Remembrance Sunday.

[jimslip]

I was watching an old production of , "All Quiet on the Western Front" and realised that it's Remembrance Sunday on the 14th November.

The casualties of this useless war still beggar belief!

Read and be stunned:



Oh, and if those loveavble, cuddly, Halifax ads on TV were starting to make you love your bank again have a read of this:

[max_tranmere]

I watched that programme the other night on BBC1, 'World War One From The Air'. At the start they showed just how long the Western Front was, and it really shocked me. From Belgium, along to the north-east corner of France, then from there all the way down through France to the French Alps.

I always get a bit sad watching these sorts of programmes, and ones about WW2 aswell, because I believe we've given away many of the things we achieved in the 2 wars. Just this morning I was walking along Edgware Road in London, through that vast middle-eastern district, and many people were starring at my Poppy with a puzzled look on their faces. Few would have had any idea what it was all about, what it symbolised, or anything.

They don't mind living off the legacy of the sacrifices though do they?

[eroticartist]

The machine gun had just been invented and the flower of the German and British male youth were forced over the top by the officer class with pistols at their backs to be shot for cowardice in the morning, if they did not commit suicide, by their "mates" who were too afraid to disobey an upper classe officer!
"Oh for a jolly good war" the upper classes sang because they would make millions out of the weapons industry and the bolshie youths, fighting in the streets red against the blackshirts would be wiped out and thus avoid a proletarian revolution that had just happened in Russia.
The The First World War was a conspricy between the German and English upper clases as was he second.
Mike Freeman.

[Arginald Valleywater]

Possibly the worst fought military campaign in history. My grandfather was shelled and had shrapnel in his leg and arm 'til he died and his brother was gassed and died at the "glorious" age of 18. The British upper classes should have been tried for genocide against their own people.

[max_tranmere]

On this question of the British upper classes somehow having the last laugh, did you know that the Aristocracy took so many casualties in WW1 that the year after it ended, in 1919, more than a million acres of (by then former) Aristocratic land was up for sale in Britain? Fact.

Everything changed after that: the end of the British Empire was inevitable, and the Class System would become a bygone thing. The Empire eventually went 40 years later - further nails in its coffin were Suez and how broke Britain was post WW2 - but the scene was set with the desimation of the Aristocracy in WW1.

[jimslip]

I agree, there were thousands of "Toffs" that got slaughtered as well. The war was propagated by International Bankers for profit, not "Toffs".

[justincyder]

Easy there EA

plenty of the upper class went to war and died too who do you think the officers were predominantly, you might be confusing industrialists with the upper class methinks

[BeestonBoy]

eroticartist wrote:

> The machine gun had just been invented and the flower of the
> German and British male youth were forced over the top by the
> officer class with pistols at their backs to be shot for
> cowardice in the morning, if they did not commit suicide, by
> their "mates" who were too afraid to disobey an upper classe
> officer!
> "Oh for a jolly good war" the upper classes sang because they
> would make millions out of the weapons industry and the bolshie
> youths, fighting in the streets red against the blackshirts
> would be wiped out and thus avoid a proletarian revolution that
> had just happened in Russia.
> The The First World War was a conspricy between the German and
> English upper clases as was he second.
> Mike Freeman.
>
>


Don't talk utter shite,you crazed old cunt.

It's a fact that an officer (due to the conventions of the time predominately 'Upper Class') had a significantly shorter life expectancy than an enlisted man. Read any decent diaries or works on or by enlisted men,and you will see that these men followed their officers through respect and military duty. Not fear.

This 'Lions led by Donkeys' bollocks really pisses me off.

BB

[andy at handiwork]

I have to agree. There is so much said that is well-intentioned, but misinformed, about WW1. I can recomend Gordon Corrigan's book 'Mud, Blood and Poppycock' () as a good place to start to demolish many of the myths surrounding the conflict. I'm not going to rehash his many arguments here, but as he makes clear, it was not the war but the peace that caused people to look back on it as a futile waste. At the time and for some years after, it was regarded as a struggle that had to be fought to prevent an autocratic and militarist Germany from controlling Europe. And if it had been seen at the time as so terrible, with the rank and file being forced at gun-point to fight against their will, how was it that the British army in 1918, alone amongst the combatants not to suffer mutinies, was able by force of arms and professionalism, (with increasing help from the US, and an exhausted France), to finally advance and defeat the German army in a series of stunning victories?

[max_tranmere]

Have a read of this: