dying by the thousands, month in and month out.
I believe it was the invisibility of the carnage that kept it tolerable for so many. Even many politicians likely did not have first-hand exposure to the horrors. The war remained an abstraction, the soldiers figures on a board to be pushed around at will. Sure, everyone knew somebody who got killed, or many somebodies, but it all happened off-screen. There was no mass media to bring it home. Brigades were sent off with parades but individual soldiers died in the dark. The people who could have stopped the devastation were preoccupied with other things, like avoiding the shame of defeat.
On and on it went, for years, the dead piling up by the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands, and then the millions. Life went on. Except for those for whom it didn’t.