Veterans Day 2018. Grandaddy's War: A Century of Armistice

 Army Mule-Skinners versus the Kaiser

World War I was the first war with mechanized mass weapons;
machine guns, subs, tanks, airplanes, modern artillery--and gas.

Canadian troops attend a Thanksgiving service
in the bombed-out Cambrai Cathedral
France, October 1918

With Gratitude to All our Vets, Then, Now and Always

"This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."- French Marshall Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander during World War I, upon seeing the final draft of the Treaty of Versailles.

Allen C. Guelzo: "There is no monument to the First World War on the National Mall. … No American combatants produced memoirs of wartime as powerful as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) or Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920). Not even the most heralded of American fiction about the Great War, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), is a serious match for Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). ... 

The U.S. Marines earned their first great title to combat glory in the fighting for the Belleau Wood in June 1918, along with the memorable response given by Lieutenant Lloyd Williams when the French advised him to retreat: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” The Germans gave the Marines one of the names they’ve lived with ever since: Teufel Hunden (Devil Dogs).

“All the horrors of all the ages were brought together,” wrote Winston Churchill. And “when all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves.” ...

Wilson managed to salvage the League of Nations from the wreckage of the peace conference. But Americans had had enough of unrighteous bargains with their erstwhile Allies, and U.S. participation in the League of Nations was rejected not once but three times by the Senate.

The First World War left deeper shocks than just the ones inflicted by the campaigns and the Versailles Treaty. The folly that had led Europe’s leaders into a pointless four-year nightmare tore the heart out of Western civilization’s self-confidence. Never again would the nation-states of Europe be able to call so easily on the loyalty of their peoples for war; never again, the Oxford Union declared, would “this House . . . fight for its King and Country” quite so eagerly as it had in 1914. ..Purely in monetary terms, the Great War cost its participants a mind-numbing $208 billion. ...

But the most profound transformation wrought in America by the Great War was in the nature of government itself. Woodrow Wilson came to the presidency in 1913 as the prince of the Progressives, and he at once began to assemble the scaffolding of a new administrative state through the Federal Reserve Act. His efforts were aided by constitutional amendments to secure the levy of a national income tax, to institute the popular election of U.S. senators, and to impose a national prohibition on alcohol. Entrance into the Great War widened the scope of administrative control, justifying the creation of a Fuel Administration, a Food Administration, a War Labor Policies Board, a War Industries Board, and a Shipping Board, which created an Emergency Fleet Corporation to build dry docks and piers, commandeer privately owned vessels, and even seize enemy ships. That control reached even into the schools: In Philadelphia, the School Mobilization Committee organized 1,300 public and parochial schoolboys as farm workers. The war, complained Randolph Bourne, licensed the Progressive state to become “what in peacetime it has vainly struggled to become — the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.” ...

Comments

The administrative state has marched to that beat ever since."...…

"If ye break faith with us who die…"

"This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."- French Marshall Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander during World War I, upon seeing the final draft of the Treaty of Versailles.