of war . . . .
I have just finished reading Why World War I Resonates, an op ed in today's New York Times by British novelist William Boyd. I urge all here to take the time to read it carefully.
Let me begin by offering most of one paragraph which caught my attention, especially in light of the recent movies and television shows that have a connection with the Great War. Boyd is explaining our ongoing obsession with that war:
To our modern sensibilities it defies credulity that for more than four years European armies faced one another in a 500-mile line of trenches, stretching from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. The war was also fought in other arenas — in Galicia, Italy, the Bosporus, Mesopotamia, East and West Africa, in naval battles on many oceans — but it is the Western Front and trench warfare that define the war in memory. It was a deadly war of attrition in which millions of soldiers on both sides slogged through the mud of no man’s land to meet their deaths in withering blasts of machine-gun fire and artillery. And at the end of four years and with about nine million troops dead, the two opposing forces were essentially where they were when they started.
As I read these words, I heard a voice saying "but what about Iran and Iraq?" Does it still defy credulity when two modern nations can have such a bloodbath? Or what of some of the horrors of World War II? Here I think of the Siege of Leningrad, or the ongoing Battle of Kursk in which there were, over a million casualties, or of Stalingrad? In that War, known in the old Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, the USSR suffered almost 11 million dead.
So as I continued to read, I continued to reflect about war. . . .