Thought this was rather striking, in commemoration of the tragic first day of the battle of the Somme, across the UK yesterday.
Ghosts of the Somme
Thought this was rather striking, in commemoration of the tragic first day of the battle of the Somme, across the UK yesterday.
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
The whole event it totally alien to me.
Congratulations America
They came to fight for glory in their thousands
Young men with their dreams
They died before the guns for their country
A book of faded pictures, broken dreams
They were fighting a war that could have been prevented. There was no glory in it, not then and not 100 years later.
Congratulations America
UK celebrates war too much IMO.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
celebrates is entirely the wrong word
and so is glory
Might be the wrong word. BTW, it looks like they are only dressed as British soldiers.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
Futility, naiveté, foolhardiness, senselessness, tragic. These are apt words.
It is very much a marked British day for grief, indeed.
I'm no historian, but Wiki sums up that first day (emphasis mine):
Several truces were observed to recover wounded from no man's land on the British front, where the Fourth Army had lost 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 men were killed. The French had 1,590 casualties and the German 2nd Army lost 10,000–12,000 men. Orders were issued to the Anglo-French armies to continue the offensive on 2 July and a German counter-attack on the north bank of the Somme by the 12th Division, intended for the night of 1/2 July, took until dawn on 2 July to begin and was destroyed. Since 1 July 1916, the cost of the battle and the "meagre gains" have been a source of grief and controversy in Britain; in German and French writing, the first day of the Battle of the Somme has been little more than a footnote to the mass losses of 1914–1915 and the Battle of Verdun.
~
Besides, I thought the project itself was very moving.
It would make more sense if they' d bothered to point out the incompetence and utter uselessness of leaders on all sides. All very nice to make it about the poor sobs who got slaughtered at the Somme, but the lesson we should take away from it isn' t that they were nobly fighting for some good cause, but that their leaders first plunged most of Europe into a war over basically nothing and then led it like no human life counted. To make this day's remembrance count for something sensible it should be a day on which we remember how horrible things can become if you let people like Douglas Haig, or his continental counterparts rise to lead. That man should posthumously be stripped from his title and his head shone should read Mass Murderer.
Congratulations America
It was a moving memorial to those who were lost, and their sacrifice "lest we forget". Remembering the human cost of war is the antithesis of celebrating it.
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