Darryl Cooper — Enemy: The Germans' War, ep. 1 - We Are The War

Hey there

Speaker 1: everybody. This is Daryl Cooper, back at long last with a new episode

Speaker 2: of the Martyr Maid Podcast

Speaker 3: And I know, I know

it's been

Speaker 3: a long time

And all I

Speaker 4: can say for now is that it's just been a tough

year. I'll

Speaker 4: tell my subscribers more about it another time, but it's just been a long year. On

top of some

Speaker 1: personal trials, one of

the things

Speaker 1: I've realized over this last year

Speaker 5: is that I've just really, truly had enough of politics

I mean

Speaker 6: I'm still going to vote and I'm sure people will ask me my opinion on something and I'll bloviate about it but I just spent way too much time this year accepting interview requests to talk about the day's news in Gaza or Ukraine or Washington DC and all it's done is exhaust me and distract me from the only thing that I'm actually good at

and from

Speaker 6: the only people I actually work for which

is you. Well, that

Speaker 6: is over

Speaker 7: That

is

Speaker 8: over. I am not going to let anything distract me anymore from this history podcast

Speaker 5: and from the Substack content I create for subscribers. I want

to make

Speaker 5: this series the best series that I can. And

so I feel bad panhandling

Speaker 6: given the way that I've already abused my subscribers' patience this year

But I

Speaker 8: love my cat more than I love my honor, and my cat needs to eat. I

don't accept

Speaker 8: advertisers for this show. I never have. If I did, they would have canceled me a long time ago, several times

This is a

Speaker 8: one-man operation, and I am 100% supported by the generosity

Speaker 6: of my listeners, by you. So

please consider, if

Speaker 6: you're not already, becoming a subscriber to

Either

Speaker 6: to the Martyrmaid substack, which can be found at subscribe.martyrmaid.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. Or you can subscribe on X if you prefer that

Speaker 1: platform. I'm going to make the content on substack, including the podcast, available there as well

So for just $5 a

Speaker 9: month or

Speaker 10: 50 a year, you can help keep my cat's belly full and help keep this show

Speaker 6: going

And as

Speaker 6: always, if $5 is a lot of money at this particular time in your life, and don't worry, I know what that's like, please just email

Speaker 8: me and I'll comp you a subscription. I want everybody to listen to this show who wants to listen to it

But if you can

Speaker 5: manage it, do please consider supporting the show because it is the only way I'm able to do this. And to those of you who have stuck with

Speaker 1: me through this difficult year, all I can say is thank you. Thank you, thank you

So, all right. Let's do

Speaker 10: this. I'd

wanted to

Speaker 10: cover more ground in this episode, but trying to make that work is part of why it's taken so long. But

I'm happy with how

Speaker 6: it's turned out, overall. And I hope you are, too. You're about to hear Enemy. The

Speaker 11: Germans War, Part 1. We are the war

Years

Speaker 10: ago... In my former life with the U.S. Department of Defense, I

was at a bar

Speaker 10: somewhere in East

Speaker 5: Africa. Tanzania, I think. I'd

been stuck on a

Speaker 5: U.S. Navy ship for over a month, and I was blowing off some steam with a few of the ship's junior officers

Down the bar a bit

Speaker 6: was this older

Speaker 12: guy. White guy

Maybe a

Speaker 12: buck sixty. Balding. Bit of a pot belly

The guy didn't

Speaker 12: look like much

But he

Speaker 10: had this attitude

Now, I've

Speaker 10: been deployed on different ships with nothing to do but lift weights for five or six months at this point. And I'm about 30 years old at the time, and I'm pretty jacked. I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I'm half this guy's age, twice his size, at least it seemed like it. Well

maybe we were being

Speaker 8: kind of loud and obnoxious. Like I said, we've been out to sea for a long time

But

Speaker 8: this guy keeps scoffing, you know, and

just

Speaker 5: shaking his head and making little comments about our conversation, and not even under his breath, really. It

was like this guy was

Speaker 13: looking for a fight, but that could not be because

Speaker 10: there were four of us, and we were all bigger and younger than he

was, and so I

Speaker 10: supposed he was just an ornery old bastard with a big mouth, and we just tried to ignore him

Well, it probably

Speaker 10: should have occurred to me at the time to wonder about some white guy in his late 50s, early 60s drinking alone at a nondescript bar in East Africa and seemingly not the least bit intimidated by a group of younger, bigger military guys. But it didn't

So then some other

Speaker 10: guys from our ship showed up and sat at the bar with us. And there were actually a few women from the ship

Speaker 8: as well. So, you know, the atmosphere changed a little

bit

Speaker 8: Now this guy is making his comments And we're getting a little more defensive And our larger group is crowded A little closer

Speaker 14: to this guy's personal space And we're louder Because there's more of us And we're a little drunker than we were before And so

Speaker 10: this old guy says something

And I don't

Speaker 10: even remember what it was Because all I remember is what happened afterward

I finally

Speaker 10: turn on this guy

With the

Speaker 10: intention, I'm sure To say something awesome and badass No doubt

And But

Speaker 10: before I even get started, this old guy springs out of his seat like a cat and cracks me in the jaw

It was all over me before I

Speaker 10: could even get my

Speaker 15: bearings, and it surprised me like a sucker punch, but I can't lay that on the old man because

Speaker 10: he came straight at me from the front

It didn't go any

Speaker 10: further than that, thankfully, because there were six or seven of us at this point, and my buddies snatched him up, and the old guy was out the door

Speaker 16: while I'm still trying to figure out what the hell just happened

And

Speaker 16: we're all saying the usual nonsense things. What the hell was that? What was that guy's problem

And I'm trying to

Speaker 16: process the fact that I just lost a fight. Sort of. Yeah, I just lost a fight to a pot-bellied 60-year-old half my size

And

Speaker 10: meanwhile, the bartender is behind the bar, wiping up the beer I'd spilled, just giggling to himself like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. So anyway

The

Speaker 10: night Greg's on, we're talking to the bartender, and

at a

Speaker 10: certain point he informs us that that guy, the old man, had spent years with a famous South African Special Forces unit

And when he told us the

Speaker 6: name of the unit, I'd read enough about the various Bush wars to know that I had gotten off very

Speaker 17: easy with just a sore jaw

But a lot of

Speaker 18: those thoughts came later. At this

Speaker 16: point, it's still just a few minutes or so after it happened. I'm still kind of half in shock. And so I say, oh, okay, well, whatever. What the hell was his

Speaker 19: problem? The

bartender

Speaker 20: sort of shrugs and says, you

wouldn't

Speaker 21: understand. You

Americans don't

Speaker 21: know what it's like to

Speaker 16: lose a war. And

so, of course, one

Speaker 16: of the guys with me pipes in, we've lost wars

And

Speaker 16: the bartender

Speaker 10: looks over at him

perks up

Speaker 10: one eyebrow like the rock. He says, "No you haven't. Not

really." Bob, I

Speaker 10: think that's what he said the

Speaker 17: guy's name was, I can't really remember. Bob's mates died for a country that

don't even exist no

Speaker 22: more. I guess I can see how that might give a

guy an attitude. I am

Speaker 23: content to die for

my beliefs, so

Speaker 23: cut off

my

Speaker 24: head and make me a martyr. The people will

always remember it

Speaker 25: no, they

will forget

Speaker 26: Hell does exist. God is a thought, God is an

idea. "It is a

Speaker 27: place. It is somewhere. Hell does

Speaker 28: exist

But its

Speaker 28: reference is to something that transcends all things." "I ask

why we must tear

Speaker 29: ourselves apart for this small question of religion

In his

Speaker 30: 1948

Speaker 4: novel, Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner wrote about the ancestral memory American Southerners have of the moment on July 3, 1863, just before

Speaker 31: the fateful charge led by General George Pickett commenced

when the

Speaker 5: Battle of Gettysburg, the American Civil War, and Southern Independence still hung in the balance

that

Speaker 1: last moment when there was still hope. Quote, For

every Southern

Speaker 32: boy 14 years old, not once, but whenever he wants it, there

is

Speaker 4: the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863. The brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods, and the furled flags are already loosened to break out

And

Speaker 10: Pickett himself, with his long, oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand, probably, and his sword in the other, looking up the hill, waiting for Longstreet to give the word. And it's all in

Speaker 8: the balance

It hasn't

Speaker 8: happened

Speaker 5: yet

It hasn't even

Speaker 5: begun yet

It not only

Speaker 5: hasn't begun yet, but there's still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances. And

yet it's going to

Speaker 10: begin

We all

Speaker 10: know that. We've come too far, with too much at stake, and that moment doesn't need even a 14-year-old boy to think, this time

maybe this

Speaker 33: time, with all this much to lose and all this much to gain

desperate

Speaker 12: and unbelievable victory, the desperate gamble the cast made two years ago

this is it. The absolute

Speaker 34: edge of no

Speaker 10: return

to

Speaker 10: turn back now and make for home or go irrevocably on and either win or plunge over the

Speaker 20: world's roaring rim, end quote. Some

of us have a moment like

Speaker 10: that in our own lives

Speaker 8: A moment when it seemed like the only

Speaker 5: sensible option we had was to bet everything

left. On

Speaker 5: what we hoped was a coin

Speaker 10: flip

If we

Speaker 10: win, we say, of course we won

We tell

Speaker 10: stories about how our victory

Speaker 35: sure, it took courage and determination and brains. But as long as we showed up and provided those things, our victory was inevitable. Because we were smarter, smarter

or

Speaker 36: stronger, or braver, or all of those things. And if we were luckier, it was only because fate favored the righteousness of our purpose

And if we lose

Speaker 1: everything, we

spend the

Speaker 1: rest of our lives wondering what we could have done differently

And whether that

Speaker 37: gamble really was the only option we had

And what things

Speaker 37: might have been like if the bet had paid

Speaker 1: off instead of ruining us

Speaker 20: Every country that's lost a war I mean really lost one The way Bob's country lost one

They have

Speaker 10: moments like that I imagine when the Russia-Ukraine war is over A

Speaker 38: lot of Ukrainians are going to look back at that moment in the spring of 2022 And

When

Speaker 38: the

Speaker 10: first phase of the Russian invasion was in total disarray and the Russians were wanting to negotiate, clearly looking for a face-saving way to back out of a mess that they

were

Speaker 8: not prepared for, I imagine a lot of Ukrainians are going to look back at that time and wonder how much different their futures and the

future of

Speaker 8: their country

Speaker 1: would have been if they'd just taken what they could get when they had the early initiative, instead

of listening to

Speaker 1: people who

Speaker 33: told them they didn't have to settle for that

That

Speaker 6: they could win it all. Have this epic victory that Ukrainian fathers would still be telling their sons about centuries from now. I

think of the Gauls

Speaker 6: making their stand against Caesar. Or Jerusalem, when she rebelled against Rome. With glorious visions of the successful Maccabean revolt against

Speaker 5: the Greeks dancing before their eyes. This time. Maybe this time

Well, they

Speaker 5: gambled everything, and they lost. In the case of Ukraine, they're in the process of losing, but

Speaker 39: none of them lost for lack of effort, or courage, or because they weren't willing to suffer or make the necessary sacrifices. They

Speaker 8: gave it everything

they had

Speaker 8: But they were crushed under the weight of a larger opponent, defeated by mathematics as much as anything, by

gravity. by

Speaker 6: things that have always been undefeated

and

Speaker 1: always will be

Germany had

Speaker 1: one of those moments in 1918. It

was the fourth year of

Speaker 1: the Great War to settle the question

Speaker 6: of who was going to hold sway on the European continent. And

to many

Speaker 6: observers, not only in Berlin, but

Speaker 10: in Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, New York

It looked

Speaker 6: like the Germans were about to win

The previous

Speaker 6: year had brought one disaster after another to Germany's enemies. After

a failed and

Speaker 6: very costly offensive in the spring, the French army had experienced mutinies up and down the line, troops refusing to go over the top and attack

And only with

Speaker 6: great effort, and by executing hundreds if not thousands, nobody's quite sure, but at least hundreds

of

Speaker 6: their own soldiers, was that mutiny put down

The French managed

Speaker 6: to avoid a general collapse of their lines, but it was clear to their leaders and

to

Speaker 1: the leaders of both her allies and her enemies that France would not be going on the offensive for the foreseeable future

The Tsarist regime that

Speaker 1: had ruled

Speaker 6: Russia for 300 years had collapsed in March 1917

And that

Speaker 10: summer, the new revolutionary government in Russia launched what was supposed to be a pretty easy campaign

Speaker 6: just to quiet down domestic critics of the war and to show Russia's war allies, chiefly Britain, on whom she was totally

Speaker 10: dependent for financial and diplomatic support, that she was still committed to the fight, that the new

Russia was

Speaker 10: going to keep the old Russia's promises

Speaker 6: 900,000 Russian soldiers were thrown against a section of the Central Powers line that was defended by only 260,000. But

within just a few

Speaker 5: weeks, the Russians were in complete chaos

Speaker 1: beating a disorderly retreat as the soldiers threw off their uniforms and deserted by the tens of thousands

Before the

Speaker 40: year was up

That

Speaker 40: government would fall to Lenin's Bolsheviks, and by early 1918, the Russians would be out of the war altogether

On the heels of

Speaker 40: Russia's defeat in the summer, the British army attacked the Germans in

Speaker 38: Flanders

And while they

Speaker 38: managed to inflict a lot of casualties on the Germans, they took a lot themselves, and they failed to achieve any significant strategic objectives

The Battle of

Speaker 38: Passchendaele, that's what this battle was called

was

Speaker 38: one of the most brutal and psychologically difficult of the entire war

And it took its

Speaker 6: toll on the British Army. He maintained discipline, as he always did, but the British soldier was reminded, after a second failed all-out

Speaker 8: effort in two years, of the futility of going on the attack in World War I

That battle

Speaker 41: ended in the fall

when the

Speaker 12: British were forced to transfer on short notice several divisions to help save her ally Italy, who had been holding down the southern front against the central powers. The

Italian military

Speaker 6: often gets a bad rap because of later high-profile misadventures in places like Ethiopia

Speaker 17: and Greece, but they battled hard in the First World War

They

Speaker 42: fought a high-elevation, intense mountain war against Austria-Hungary

in

Speaker 5: arguably the most difficult environmental conditions of the war

And as on every

Speaker 38: other front, the fighting

Speaker 5: had been extremely costly, but completely indecisive, with immense suffering on both sides and nothing to show for it. But

then in October

Speaker 5: 1917, just as Lenin's Bolsheviks were seizing control in Russia

The

Speaker 43: Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army attacked the Italians and claimed its most significant victory of the war

The fact that this

Speaker 6: was called the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo River

should tell you

Speaker 6: how much the previous eleven engagements had achieved, but this time was different

After an initial

Speaker 6: barrage of heavy artillery... Austro-Hungarian forces, supported by six German divisions, among

Speaker 38: whom was a crack young infantry officer named Erwin Rommel, about whom much more

Speaker 1: later in the series, well, they broke through the lines of the Italian Second Army, which was sent retreating in near chaos until the officers finally

Speaker 5: managed to stem the panic and reconstitute a defensive line just

north of Venice

Speaker 5: Nearly 300,000

Speaker 44: Italians were killed, wounded, or captured in a matter of weeks

Speaker 45: 300,000

As historian Robert

Speaker 45: Gerworth writes, quote

Speaker 46: Even if the rout of Caporetto, this was also called the Battle of Caporetto after a nearby town

even if the

Speaker 5: rout of Caporetto, which led to the dismissal of the Italian chief of staff, Marshal Luigi Cadorna, and the fall of

Speaker 37: Prime Minister Paolo Buscelli

did

Speaker 37: not bring about a complete collapse of the Italian army. In November 1917, it seemed as if the best

Speaker 32: that Rome could now hope for was the conclusion of an honorable peace treaty without territorial losses

Italy's French and British allies

Speaker 5: were not encouraged by the new Prime Minister's promise

Speaker 8: to carry on the fight from Sicily if necessary, if the whole Italian peninsula was lost

And so the

Speaker 37: Russians are finished in the east

the Italians

Speaker 4: look finished in the south, in the west

the French

Speaker 4: are nearly finished, and the British were undermanned and licking their wounds from Passchendaele. True

the Americans had

Speaker 4: declared war in April, but the U.S

was

Speaker 47: not prepared for a major war, and by early 1918 there was still time

for

Speaker 47: the Germans to land a crushing blow on the Western Front

and

Speaker 38: force an end to the war before the Americans showed up with enough forces to decide things

The man in charge of the

Speaker 5: German war effort, First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, summed up the situation. Quote, The situation in Russia and Italy will likely make it possible to strike a blow in the Western theater of war in the new year

The

Speaker 6: balance of forces will be approximately equal. Around 35 divisions and 1,000 heavy artillery pieces can be made available for an offensive. Our overall situation demands that we strike as early as possible, ideally in late February or early March, before the Americans throw powerful forces into the balance. End

Speaker 10: quote

One of Ludendorff's

Speaker 10: staff officers was even more optimistic

Speaker 5: Quote, Our position was really never so good

The

Speaker 5: military giant Russia is completely finished and pleads for peace. The same with Romania. Serbia and Montenegro have simply gone

Italy is

Speaker 5: supported only with difficulty by England and France, and we stand

Speaker 4: in its best province

England and

Speaker 4: France are still ready for battle, but are much exhausted, above all the French, and the English are very much under pressure from the U-boats. That optimism

was felt by many

Speaker 4: soldiers on the front line

And

Speaker 8: it was felt by many of their families back home

The German

Speaker 40: soldier had no doubt that he fought for the best army in the world

Who else could

Speaker 40: have stood up to four powerful empires on three fronts for this long and now still find

Speaker 4: themselves in a position to potentially win

After

Speaker 4: three years of the most intense fighting against the combined

Speaker 40: forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia, and Romania, along with all the men and resources the four great

Speaker 5: empires could bring to bear, Germany and her allies had held the line, and

her armies

Speaker 5: remained entrenched deep in enemy territory, while the only enemy soldiers standing on German soil were prisoners of war

Now, with

Speaker 5: the Russians

Speaker 40: out of the fight and Italy seemingly out of it, the Kaiser's forces wheeled around to face Great Britain and a hobbled France on a single front. But

the clock was ticking. Central Europe was

Speaker 4: under siege, with millions of soldiers manning the battlements of a fortress that spanned half a continent. In 1916

Speaker 44: men were killed. Wounded or went missing at a rate of about 23 every

Speaker 4: minute, more than 1,400 every hour, over 30,000 every day for 365 days of the year

It was the bloodiest

Speaker 4: year in the history of

Speaker 8: warfare, with roughly 12.2 million casualties taken by all sides

The next year

Speaker 8: 1917

Speaker 4: brought no relief

Just

Speaker 4: more death on an enormous scale

As the Entente

Speaker 8: nations and the central powers geared up for the fighting season in 1918, some 26 to

Speaker 30: 28 million men had been killed, captured, or wounded badly

Speaker 6: enough to be taken out of the war

Two-thirds of those casualties

Speaker 6: had been taken by Germany's

Speaker 10: enemies

But

Speaker 10: the Entente powers had vast colonial empires to draw on for manpower and resources

while Germany

Speaker 14: and her allies had to fight with the men and material available from their own territories

The Entente

Speaker 10: governed half the globe's landmass, some 700 million people around the world, about 40% of the

Speaker 6: global population

While the

Speaker 6: central powers governed

Speaker 49: only about 140 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were their own people

After three years

Speaker 49: of

Speaker 4: fighting, more than three years, Germany and her allies were still at a disadvantage in almost every area

Every area

Speaker 4: except one

Germany still

Speaker 6: fielded the most efficient and well-led army on the planet. An

army that

Speaker 6: would

Speaker 5: go down

as

Speaker 5: one of the great military forces in

Speaker 1: world history

But it wasn't the same

Speaker 1: German army that had invaded France and Belgium in 1914. None

of the armies

Speaker 1: were the same

None after what

Speaker 37: they'd been through

What these men had

Speaker 37: been through

Speaker 5: is indescribable in terms that could give us the faintest idea of it

We can

Speaker 4: hear about it in bloody detail, but we were not there. My

friend Jocko

Speaker 4: Willink is one of the hardest

Speaker 8: men you're going to find in our modern world. A

Speaker 5: Navy SEAL

Speaker 8: commander who led men in the most intense combat of the Iraq war, and

who dreams

Speaker 8: at night of being behind enemy lines in Vietnam, coming up out of the water like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now. And

when he's asked

Speaker 8: if there's a war in history

that he

Speaker 1: would never want to be involved in

He gives the same

Speaker 1: answer without hesitation every time

He says he wants no

Speaker 1: part of the trenches in World War I

Like anybody

Speaker 5: else, a soldier needs at least an illusion of agency on the battlefield

Some feeling

Speaker 5: that the decisions he makes play some part in his fate, in the fate of the

mission. Even if

Speaker 5: it is an illusion, or even if the fog of war clouds any insight

Speaker 35: into the outcome of your decisions at the time you make them, or

if it's

Speaker 35: really all just up to chance whether you catch a stray round, or your buddy does, or nobody does, the illusion of agency is enough to carry you through. It

makes it so that

Speaker 12: every day there are things to do, things that might help keep you alive, or

Speaker 6: your friends alive, or contribute to the success of the mission

It

Speaker 6: orients you in the world, gives you direction

Speaker 10: and purpose when you get out of bed

Speaker 35: every morning. It carves out a space for order amidst the chaos of war

But it was impossible for a

Speaker 5: soldier in the trenches of the Great War to pretend that his fate was anything but arbitrary

That even the

Speaker 5: grand strategic decisions that made his fate arbitrary were themselves anything but arbitrary

whether

Speaker 12: you lived or died, were crippled, maimed

Speaker 14: blinded

whether you

Speaker 14: survived and were returned alive to your mother or wife with part of your lower jaw ripped off, or

an eye and

Speaker 14: a part of your orbital

Speaker 50: bone missing, or

if you made

Speaker 51: it home in one piece but thanks to a cruel dose of mustard

Speaker 40: gas are unable for the rest of your life to take a flight of stairs without pausing twice to catch your

breath

Speaker 52: nothing you did or could have done had anything to do with the outcome. Your

fate was in the

Speaker 5: hands of God and

it can be

Speaker 5: very hard to believe in God when you are eye-deep in hell as

the

Speaker 2: Canadian poet and soldier John McRae famously described life in a trench. The

great World

Speaker 53: War I soldier and writer Ernst

Speaker 6: Younger Reflecting back on his time in the trenches, wrote, The trench soldier was stamped with the mark of the animal, the mark of the uncertain, the fateful, and the elemental, in an environment as charged with menace as in primeval times. The

eyeless

Speaker 4: face of death often stared at other men as well, but only for a few hours, or

Speaker 5: a few days. If the aviator rose in a decisive flight above the armies

It

Speaker 5: was still a brief

Speaker 4: game with death, complete with white collar and the relaxed smile typical of the courageous man

For him

Speaker 4: battle was an intoxicating drink from the glass of the moment, as

in the

Speaker 4: old days when one galloped

Speaker 8: across dewy fields while the morning sun danced on colored rocks and bare blades. Once upon a time, war was celebrated in days when dying was a joy, days that rose above

Speaker 4: the ages like gleaming monuments of human courage

The trench, on

Speaker 4: the other hand, has turned war into a profession

Speaker 45: and warriors

Speaker 4: into day-laborers of death, rooted in a bloody everyday life

It is now a

Speaker 4: mere romantic legend, that sense of anguish foreboding that seizes the soldiers on the eve of war, around the campfire or writing at dawn

that

Speaker 4: feeling

Speaker 5: that can transform the world into a dark and solemn cathedral and can weigh down the breath at dinnertime, the day before the battle

The trench gives no

Speaker 54: room for lyrical feelings, for the veneration of one's own greatness. Every

Speaker 1: sophistication is trampled and shredded, every delicacy incinerated by the brutality

Speaker 14: of events

For many soldiers, the

Speaker 5: challenge of facing the acute danger of enemy fire was less difficult than simply keeping their sanity amidst the drudgery, boredom, filth, and casual horror of daily life in a trench. You

had to survive the

Speaker 5: environment before you even concerned yourself with the enemy. Just

take the rain. Just take the rain. There's a

Speaker 8: light rain in the forecast for my area this evening

If it's

Speaker 8: still warm enough outside

Speaker 10: and the lightning isn't too close, I might put on my raincoat and my galoshes and go

for a nice

Speaker 55: walk. Who doesn't love the scent given off by the world following an early autumn downpour? Okay, fine

Speaker 8: Now go out into your yard and dig

a big

Speaker 8: hole. Big enough for you to stand up in, but without seeing

over the top. Now

Speaker 5: go get everything you

Speaker 6: own, or everything you can carry at least, your clothes, your food, your cooking utensils, your blanket and pillow, your pictures of your family

Speaker 4: everything you need to live and can fit in a large backpack, and throw it in that hole. And

then put

Speaker 4: yourself down there

and then just

Speaker 5: forget your house exists, because you live here now

And now it

Speaker 5: starts to

Speaker 4: rain

And now it's a

Speaker 4: little different. Now the rain is no longer an opportunity for

a

Speaker 45: leisurely stroll. It

is a

Speaker 45: cold-hearted enemy that wants to kill you

Speaker 56: and to make

Speaker 45: you suffer before

Speaker 56: it does. To

make matters worse, in

Speaker 38: Belgium and northern France, where the strongest forces on both sides of the western

Speaker 8: front were concentrated, much

of the

Speaker 5: landscape sits at or below sea level. And so the water

table lay

Speaker 5: just beneath the soldiers' feet, and when they dug down to cut a trench, it

wasn't long at

Speaker 5: all before they

Speaker 40: hit water

The trench

Speaker 40: soldier was invariably ankle-deep in mud, and that's if he was lucky

Often the trench

Speaker 6: went deep below the water table, and so water seeped endlessly from the muddy walls, and baling

Speaker 8: water was a full-time job for nine or ten months a year

they used

Speaker 57: buckets

Speaker 13: to bale water if they had buckets and then dug a

Speaker 15: few spadefuls of mud and threw it over the top before the water rose and they had to bale it out again. And during

Speaker 8: the wet season, which was half the year, the

trenches would

Speaker 8: sometimes have men on rotation, baling water 24-7 just to keep the level of the water below their knees. Any

Speaker 40: interruption in the process

Like

Speaker 40: if everyone had to take cover from artillery fire or man the battlements to face a potential attack, the water quickly rose to their thighs, to their waist, sometimes

Speaker 8: their armpits

The soldiers on watch

Speaker 8: couldn't call a timeout for a bathroom break, so the trench

Speaker 4: often doubled as a latrine

Sometimes men had

Speaker 4: to stand in near-freezing water mixed

with

Speaker 5: urine, blood, feces, and

and

Speaker 5: who knows what, up to their waist, sometimes their armpits

Speaker 37: for days at a time

They could get out of

Speaker 58: it if they wanted to

They could get out

Speaker 58: of the water by getting out of the trench

But along large

Speaker 59: parts of the front, that was tantamount to suicide. A French soldier wrote

The trench is

Speaker 8: nothing more than a strip of water. The sides cave in behind you as you pass with a soft slither

We

Speaker 8: ourselves are transformed into

Speaker 4: statues of clay, with mud even in one's very mouth, end quote

Well, as if it wasn't difficult

Speaker 4: enough to slog through knee-deep water and ankle-deep mud, carrying a rifle and a pack full of gear, the greatcoat worn by the men in the trenches was not waterproof, and in addition to the seven-pound weight of the coat

Speaker 8: itself— water and mud often added another 25 to 35 pounds to it

men from one

Speaker 4: british platoon that emerged from the trenches during the battle of the somme were reported to have an average of 58 pounds of water and mud soaked into their gear in addition to the 60 pounds of gear itself

and so

Speaker 4: you're talking 90 100 110 pounds of extra weight to carry for men who are much smaller than

we are The

Speaker 6: average weight of a British soldier in the Great War was 112 pounds

German soldiers

Speaker 4: described their first encounters with corn-fed Americans in 1918 as if they'd come under attack by a race of giants, but even the Americans were only 141 pounds on average. So you're 110, 120, maybe 130 pounds, carrying 90 to 100 pounds of waterlogged mud-cake gear, threw mud up to your calves and water up to your thighs

and if you

Speaker 8: were a German soldier, you enjoyed the added bonus of doing it all on an empty stomach

Another

Speaker 6: curse feared by every soldier was trench foot, which was caused by having to stand in water for long periods without being able to remove wet socks or boots. The combination of wet and cold led to reduced blood flow in the foot

And soon, the

Speaker 6: wrinkly skin starts turning blotchy and red, and then begins to die and fall off. If left untreated, as soldiers in the trench often had no choice but to do, the flesh would start to turn black and come

Speaker 5: off in chunks. Toes

and whole

Speaker 5: feet would sometimes have to be amputated

to

Speaker 4: ward off trench foot men had to change their socks two or three times a day making sure to dry their feet thoroughly and then coating their feet

Speaker 10: with grease made from whale oil before putting on a fresh pair but obviously that was just not always possible it

gets cold in

Speaker 17: France and Belgium too a

lieutenant of

Speaker 17: the

Speaker 5: 2nd Scottish Rifles said no one who was not there can fully appreciate the excruciating agonies and misery Yeah. through which the men had to go in those days, paddling

Speaker 47: about by day, sometimes with water above the knees, standing at night, hour

Speaker 5: after hour, on sentry duty

while the drenched

Speaker 5: boots, putties, and breeches became stiff like cardboard with ice from the freezing cold air

The winter of

Speaker 6: 1916-17 was the worst in decades, lasting from October to April

An

Speaker 60: Australian sergeant remembered how one time he had filled his bottle with boiling hot

Speaker 6: tea around midday

Speaker 60: only to find

Speaker 6: when he reached his trench assignment just a few hours later that the whole thing was frozen solid as a brick

Sometimes the temperature

Speaker 6: fluctuated so that the weather would alternate between rain, sleet, and snow from day to day. A landscape covered with ice and snow would suddenly melt during one warm afternoon

with

Speaker 6: water running into the trenches

Speaker 61: only to have it all freeze again later that night

No matter how

Speaker 6: much rain fell on the western front, though, it was never enough to wash away the filth

The

Speaker 40: muddy, pockmarked, lifeless landscape, suffused with smoke and acrid fumes, smelled of sweaty, unwashed men, of their piss and shit, their garbage, "'and of rotting flesh of

Speaker 4: corpses that lay at every hand. "'No

man's land

Speaker 4: between the two sides' trenches "'was littered with dead bodies

Speaker 38: some of them

Speaker 4: blown to

Speaker 38: bits, others intact, "'and propped up by the endless mass of barbed wire "'like some kind of macabre

Speaker 4: scarecrow. "'Dead

bodies couldn't

Speaker 4: always be evac for processing. "'Sometimes they sat in the trenches for

days.' You can't take

Speaker 6: your friend's body topside to bury him, because then they'll be burying you with him, and so you bury him beneath the floor of the trench. But

by the middle

Speaker 6: of the war, in many places, there was no more room

Speaker 10: to bury more bodies underfoot. And

when the

Speaker 10: ground was churned

Speaker 4: up into mud, the rotting bodies would rise to the surface. One

soldier

Speaker 62: told a story about trudging through the muck in the dark when his foot got caught on something

He had

Speaker 4: to reach down with his hands into the dirty water, into the mud, to work his foot

Speaker 10: out

and when he

Speaker 10: did, he realized that his boot had pushed through the soft chest of a rotting corpse, and he'd gotten tangled up in the dead

Speaker 6: man's ribcage. A

German soldier, whose

Speaker 6: face had been blown

Speaker 4: off by a French sniper, was sat down in a corner of his trench until something could be done with him. He stayed there for days

His

Speaker 4: friends covered his face

Speaker 63: with a cloth out of respect and so that they didn't have to be reminded of what would happen if the sniper got them

The

Speaker 4: smell, the smell of rotting flesh, wasn't something one encountered. It was in every breath the men took for as long as they remained at the front. At

great battle

Speaker 4: sites like Verdun or the Somme

Men

Speaker 4: coming to relieve the frontline soldiers said they

Speaker 59: could smell the scene long before they saw it, when they were still miles away from the fighting. A

private remembered that his

Speaker 64: overriding memory of all of his time on the Western Front

Speaker 59: was the smell

You ever seen a dead

Speaker 8: body? I don't

mean in a

Speaker 8: funeral home, although even that can be jarring and uncanny

Speaker 5: and

is not

Speaker 5: something to be dwelt on for too long, but in the wild, in

a house

Speaker 5: or on the street

Dead bodies were such a common

Speaker 4: sight to the trench soldier that they hardly noticed them after a while. Some German soldiers who'd taken a British

Speaker 45: trench came across the arm of a British soldier jutting out from the side of a wall caved in by German

artillery, They

Speaker 4: stared at it dumbly for a moment and then shrugged and hung their rifles from it and sat down to rest. We

can read about

Speaker 6: bodies being stacked on top one another to give the living soldiers something to sit on above the water. In one particularly horrifying

Speaker 5: story, men who had recently retaken a trench from the Germans used a pile of corpses as a table to play cards on

Sorry to

Speaker 8: put these images in your mind But what

I want you to

Speaker 8: understand Is

Speaker 56: that this is not a bunch of criminal psychotics in the trenches This is factory workers Farmers

Speaker 4: school teachers, clerks It

was kids

Speaker 4: barely out of school Guys who had not yet been with a woman Or ever left their hometown Except to go to this war

well

Speaker 4: then there were the lice and

Speaker 5: the fleas and

of

Speaker 60: course the rats hordes of them everywhere all the time the German whose body was propped up in

Speaker 8: a corner after being killed by the French sniper his friend stood watch to keep the rats from chewing his flesh but not everyone had friends like that or conditions made it impossible to be vigilant all the time

And

Speaker 8: even that German, whose friends watched over him, even he couldn't be watched all the time

The man who

Speaker 8: told the story remembered waking up from a nap one day

and being

Speaker 8: startled when the shroud hanging over his dead friend's head began twitching

He knew from

Speaker 38: experience what it was, but even still his nerve almost failed him, he says, and he almost just walked away rather than face what was under that cloth

But this

Speaker 8: was his friend

and he

Speaker 8: worked up the courage to pull away the cloth and found two rats picking through the exit wound behind

Speaker 59: the dead man's ear, digging

in to get

Speaker 59: at what brains hadn't been blown onto the trench wall by the bullet. There

were hundreds of

Speaker 1: millions of them. And

the rats weren't

Speaker 1: just numerous, they were huge, and had been

feasting on the

Speaker 35: flesh of human beings for so long that they had no fear of the soldiers

Thank you. A British

Speaker 14: soldier told of a man from his unit who'd ventured out into no man's land and was blown up by a landmine

It didn't kill

Speaker 4: him, but the explosion had drawn the attention of every German gun within range so his unit couldn't send men out to retrieve him

And so he

Speaker 4: screamed and screamed into the night

begging for

Speaker 5: someone to save him, crying that he'd been crushed and couldn't move

Sometime

Speaker 55: after midnight, the rats found him

and what had

Speaker 55: been the screams

Speaker 4: of a man in pain became the horrified screams of a little boy confronted with the worst imaginable nightmare. His friends ran up and down the trench looking for a clear shot so they could put him out of his misery rather

than

Speaker 4: Having him watch the rats eat his paralyzed body alive

Speaker 56: but they could not see him, and so they listened to him scream until he passed out from shock or loss of blood

There was so much to eat that the

Speaker 65: rats could

Speaker 66: afford to be

Speaker 65: picky, often eating just the eyes and burrowing in to get at the liver, leaving the rest of the meat to rot

Even the

Speaker 67: living would

Speaker 59: wake up to find rats nibbling at their earlobes or any other exposed flesh they could get at

Historian

Speaker 4: John Ellis describes an encounter of a French soldier in what he says

Speaker 5: was a typical story. One evening, whilst on patrol

Speaker 4: Jacques saw some rats running from under the dead men's greatcoats. Enormous rats, fat with human

Speaker 5: flesh

His

Speaker 5: heart pounding, he edged toward one of the bodies. Its helmet had rolled off

Speaker 4: The man

Speaker 5: displayed a grimacing

Speaker 40: face, stripped of

Speaker 4: flesh. The skull bare, the eyes devoured. A set

Speaker 40: of false

Speaker 4: teeth had slid down onto his rotting jacket, and from the yawning mouth leapt an unspeakably foul beast

Speaker 18: well-fed black rats multiply at an astronomical rate a

single

Speaker 8: couple under ideal circumstances can

give

Speaker 44: birth to eight or nine hundred young per year but even in those numbers even in those numbers the rats were still something

that

Speaker 40: you could occasionally get away from you could get away from you could swat away the lice and the fleas were

Speaker 68: ever-present. Every

man in

Speaker 4: the trench was swarming with them at all times. Your

clothes and

Speaker 4: blankets were covered with them

The vermin

Speaker 4: never produced anything like the plagues of the past, but they did carry lesser diseases that every soldier contracted eventually

Black

Speaker 45: clouds of huge flies gorged on corpse flesh were took over the battlefield in trenches so that every piece of exposed food was covered with them in seconds

And so you're cold, you're

Speaker 45: wet, you're filthy, sleep-deprived

Speaker 10: and sick

You're covered

Speaker 10: in lice and rashes, maybe with chunks of rotting skin falling off your body, eating food covered in flies, swatting rats off the corpse of your friend, whose stink is so pervasive

Speaker 56: that it soaks into your clothes, your hair, your bread

And this was not something you

Speaker 56: experienced occasionally. It wasn't the worst vacation

Speaker 5: you'd ever been on

This was

Speaker 5: the world in which tens of millions of men spent their young adulthood. And

we haven't even

Speaker 5: talked about

Speaker 8: the guns and the gas

We

Speaker 8: haven't talked about battle

The scale of

Speaker 8: combat on the Western Front was titanic

never before

Speaker 69: witnessed in the history of the world

Unimaginable

Speaker 70: artillery barrages, including shells filled with poison gas

Speaker 4: followed by millions of men being thrown at entrenched lines of machine gunners, riflemen, and defensive artillery fire

The

Speaker 6: British army suffered 60,000 casualties on the

Speaker 65: first day of

the Battle

Speaker 65: of the Somme. The

Speaker 44: first day. And

then that battle went

Speaker 44: on for another four and a half months. When

it was

Speaker 54: over, the British, French, and Germans had taken over a million casualties. In one

Speaker 8: offensive. Just think about

Speaker 55: that

The Battle

Speaker 55: of Verdun, another 800,000 casualties The Battle

of the

Speaker 55: Frontiers

Speaker 8: another 700,000 First Battle of the Marne, 600,000 Passchendaele, 800,000 Any one of these battles would have been the biggest and deadliest

Speaker 71: war Europe had ever seen And

there were

Speaker 71: several

Speaker 6: of them every fighting season The

best writers of the

Speaker 6: early 20th century tried and mostly failed to describe what battle on the Western

Speaker 4: Front was like

Even when they

Speaker 4: hit the mark, it's almost impossible for most of us to imagine the emotional impact of these experiences

During the Battle of Passchendaele, that

Speaker 4: 1917 British assault in Flanders, a British soldier described coming

Speaker 45: across an artillery shell crater that had turned into a death trap for wounded soldiers stumbling back to the rear

Speaker 35: Quote

A

Speaker 35: khaki-clad leg, three heads in a row, the

rest

Speaker 5: of the body submerged, giving one the idea that they had used their last ounce of strength to keep their heads above the rising water. In another

Speaker 4: miniature pond, a hand still gripping a rifle is all that is visible, while its next-door neighbor is occupied by a steel helmet and half a head, the staring eyes staring icily at the green slime

Speaker 59: which floats on the surface, almost at their level

Speaker 8: Passchendaele became a byword for the brutality and futility of combat in the First World War

The Canadian

Speaker 8: historian and military

Speaker 60: officer D.J. Goodspeed

Speaker 45: described the scene encountered by a batch of British troops just outside Ypres

The troops who marched up

Speaker 45: through the broken

Speaker 60: arch of the Menin Gate, across the footbridge over the Iser

Speaker 4: Canal, and made their way to the line, came on a dreary plain that stretched as far as the eye could see

It was a

Speaker 60: nightmare landscape, featureless, evil-smelling

Speaker 5: a gray waste of scum-coated water and mud. It was all too easy to sink down and suffocate in the

Speaker 4: stinking mud. Horses, mules, and men were often lost this way, and many of the walking wounded never reached the regimental aid post

The

Speaker 4: thousands of shell holes were filled with water, and in some the water was reddened with blood, and in some there floated, horribly bloated corpses, end quote. The

mud at Passchendaele

Speaker 5: was like something from an alien planet. It

swallowed whole

Speaker 5: vehicles

Speaker 4: and artillery pieces, just as it swallowed men. Private David Jones of the Royal Welch Fusiliers participated in the Passchendaele Offensive, and he remembered, In this desolation the mud is unfathomable, and men and horses sink without trace. Guns stick fast, mules flounder, wagons overturn, and men reel and stumble like drunkards. Jones

captain

Speaker 72: Robert Graves, said

Speaker 44: that the

mud did

Speaker 44: not seem like an inert environmental threat

but

Speaker 71: a living, evil thing that

Speaker 6: existed to kill men and make them suffer

Soldiers sometimes

Speaker 6: had to cross kilometers of deep mud, while being raked by enemy machine guns and pounded by artillery

Often artillery

Speaker 6: shells would be smothered by the deep mud before they exploded, which provided some protection from shrapnel, but

Speaker 4: the explosion would create a large empty space under the mud that would then collapse and swallow alive all the men in their vicinity

The sky was

Speaker 60: darkened by rain

Speaker 4: clouds and smoke, and light was provided by flares fired high over a battlefield on which there was nothing alive except human beings and the bacteria and vermin that feasted

on their

Speaker 4: corpses. Shell craters

Speaker 71: full of fetid

Speaker 60: stinking water, the surface sprayed with noxious chemicals, men fallen into flooded shell holes weighed

Speaker 65: down by too much gear to swim, drowning in a soup of mud and poison gas and waste given off by the torn and rotting corpses of their comrades. To

even make their

Speaker 4: way from one place to another. Wide wooden planks were laid down to distribute their weight, and you better stay on those

Speaker 5: planks. Artillery shells and machine gun bullets be damned You better stay on those planks But that was harder than it sounds Given

Speaker 8: that the men were often stumbling around from lack of sleep Overburdened by gear With bullets and explosions

Speaker 6: all around Not to mention that the planks quickly accumulated a layer of grease From the smoke that covered

the

Speaker 60: battlefield A British private who was there said If you fell off the duck boards, you never got out Men and horses sank, and they just disappeared

The official British

Speaker 5: account of the battle, based on

Speaker 38: interviews and written accounts from the men who fought at Passchendaele, recalled, A party

of men

Speaker 73: passing up to the

Speaker 4: front line found a man bogged down to above the knees. The united efforts of four of them with rifles under his armpits

Speaker 6: made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, was impossible, for there was no foothold. duty

Speaker 5: compelled them to move on up the line and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched man was still there but only his head was visible and he was raving mad end quote

there are stories of men

Speaker 5: trapped like this and begging their friends for the mercy of a bullet and their

Speaker 8: friends often gave it to them and carried that memory with them on top of everything else

The lines

Speaker 8: were pounded by artillery in the lead up to a great battle But even in relative downtime, shells fell all the time Even

if you were in a

Speaker 8: reserve

Speaker 74: unit, not in a front line trench Very often they were hit harder than the front line trenches Because

Speaker 4: advancing troops were going to be close to the front line trenches And so they would fire behind the lines There was

nowhere safe There

Speaker 4: were anti-personnel shrapnel shells that sprayed small metal balls out in a cone that covered an area more than a football field. The

purpose of

Speaker 75: these was to tear flesh. Then

there were shells packed

Speaker 75: with high explosives and fitted with a fuse so

Speaker 60: that they exploded on impact. And the purpose of these was to destroy earthworks and enemy

Speaker 4: defensive infrastructure. And

some were filled

Speaker 4: with poison gas

As the

Speaker 4: war dragged on, artillery tactics became more and more sophisticated. An attack meant to soften up the enemy for an

Speaker 65: assault might see shrapnel shells fired to drive men deep down into their bunkers

Speaker 4: which would be followed up by high explosive rounds to bury them alive if possible, and then followed up by shells

Speaker 2: carrying chlorine or mustard gas to seep into the hiding places of any survivors

The standard

Speaker 4: howitzer round was about 6 inches in diameter at the base, and weighed about 100 pounds. Even

deep in their

Speaker 4: dugouts

Speaker 6: front-line and reserve soldiers were experiencing traumatic brain injuries on a daily basis during heavy bombardments

I was at

Speaker 38: the range the other day sighting in my

Speaker 45: rifle for this year's elk hunt

The

Speaker 45: guy next to me was shooting this awesome, really expensive 338 Lapua. It's a big rifle. And every

Speaker 4: time he fired, I could feel this little shockwave from the muzzle blast as the round left the barrel

Now, a 338

Speaker 15: Lapua Magnum is a large round, but it's still just a rifle that the guy is holding. And the bullet itself only weighs just over half an ounce

And so

Speaker 6: imagine the shockwave from a 100-pound projectile packed with high explosives. And

those aren't

Speaker 6: even the big ones. Those

are just

Speaker 76: your standard field howitzers. As

both sides

Speaker 4: constructed fortifications that could stand up to those, larger guns became more common. We're talking nine 10-inch rounds that weighed 200 or more pounds each. There were even siege guns that fired 17-inch rounds

which

Speaker 4: are bigger than the shells fired from the big guns on a World War II battleship

Sometimes it might

Speaker 4: be half a dozen shells every hour just to keep you on your toes

But during

Speaker 4: scaled operations, artillery

Speaker 77: would open up until it sounded like a drumroll

with no

Speaker 77: break between one shot and the next, and it would go on for hours. In

very

Speaker 4: intense operations, like when one side was softening up the other before a major battle

Even

Speaker 4: the drum roll would increase in intensity until the reports merged all together. And it just sounded like one endless roar for hours

And the shells

Speaker 4: themselves were not silent. They would come in like screaming locomotives. A

lot of you veterans know

Speaker 4: from experience, but the rest of us have probably

Speaker 56: seen it in movies. You know that sound when a

Speaker 77: bullet whizzes past? That zzzz, zzzz. Well, larger rounds do that too, only they don't zzzz. They roar

They explode

Speaker 77: on

Speaker 56: impact and send geysers of Earth 50 to 100 feet up into the air as they blast craters that could be anywhere from 10 to 50 feet in diameter, up to 15 feet deep, and send thousands of pieces of deadly shrapnel in every direction

It would be crazy

Speaker 56: to have one of these land in your

Speaker 5: vicinity

Just the sensory

Speaker 5: overload and just the trauma, the experience... Just imagine they're coming down like rain, and not for one day, but all the time

It was an

Speaker 5: overwhelming sensory experience

Hundreds of

Speaker 5: thousands of men had to be hospitalized for what came to be known as shell shock

In one of many searing

Speaker 5: passages from Ernst Younger's war memoir, Storm of Steel, he recalled witnessing a

Speaker 38: barrage, quote

The

Speaker 38: earth trembled, the air boiled with the crash of shells, and the drumming on the eardrum was such

Speaker 6: that one felt as though one's skull would burst. Fragments whistled past, whined, hummed, clanged, and whirled up the soil into black

Speaker 78: geysers. The

whole

Speaker 69: surface of the earth was one great wound, gaping, smoking

Speaker 5: bleeding. A British

officer, Guy

Speaker 5: Chapman, in his memoir

Speaker 60: wrote

The

Speaker 79: great shells came rushing in

Speaker 60: each with the sound of an

Speaker 5: express train, and burst with a crash that shook the world. You had the impression of being the object of a relentless

Speaker 71: mechanical extermination, against which nothing could avail. The shells came with a sinister precision, whining, shrieking, rushing down as though each one had been aimed at me alone

There was no

Speaker 71: protection, no escape. Each one came with the shriek of something malevolent, Seeking me out, I felt hunted

Speaker 8: like an animal in a cage. There

was no

Speaker 8: defense, no shelter, no prayer that could save me

I was

Speaker 8: naked beneath that

Speaker 4: sky of iron, a sky filled with hatred

The feeling was of being

Speaker 4: hunted by some monstrous mechanical

Speaker 6: beast, end quote

Younger described

Speaker 6: the feeling of being under bombardment in similar

Speaker 60: terms, as feeling like a cowering prey animal, quote, we crouched low clutching the earth while the storm swept

Speaker 4: over us one could feel the air torn asunder by the iron rain each crash was followed

Speaker 71: by the whir of fragments you felt you were the object of a gigantic chase like game pursued by invisible hunters who missed

Speaker 5: you only by chance end quote

almost every account you find

Speaker 5: describes this feeling of being personally hunted amidst the chaos

an

Speaker 5: unknown british soldier wrote in a letter home

it is as if

Speaker 4: the guns can see you you lie in the mud face down while the whole world above you bursts and

Speaker 56: you wait like a condemned man for the stroke each shell seems meant for your body each explosion says

Speaker 45: this one is yours when

the whistle blew and you

Speaker 45: were ordered

Speaker 4: over the top to attack

You

Speaker 4: mounted the parapet and emerged into a hellscape with a raging hurricane of metal and fire tearing across it in your direction

The

Speaker 55: ground is churned up and muddy. You're 120

Speaker 5: pounds, carrying 80 pounds of gear, and the mud is sucking your boots down to the ankle with every

step. And

Speaker 6: the ground isn't even. It's pockmarked with moguls and blast craters, some of which are completely full of mud or water

And

Speaker 6: sometimes the mud is 10, 20 feet deep and in your panicked sprint across no man's land, it

sometimes

Speaker 8: looks solid enough to run on until you splash down into it and no one can pull you out

Speaker 59: without getting shot up by the enemy or pulled in after you

Guys are dropping

Speaker 4: like flies all around you as you look for a spot to take cover and catch your breath before breaking for the next one. Anti-personnel artillery shells and landmines are exploding all around you. Your head is pounding. Your mind is

Speaker 5: confused and unfocused from the concussive blasts. And it's so loud that you could not hear someone even if they were screaming directly into your ear. If

you make it far

Speaker 5: enough across

Speaker 47: the battlefield, you'll encounter row after row after row of tangled razor

Speaker 46: wire. And so you pull out your bolt cutters, which you've also been carrying, and start trying to cut your way through

but the

Speaker 8: wire has been placed in that specific spot to give the defenders a clear line of fire at anyone trying to cut it

so the

Speaker 56: enemy machine guns fix on your position and open up

Henri Barbus, a

Speaker 6: French soldier who wrote a novel based on

Speaker 77: his experiences while the war was still on, describes

what it

Speaker 45: was like to go on the attack. Quote, Halt! A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the parapets of the trench where we were halted at the moment. I

Speaker 38: looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision. In front of us, a dozen yards

Speaker 6: away at most, there were motionless forms outstretched side by side. A row

of

Speaker 4: moaned-down soldiers. And the countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling into this

Speaker 64: rank of the dead

The

Speaker 64: bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks amid raised slender stems of

Speaker 40: cloud were perforating, ripping the body so rigidly, close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs, plunging into the wan and

Speaker 65: vacant faces, bursting and bespattering the liquefied eyes. And

even did

Speaker 65: that file of corpses

Speaker 5: stir and budge out of line under the avalanche

We could

Speaker 5: hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as

Speaker 45: they pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife, the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing

Above us

Speaker 4: rushed jets of shrill whistling and the declining and far more serious hum of ricochets, and

we bent our

Speaker 4: heads under the enormous flight of noises and voices. "'Trench

must be

Speaker 60: cleared

Speaker 5: Get up

We leave

Speaker 5: this most infamous corner of the battlefield, where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain anew. We turn

Speaker 6: towards the right and towards the rear. The communication trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners. Here there's a further halt

Some of us have

Speaker 6: risked our heads over the edge of the bank, and have glimpsed for the

Speaker 4: space of the lightning's flash, all the field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since morning. and saw a limitless gray plain afar on the evil endless and half-ruined fields caverned like cemeteries we see the slender skeleton

of a

Speaker 4: church like a bit of torn paper and from one margin of the picture to the other

Speaker 5: dim rows of vertical marks close

Speaker 17: together and underlined like the straight strokes of a written page and these are roads and their

trees

Speaker 60: Delicate, meandering lines streak the plane backward and forward and rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men

Speaker 4: We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plane in the horrible face of flying firmament. It is difficult to believe that each one of those tiny spots is a living thing, with fragile and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, "'full of deep thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. "'Poor unknowns

Speaker 38: poor fellow men. "'It is your turn to give battle

We descend

Speaker 6: over the rough

Speaker 4: and slippery ground with involuntary gestures, "'helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. "'Mechanically, the eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, "'of the ruined ground, of the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, "'of the wreckage in the holes.' On all sides, the slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on the descent. Several bullets arrive at last among us. Bertrand shouts to us to reserve our grenades and wait to the last

Speaker 6: moment, but the sound of his voice is carried away. Abruptly, all the width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth and strike the air with terrible

Speaker 4: detonations. In line from left to right, fires emerge from the sky and explosions from the ground. It is a frightful curtain, which divides us from the world, which divides us from the past and from the future. We stop, fixed to the ground, stupefied by the sudden host that thunders from every

Speaker 6: side. Then a simultaneous effort uplifts our mass again and throws it swiftly forward. We stumble and impede each other in the

Speaker 4: great waves of smoke

with

Speaker 4: harsh crashes and whirlwinds of pulverized earth toward the profundity into which we hurl ourselves pell-mell we see craters opened here and there side by side and merging with each other then one knows

Speaker 54: no longer where the discharges fall volleys are let loose so monstrously resounding that

Speaker 4: one feels himself annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured thunder of these great constellations of destruction that

Speaker 65: form in the

sky one

Speaker 65: sees and one feels the fragments passing close to one's head with their hiss of red-hot iron

Speaker 4: plunged in water the

blasts of

Speaker 4: one explosion so burns my hands that i let my rifle fall i pick it up again reeling and set off in the tawny gleaming tempest with lowered head lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like volcanic

lava

Speaker 4: The stridor of the bursting shells hurts your ears, beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot endure it without a cry. The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up, rock us to and fro. We leap, and we do not know whither we go. Our eyes are blinking and weeping and obscured. The view before us is blocked by a flashing avalanche that fills

Speaker 45: space. It is the barrage fire. We have to go through that whirlwind of fire and those fearful showers that vertically fall

We are

Speaker 45: passing through

We are

Speaker 45: through it by chance

Here and

Speaker 5: there I've seen forms that spun around and were lifted up and laid down, illumined by a brief reflection from over yonder. I have glimpsed strange faces that uttered some sort of cry

You

Speaker 5: could see them without hearing them in the roar of annihilation. A brassiere full of red and black masses, huge and furious, fell about me, excavating the ground, tearing it from under my feet, throwing me aside like a bouncing toy. I remember that I strode over a

Speaker 45: smoldering corpse, quite black, with a tissue of rosy blood shriveling on him. And I remember, too, that the skirts of my

Speaker 4: greatcoat had caught fire and left a trail of smoke behind. On our right, all along Trench 97, our glances were drawn and dazzled by a rank of frightful flames, closely crowded against each other like

Speaker 60: men. Forward. Now we were nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face

Speaker 5: forward, and others who found her meekly, as though they would sit down on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the prostrate dead, quiet and rigid, or else offensive, and And also, more perilous snares, the wounded that

Speaker 8: hook onto you, struggling. The international trench. We are there

End quote. He

Speaker 80: continues

Speaker 4: Quote

A

Speaker 4: shower of bullets spurts around me, increasing the number of those who suddenly

Speaker 45: halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating, of those who dive forward solidly with all the

Speaker 4: body's burden, of the shouts, deep, furious and desperate, and even of that hollow and terrible gasp when a man's life goes bodily forth in a breath. And we who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run among the frolics of the death that strikes at random into our flesh. the wire entanglements, and there is one stretch of them intact. We go along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening. This is a colossal funnel hole, formed of smaller funnels placed together, a fantastic volcanic crater scooped there by the guns. The sight of this convulsion is stupefying. Truly, it seems that it must have come from the center of the earth, Such a rending of virgin strata puts new edge on our attacking fury. Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the hollows and the earthly mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet

Speaker 6: and we tear them out angrily. The accoutrements, stuff that cover the soft soil... The linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks prevents us from sticking

Speaker 4: fast in it, and we're careful to plant our feet in this debris

Speaker 45: when we jump into the holes or climb the hillocks. Behind us, voices urge us

Speaker 81: Forward, boys! Forward! Nom de Dieu! All the regiment is behind us! They cry

We do not turn

Speaker 45: round to see

Speaker 4: but the assurance electrifies our rush once more. No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are nearing. Some German dead or crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled heaps or extended

Speaker 56: lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite and sinister shape and detail. The loopholes. We are prodigiously, incredibly close. Something

Speaker 45: falls in front of us. It is a grenade. With a kick, Corporal Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the trench. With that fortunate deed, the squad

Speaker 6: reaches the trench. pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and has found himself involved with a corpse he reaches the edge and plunges into it the first to enter foilab with great

Speaker 4: gestures and shouts jumps into the pit almost at the same time that pepin rolls down into it indistinctly i see in the time of a lightning's flash a whole row of black demons

Speaker 5: stooping and squatting for the descent on the ridge of the embankment on the edge of the dark ambush A terrible volley

Speaker 82: burst point-blank in our faces

Speaker 4: flinging in front of us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earth and verge. After the stunning shock, we shake ourselves and burst into devilish laughter

Speaker 45: The discharge has passed too high. And at once, with shouts and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly of the trench

i hope you'll

Speaker 5: forgive my resorting to these extended quotations these are experiences that are best related in narrative

Speaker 83: form by men who were there or at least one who has studied and

Speaker 84: spoken to men who were there and written their stories down i

could tell

Speaker 85: you of gas attacks of the choking panic

of

Speaker 85: The blistering

Speaker 5: skin, the bloody vomit and yellow film that covered every inch of a victimized soldier. But

I could never

Speaker 60: explain to you the terror of what it was like

Here, novelist

Speaker 63: Sebastian Barry, in his book A Long, Long Way, about a young Irish soldier named Willie Dunn

does his best

Speaker 63: to put into

Speaker 45: words Willie's first encounter with poison gas. Quote

The

Speaker 5: yellow cloud was noticed first by Christy Moran "'because he was standing on the fire step

Speaker 4: with his less-than-handy mirror arrangement, "'looking out across the quiet battlefield. "'That little breeze had freshened, "'and it blew now against the ratty hair "'that dropped out of Christy Moran's hat here and there. "'So

the

Speaker 8: breeze was more of a wind "'and was blowing full-on against Christy's hat and mirror, "'but it was nothing remarkable. "'What was remarkable

Speaker 5: was the strange... yellow-tinged cloud that had just appeared from nowhere like a sea fog

But not like

Speaker 5: a fog

Speaker 8: really

He knew what a

Speaker 8: flaming fog looked like, for God's sake, being born and bred near the sea in fucking Kingstown

He watched for a

Speaker 8: few seconds in his mirror

straining to

Speaker 8: see and straining to understand

It was about

Speaker 8: four o'clock, and all as peaceful as anything

Not even the

Speaker 8: guns were firing now

Now. The

Speaker 8: caterpillars foamed on the yellow flowers, and the grass died in the path of the cloud. That

was only Christy

Speaker 8: Moran's impression, maybe. He hoiked down the mirror a moment and wiped it clean with his cleanest sleeve. Back up it went. The

cloud didn't

Speaker 8: look too

Speaker 56: deep, but it was as wide as the eye could see. Christy

Moran was

Speaker 56: absolutely certain how he could see figures moving in the yellow smoke. "'It must be some sort of way of hiding the advancing men,' he was thinking. "'Some new-fashioned piece of warfare.' "'Would you fetch out the captain?' he said to O'Hara. "'All

Speaker 86: right, boys. Stand now in readiness. "'Get those rifles up here. Machine gunners. "'Start firing there into that bloody cloud

So, the

Speaker 6: gun detail leaped to their machine gun, Joe McNulty and Joe Keelty, the loaders as ever, Mayo men, and cousins too, that joined up somewhere against the wishes

Speaker 4: of their fathers, they had confessed, and the bullets started clattering away from them, the water man keeping the gun well

Speaker 1: cooled, the shooter firm on his knees and expecting all the while to have the top of his noggin

shot

Speaker 8: off. But this was a very curious advance. Captain Pasley came out and stood contemplatively by Christy Moran, who had abandoned his mirror and was now standing up on the

Speaker 10: fire step. Such was his puzzlement. "'What's going on, Sergeant Major?' said Captain Pasley. "'I

couldn't tell

Speaker 10: you for the life of me,' said Christy

Speaker 4: Moran. "'There's just this big fucking cloud about fifty yards off, drifting along in the wind

It doesn't

Speaker 4: look like fog. It

might be

Speaker 87: smoke from the fires there burning.' "'Might be

Can you

Speaker 87: see them coming on? I

thought I

Speaker 87: could, sir, but there doesn't seem to be anyone. No shouts, no cries. It's

Speaker 4: as quiet as

Speaker 87: a nursery, sir

Speaker 4: and the baby's all asleep. Very good, Sergeant Major. Cease firing, men

The Algerians to

Speaker 42: the right were a little ahead of them, as the trench twisted away there in a slight salient

All

Speaker 4: the Irish were on the fire step now, all along the length of the trench, some 1,500 men showing their faces to this unknown freak of weather, or whatever it might be. The

commanding

Speaker 5: officer was rung up and told what was afoot, but there wasn't any coherent order he could think to give, except

to

Speaker 4: be cautious and to shoot anything that came creeping

There had been no

Speaker 4: warning barrage, and the dense smoke didn't look too threatening. It

was beautiful

Speaker 4: in a

Speaker 5: way

The

Speaker 5: yellow seemed to boil about and sink into whatever craters it was offered "'and then rise again

Speaker 8: with the march of the main body of smoke. "'There were still birds singing behind them. "'But whatever birds had been in front of them were silent now. "'Captain Pasley removed his hat and scratched his balding pate "'and put the hat back on again. "'I don't know,' he said. "'Like a London fog

Speaker 87: only worse

The big

Speaker 5: snake of turning yellow reached the parapet of the Algerian trench, far over to the right, and now strange

Speaker 6: noises were heard. The soldiers seemed to be milling about haphazardly, as if invisible soldiers had fallen in on them, and

were

Speaker 1: bayoneting them without restraint. That wasn't a good sound

The colonial

Speaker 1: men were roaring now, and there were other frightening cries, as if the unseen

Speaker 5: horde were throttling them

Of

Speaker 5: course, the Irishmen could not see into the trenches as

Speaker 6: such, but in their mind's eye, a ferocious slaughter must have been afoot. Horrible laments

Speaker 5: rose from the affronted Algerians. Now they were climbing up the Peridos and seemed to be fleeing back toward the rear

The smoke

Speaker 5: came steadily on. "'It's the smoke,' said Captain Pasley. "'There's something wrong with the smoke, gents

now in

Speaker 5: his old house at home in Wicklow there were seven fireplaces and two or three of them were as leaky as old buckets and when they were lit smoke poured forth into the bedrooms above them and that was an evil smoke but it would not drive you back as if you were cattle as was happening to those poor men of Algiers now for some reason tearing off their uniforms and writhing on the ground and howling howling was the word

for it The

Speaker 6: Dublin Fusiliers took the smoke at the furthest right tip, beside the Algerians. Exactly the same thing happened. Now the men were possessed

Speaker 5: of an utter fear of this dark and seemingly infernal

Speaker 8: thing creeping along, seeming to make the grass fizz and silencing birds and turning men into howling demons. On instinct, the men pushed down along the trench, as anyone would do in the same

Speaker 4: circumstance, crowding into the next stretch suddenly, so that the men there for a moment thought they were being attacked from the turn of the trench

These

Speaker 4: men in turn were panicked and poured out onto

Speaker 5: the next section, and because the line of the trench was only at the slightest of angles to the line of the smoke, they had to move proportionately faster to keep ahead of it

Soon the

Speaker 5: third and fourth stretches were in a hopeless

Speaker 4: tangle, and the smoke poured in upon them. In the sudden yellowy darkness, awful sounds sprang up

like a

Speaker 4: harvest of hopeless cries. O'Hara started to scramble up the peridots behind, and it was only Christy Morant's bark that made him stop. The sergeant major looked to the captain. Captain Pasley's face had turned the color of a sliced potato. There was the same bloom on it, also of damp

I need to ring headquarters and

Speaker 4: ask them what to do. What is this hellish thing? No time for that, sir, said the sergeant major. Can I let the

Speaker 87: men fall back, sir? I have no earthly orders for such a thing, said Captain Pasley. We are to hold this position. That's all there is to it

You

Speaker 87: won't hold nothing against that smoke, sir. "'Best to fall back to the reserve trenches anyhow. "'There's something deathly and

wrong

Speaker 8: But before such a sensible conversation could continue, "'the smoke was slipping down the parapet about a dozen yards ahead

Speaker 6: itself like dozens and dozens of slithering fingers, "'and there was a stench so foul that Willie Dunn gripped his stomach. "'Joe McNulty came tumbling down from his emplacement, "'gripping his mayo throat like a dog done in by poison meant for rats

Speaker 13: Get the fuck out!' said Christy Moran. "'All

Speaker 88: right!' said the captain. "'I'll hold the fort here, Sergeant Major. "'You will on your fuck, sir, begging your flaming pardon. "'Come on

Speaker 55: Willie Dunn and his comrades scaled the peridose, "'and everyone started

Speaker 8: to stumble back across the broken ground. "'It was astonishing to be up out of the trench "'and going along at the

level of

Speaker 8: normal things. "'Ghosts of soldiers plummeted up out of the smoke

to

Speaker 8: the right

and

Speaker 6: tottered screaming along falling to their knees their hands around their throats like those funny men in the music halls that would pretend to be strangled and it was their own hands at their necks doing the throttling now there was no question of order or retreat the soldiers that had not

had a

Speaker 6: dance with the smoke just went tearing away towards what they hoped was safety after some hundreds of yards they reached one

Speaker 4: of the advanced batteries who without a word caught the horror in their faces and began to shout and pull and jostle try to get up the horse's quickly to bring their guns, for it would be a fearsome disaster to let the guns be captured. But

it was

Speaker 4: all aspiration. When the scores and scores of suffering men were beheld, staggering towards them like an insane enemy, the artillerymen scarpered too. There was nothing else to be done. Anyone that lingered tasted

Speaker 8: the smoke, felt the sharp tines in his throat raking and gashing, and he was undone. Now and then, miraculously, a man seemed to run unscathed from the gloom, running all the faster for his escape

Speaker 4: rifles were scattered now across the pounded fields as if some proper battle were being fought after all willie dunn ran with the rest there

was a

Speaker 4: bottleneck ahead where

Speaker 5: the ground had been fought over a few weeks back and the men had to get up on a rough road to make any progress at all this of course engendered the wild fear of being prevented from escaping at all and still the vile smoke came on behind Men were slushing into craters

Speaker 4: to try to swim across and could not get to the other blessed side. No act of virtue or rescue was possible. Every man had to do for himself. Now three or four battalions seemed to be mixing themselves together. There were the remnants of the Algerians and some regular French soldiers and the fusiliers themselves, and there were lads from some Lincolnshire regiments that must have been driven from across the field. Everyone was gripped by the same

Speaker 40: remorseless impulse, to flee the site of this nameless death. If

Speaker 6: it were a battle proper, these men would never have turned tail. They would have fought to the last man in the trenches and put up with that and cursed their fate

Speaker 4: But it was the

Speaker 6: force of something they did not know that drove

Speaker 89: them, shoving and gasping away from that long, long monster with yellow skin

There were

Speaker 4: officers now along the road trying in a bewildered and puzzled fashion to get the men to turn around. They did not know what was happening, and all they saw was that the men seemed to be deserting wholesale

A

Speaker 4: route like this was unheard of, unless a man was a veteran of the terrible pushback from Mons to the Marne in the first months of the war

Battalions in

Speaker 4: reserve had to conclude that there had been some mighty breakthrough by the Hun, but this seemed entirely mysterious, as no one had received the least

Speaker 5: message in this direction, and no mass bombardment had been heard and endured. Furthermore, no bullets even followed the retreating

Speaker 8: and desperate men

Now a weakened

Speaker 8: version of the stench seemed to be everywhere

It

Speaker 8: was getting into every niche and nook in creation, into ears and eyes, into mouse holes and rat holes. But the danger then was

Speaker 4: at last passing. Men dropped where they found themselves, soaked in sweat, already exhausted men, further exhausted by such a hard gallop across ruined ground. Willie Dunn

Speaker 45: was visited by a tiredness so deep that he lay where he had fallen and plummeted further into a dreamless sleep

He awoke to

Speaker 45: a yellow world. His first thought was that he was dead. It

was the

Speaker 4: small hours of the morning and there were still torches and lights being used. Long lines of men were going back along the road with weird faces, their right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front, about forty men in a chain sometimes. He thought horribly of the revelation of St. John and wondered if by chance and lack he had reached the unknown date of the end of the living world. smeared across the faces was a yellowish grease the men's uniforms had turned a peculiar and undesirable yellow and all the acres of the world had been seared and ruined afresh even the leaves of the trees so fresh the day before seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about

Speaker 38: sadly not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside but a dank

Speaker 1: dead, metallic rustling

as

Speaker 1: if every drop of sap had been replaced with a dreadful poison. End quote

You were a goner if you took

Speaker 38: the full brunt of a gas attack

But of

Speaker 38: course, not everyone died

Some were

Speaker 38: just late getting their masks on, or else put them on in

Speaker 5: a way that they didn't seal properly. These men were merely blinded, not always for good, but

Speaker 63: sometimes... or they had their lungs wrecked, and that was usually a life sentence

After the war

Speaker 63: there were thousands of young men on both

sides

Speaker 38: who had to live the rest of their lives as if they'd been smoking two packs a day for 60 years, unable to get up a flight of steps without pausing a few times for breath

Your reward

Speaker 38: for coming through unscathed was that you got to go back

Speaker 40: to living in the wet, muddy

Speaker 56: desert. Rat-infested, lice-bitten, corpse-stuffed whole until it was your turn again. This was your

Speaker 4: life. And by 1917, most frontline troops had been living this life for almost three years. A

young American

Speaker 4: preacher wrote a short book published by the YMCA that year

In it, he

Speaker 4: wrote

War is

Speaker 4: now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds. It is shooting by telephone orders at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men. War, he said, is men with jaws gone, eyes

Speaker 54: gone, limbs gone, minds gone. And

yet, this

Speaker 59: young American clergyman ended

Speaker 60: his book, with a call for American men to enlist and go fight in Europe

Everything I've

Speaker 91: described so far was a common experience of every front soldier, on all sides. If

anything

Speaker 6: the French had it the worst, because their military culture was so focused on always being on the attack that they could never bring themselves to think of their trenches as anything more than a temporary stop

Speaker 5: before they moved forward

And so

Speaker 5: they were always in disrepair

But now

Speaker 92: take everything I just described

from

Speaker 47: the acute expenditures of total effort and battle to the daily grind, to digging out and bailing water from the collapsed trenches and carrying gear equal to 60% to 70% of your body weight through ankle-deep mud and knee-deep water

and now

Speaker 5: imagine doing it all on an empty stomach

That was

Speaker 59: an element of suffering that was felt only by Germany and the other central powers

When the war

Speaker 15: began, all sides envisioned a short, sharp conflict to settle which powers were going to hold

Speaker 5: sway in Europe

All sides

Speaker 5: envisioned that, but the Germans needed it to happen that way. Of

course, it

Speaker 5: didn't go that way

A war

Speaker 4: that everyone hoped and believed would be short and decisive had devolved into an apparently purposeless and maybe endless killing machine

Speaker 47: that chewed up human bodies with mathematical regularity and which seemed to operate without regard for the plans or desires of the people involved

The main military

Speaker 47: lesson taken from the first few months of the war was that technology like machine guns

Speaker 4: Accurate long-range rifles, barbed wire

Speaker 38: precision artillery had given the defender a huge advantage over the attacker

And so the Germans

Speaker 5: after their initial push into France and Belgium was brought to a halt, hunkered down

Speaker 8: and dug their trenches and built a powerful defensive line that stretched all the way from the English Channel to the border of neutral Switzerland

Speaker 38: that was in the west. The Eastern Front never settled into the kind of stasis for which the Western Front became famous, but military frontiers were established there

Speaker 4: as well. It's oversimplifying things a bit, but the basic situation was that the Germans simply didn't have the manpower to attempt a decisive

Speaker 6: blow on one front without making themselves fatally vulnerable on another front

In any

Speaker 6: case

They

Speaker 6: were

Speaker 8: the ones who were now occupying their enemy's land, not the other way around, so the impetus to attack was on their enemies, not on Germany

All Germany had

Speaker 8: to do was hold its ground until the other side got tired of smashing headfirst into their defensive line and opted for a negotiated conclusion that hopefully favored

Speaker 47: Germany

That was the

Speaker 47: plan. In 1915 and 16, all sides had played their part. No

The

Speaker 47: Entente threw bodies at the Central Powers' lines, and the Central Powers threw them back

But still, the

Speaker 5: cold, hard math continued to favor the Entente. The

soldiers they

Speaker 5: lost could be replaced by men drawn from their globe-spanning

Speaker 8: empires, while German reinforcements could only be drawn from each year's graduating class

The

Speaker 8: Entente had access to financing from the Americans into the resources of six continents, while Germany and her allies already by 1916 were beginning to starve

Germany had no

Speaker 4: substantive plan for

a long war. The country is relatively

Speaker 45: resource poor and even before the 20th century often had difficulty providing

Speaker 6: for all of its people

That's

Speaker 6: a big reason there are large German populations in the Americas, and there used to be large German populations

Speaker 4: in the countries of Germany's near-abroad in Eastern Europe. These were outlets for excess population. In

1914

Speaker 47: Germany depended on imports for at least a third of her food staples, her fertilizers

Speaker 4: and her animal feed

And with the

Speaker 4: outbreak of war, those imports disappeared

as

Speaker 4: Germany's enemies locked down her borders and the British Navy locked down her coast

Central powers made do

Speaker 4: by using up stores and

Speaker 47: rationing in 1915, but poor crop yields and more efficient blockade tactics by the Royal Navy made hunger and deprivation a major problem by 1916

As early as October 1914, a

Speaker 47: few months into the war, to save grain, Bakers

Speaker 5: in Germany were using potato flour to make bread

But soon

Speaker 5: potatoes were in short supply, and flour was made from corn and lentils

And by late

Speaker 5: 1916, when even those were hard to come by, they made up the difference with sawdust and straw

Food scarcity

Speaker 5: naturally affected the poor first and most severely, but everyone

Speaker 6: was feeling it. Princess Blücher

said, An

Speaker 6: Englishwoman who'd married a German aristocrat kept a diary of her life in Germany

Speaker 38: during the war

In it, she

Speaker 38: wrote, quote, We are all growing thinner every day, and the rounded

Speaker 5: contours of the German nation have become a legend of the past. We are all gaunt and bony now, and have dark shadows round

Speaker 8: our eyes, and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering when our next meal will be, end quote

End quote. Like

Speaker 6: all countries in the war Germany censored the mail But bad news still made it through Soldiers

Speaker 38: who went home on leave Found their family starving And they brought those stories back to the front Women whose husbands had been killed in the war Watched their children waste away from hunger There were food protests and even riots Mostly involving women Since most of the men were in the army In the autumn of 1915, and even more widespread and intense waves of riots in the summer of 1916, when things were getting really bad

The government did

Speaker 38: what it could

Speaker 56: Extra rations were allocated for

Speaker 5: workers in heavy industry, people who burned the most calories

women in

Speaker 5: the last three months of pregnancy were given extra rations and some other groups, but this was complicated to enforce, and at the end of the day, there was no getting around the fact that there was

Speaker 4: simply not enough food available. C

Paul Vincent

Speaker 4: in his book The Politics of Hunger, quotes an eyewitness, quote, Once

I set out for

Speaker 4: the purpose of finding in these food lines a face that did not show the ravages of hunger

But

Speaker 5: among the 300 applicants for food, there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the youngest women and children, the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless

Eyes

Speaker 4: had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips, all color was gone, and the tufts of hair which fell over the parchmented faces seemed

Speaker 40: dull and famished, a sign that the nervous vigor of the body was departing with the physical strength

A Swiss

Speaker 40: diplomat reported seeing similar things

Speaker 5: quote, The

Speaker 40: faces of

Speaker 5: Berlin are gray with hunger. One sees children with legs like sticks, women fainting in queues, men too weak to work. It is as though the city is under a slow siege

Speaker 60: Death advances invisibly, not with shells, but with empty stomachs

End quote. Products like

Speaker 60: sugar, Milk and butter became luxuries early

Speaker 38: on and before long were hardly ever seen at all. Meat consumption dropped to 12% of pre-war levels

People with hookups in

Speaker 6: the countryside where people grew more of their own food than in the cities

often had more

Speaker 6: than others, but in large areas of the country, like the industrial heartland of the Ruhr in the West

much of the

Speaker 6: food had always come from far

Speaker 45: afield

And

Speaker 45: these areas were hit very hard. Middle-class housewives were searching dumpsters and trash heaps for scraps of used food, discarded

Speaker 4: food, that they could bring back to their children

Old people

Speaker 4: women, and children staggered around in fields outside of town, looking for gleanings and edible

Speaker 6: roots, even bugs, anything that would quiet the demon of hunger for just an hour

Speaker 4: looting and stealing became more common and magistrates were often faced with the difficult choice of whether to make an example of a poor mother stealing a loaf of bread for her hungry children

by the long

Speaker 5: winter of 1916-1917 the so-called turnip winter even

Speaker 39: potatoes had become a rare sight and many people lived almost exclusively throughout that winter on turnips and cabbage

Winston

Speaker 45: Churchill So

The

Speaker 45: architect of the blockade in its first year would later write, quote, The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress and avowedly

Speaker 6: sought to starve the whole population, men, women, children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission

And Churchill's kind

Speaker 6: of doing himself a favor here because it wasn't only Germany that was under this blockade

The

Speaker 5: German army stood in large parts of France and Belgium and in Slavic territories in the east, and those people

Speaker 17: starved too. Starvation tears society

Speaker 35: up by their roots

People start to

Speaker 5: behave in ways that they would never have even considered, because your mind goes when you're starving. You become like a

Speaker 60: crack fiend who needs his drug. He'll do anything to get it, because the need, the impulse, just swallows up every other human impulse until it's satisfied

Flavius Josephus, in his History of

Speaker 60: Jerusalem's Rebellion Against Rome in the First

Speaker 4: Century, tells the story of a woman who was caught roasting her baby for dinner

Things didn't get

Speaker 4: that bad

Speaker 8: in Germany now. But about 1% of the pre-war

Speaker 6: population, up to about 800,000 people, died of starvation or causes directly linked to malnutrition brought on by the blockade. 800,000

Speaker 8: people starving to death

What did those

Speaker 8: 800,000 do before they gave in to the hunger

What did the

Speaker 8: survivors do to keep alive

Speaker 2: Profound instincts scream in the brains of people watching their children starve

Speaker 65: Obligations that are taken for granted by people living together in good times wither away

Speaker 54: in a famine. The law-abiding start to

break the

Speaker 54: law. People

Speaker 8: who would never hurt a fly, let alone a

child, steal

Speaker 8: food from out of the mouths of their neighbor's children to quiet the rumbling in the

Speaker 6: bellies of

their own kids. these

Speaker 6: people have to go back to living next door to each other when the famine passes no society goes

Speaker 94: through a period of extreme deprivation like Germany faced during this period and

is the

Speaker 15: same when it's over imagine trying to fight a war in conditions that are hardly endurable under

the

Speaker 36: best

Speaker 5: circumstances

And not

Speaker 5: only doing it on an empty stomach, but doing it while knowing that your family back home is slowly starving to death. Knowing that your wife, your sister, your

mother is forced to

Speaker 60: steal and fight for food to feed her children or your children

Soldiers home on

Speaker 60: leave saw rail-thin

Speaker 4: women with drawn faces standing in queues for hours waiting for a scrap of food

They

Speaker 4: saw children with bloated, distended bellies and bulging eyes begging on the streets. Respectable, middle-class women with husbands and sons at the front fought with each other in the streets for scraps

Sometimes, after

Speaker 5: hours of waiting for a meager ration that would get their kids through the next few days, the window would slam shut and

a sign

Speaker 5: would be put

Speaker 8: up announcing that supplies had run out

but

Speaker 8: not before policemen got into position to deal with the potential riot that was sure to follow. As malnutrition set in, the overall health of the population rapidly

Speaker 4: declined

The number of

Speaker 4: stillbirths and deaths in early infancy skyrocketed. The death rate of tuberculosis for people in towns and cities nearly doubled over the course of the war, as did the number of those dying from typhoid

half

Speaker 4: of school children in the big cities were anemic 40% suffered from rickets a physician in hamburg recounted quote every day i see the swollen bodies of children suffering from hunger edema mothers bring them in with faces thin

Speaker 8: as skulls the children are so weak they cannot walk the old die quietly

The

Speaker 8: young protests with cries that cannot be stilled, end

Speaker 32: quote. 800,000 people

Germany's pre-war

Speaker 32: population was about 67 million in 1914, so that would be the equivalent of about 4 million Americans

Speaker 65: starving to death

Old people and

Speaker 49: kids died first

Starving new

Speaker 49: mothers couldn't make milk

and

Speaker 49: watched their babies starve to death

Like workers in

Speaker 4: heavy industry, men at the front received a larger food ration to account for the heavy labor that was often required of them, you know, digging and baling water, moving things around

just simply

Speaker 4: getting

Speaker 38: from one place to another with 70 pounds of gear on their backs

But even

Speaker 38: they rarely had enough

that food

Speaker 38: was not a

Speaker 49: predominant topic of every conversation

This would

Speaker 49: only continue to get worse and worse, right up until the end of the war and

and

Speaker 38: even far beyond the end of the war

You know, I mentioned

Speaker 38: Jocko earlier, and how he

Speaker 53: says that of all the wars in world history, World War I is the conflict he would least like to be involved with

I believe

Speaker 38: him, because if you rank the wars from ones you'd most to least want to be involved in, you can't say all or none, then one of them has

Speaker 4: to be at the bottom

But I

Speaker 4: still think that if you threw Jocko in a time machine and plopped him down in Flanders in the mud in 1917, he'd figure out how to have the time of his life

Because that's

Speaker 8: just how some people

Speaker 5: are

There's a

Speaker 5: certain kind of man—and

I think

Speaker 95: probably

Speaker 5: this idea sleeps in every man

but

Speaker 40: in a certain kind of man it doesn't sleep. It's wide awake, whispering in your ear from boyhood

A

Speaker 40: certain type who, while he respects and understands

Speaker 5: the need for every kind of labor, he

believes on some

Speaker 5: bone-deep level that there

Speaker 60: is really only one vocation, one calling that is truly worthy of a man

that of a soldier, a

Speaker 4: warrior. Such

a man can rest

Speaker 4: at home, he can enjoy its comforts for a while

But he

Speaker 4: knows that comfort is

Speaker 5: poison. He can feel it rotting his insides, dulling his senses, weakening him for the fight. And

he only truly feels

Speaker 5: at home, standing with his friends, across a battlefield from men with the capability

Speaker 8: and intent to take everything from him

Jocko is just one of

Speaker 8: those

Speaker 4: people

And

Speaker 4: he would have been one of those people, whether he was in Ramadi, Caisson

Speaker 55: Stalingrad, or Thermopylae

And I know it

Speaker 55: because there were men like

Speaker 5: that in every one of those battles

There were men like

Speaker 5: that in the trenches of the Great War

Ernst Younger was a

Speaker 5: man like that

Younger was a young infantry

Speaker 8: officer and stormtrooper

Speaker 96: in the German army

Speaker 8: Reflecting

Speaker 47: back on the war a decade later, he wrote

We

Speaker 4: cannot deny, as some would have it, that war, father of all things, is also in us. He has forged, chiseled, and hardened us. And always, as long as the spinning wheel of life continues to whirl within us, this war will be its axis

Speaker 60: He has educated us to fight, and we will remain fighters as long as we live

We

Speaker 60: lived in the womb of a culture

Speaker 5: gone insane, more confined than our ancestors, disintegrating between cravings and business at breakneck speed between glittering plazas and subway tunnels, lured into cafes

Speaker 35: by the glow of mirrors, boulevards, beams of colored light, bars full of glittering liquor, conference tables, everything up to date, a novelty every hour, every day a problem solved, a new sensation every week in great

Speaker 65: rattling lives. underlying discontent, children of an age intoxicated with the material. Progress appeared to us as the ultimate crowning achievement. The machine was the key to approaching God. The telescope and mirror were our organs of perception

But underneath

Speaker 65: that polished and shiny shell, underneath the robes with which we were adorned

Speaker 54: like magicians, We remain naked and raw like the men of the forest and steppe. In divine sparks, the blood

Speaker 56: spurts through the veins when one marches on the fields headed for battle

with a

Speaker 56: clear consciousness of one's daring

Under the

Speaker 4: warlike steppe, all the values of the world wither like leaves in autumn. Having reached such heights of charisma, one can only feel reverence for oneself. What is more sacred than a fighting

Speaker 60: human being

End quote. There were other men like Younger. One of them was the

Speaker 59: most famous soldier to

Speaker 61: emerge from the Great War

The most

Speaker 61: consequential man of our age, Adolf Hitler

Hitler had found his

Speaker 61: home in the army. It

was the first

Speaker 5: place he had

Speaker 45: ever really, truly felt at home

He was a

Speaker 45: 24-year-old artist renting a single room in

Speaker 97: Munich, living hand-to-mouth working the streets selling painted postcards and portraits of passers-by. Before

that, he had

Speaker 6: shuffled through men's homes and soup kitchens and spent many nights with hunger gnawing at his insides. When

the news came

Speaker 6: down in June 1914

Speaker 47: that Archduke Franz Ferdinand

the

Speaker 47: heir apparent to the Habsburg throne

Speaker 54: of Germany's ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Bosnian-Serb terrorist, Hitler was incensed, like most

Speaker 38: of his countrymen

The Austrians demanded

Speaker 77: satisfaction for the murder, and when Serbia wouldn't give it to them, a military operation was inevitable

When the Russian

Speaker 77: Empire

Speaker 47: in all likelihood with her ally France, made clear that

she would

Speaker 47: intervene in defense

Speaker 5: of Serbia

and

Speaker 5: Germany announced that she would honor her commitment to fight alongside Austria before anyone really knew what was happening. A continent that had known mostly peace for a hundred years suddenly found itself in the deadliest and most

Speaker 4: destructive war in human history

Despite governments

Speaker 4: on all sides predicting a great victory by the end of the year, the most perceptive observers and

Speaker 38: participants had a deep foreboding, as when one of... English Prime Minister Asquith's sons remarked that

Speaker 8: sinister influences, hostile and imponderable, seemed to be moving behind the veils, and

Speaker 6: there was a sense also of the tramp of some malign destiny marching toward disaster

But most did not pay

Speaker 6: attention

Speaker 5: to or even consider what might be lurking behind the veil, and instead rushed into the fire

Speaker 60: with wild abandon

The

Speaker 60: dislocations generated by Germany's very rapid Industrial Revolution

Speaker 56: had broken up ancient communities and called into question old customs and beliefs and

Speaker 4: created strife between newly conscious social classes. Millions

of people

Speaker 4: mostly men, whose ancestors had lived in the countryside and worked on farms for countless generations— milled around the teeming cities, looking for something that would restore a lost sense of belonging, purpose, a lost sense of order to their lives. Some dissipated themselves in alcohol or the passing pleasures on offer in the cities, but many latched on with great enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a drowning man clutching at a floating life ring and To social movements

Speaker 60: that promised to fill the void left by the abdication of family, church, and community. All

the

Speaker 6: things that had given structure and direction to the men's lives right up until the most recently passed generation. But

the ideological

Speaker 6: replacements, whether nationalism

Speaker 4: socialism, anarchism, what have you, just produced more conflict and antipathy within society

And

Speaker 5: everyone had the sense, and not only in Germany actually, but in all the belligerent countries, they

had the

Speaker 5: sense that they were in some kind of a holding pattern

Things could not

Speaker 5: simply continue as they were. They couldn't

The building

Speaker 5: pressures were becoming too

Speaker 39: great

And no one

Speaker 4: could imagine a world where the laws of physics were defied and the pressure just kept building indefinitely without an explosion of some kind

And so

Speaker 4: history, in other words, that

sense

Speaker 5: of continuity between past, present, and the immediate future, at least, the feeling of moving

Speaker 45: together toward a hoped-for future, it was

as if the

Speaker 45: pause button had been pressed

People were

Speaker 45: confused and overwhelmed and disoriented

Speaker 6: by the rapidity of change. The

English writer

Speaker 5: and historian Caroline Plain said, Reflecting on the summer of 1914 years later, wrote

Speaker 60: quote

Let

Speaker 65: us fight,' they said. "'Peradventure amidst the excitement of battling, "'we shall stumble onto a life fit

Speaker 4: for heroes.' "'There was a feeling abroad that life without great excitement "'was no longer tenable, that explosive forces had become

Speaker 65: too threatening, "'too dangerous to tolerate, too intractable to coordinate, impossible to subdue. "'Nations

Speaker 5: of men, fearing one another, glided into a suicidal attitude

Then

Speaker 4: they departed from the course of life and plunged into the adventure of death. They dethroned reason and espoused force, till large tracts of habitable earth became fatal playgrounds for maddened millions, whilst the masses of the home population watched and upheld and

Speaker 60: encouraged and loudly applauded the murderous game." Another

English

Speaker 35: novelist, Agnes Hamilton. Had one of her characters put it more succinctly

After all

Speaker 35: these years of unreality

Speaker 5: and sham, a big thing like this gives one the sense of having escaped out of the tunnel into the air. It's

the same impulse that causes

Speaker 5: people to pine for

Speaker 8: the apocalypse, for the EMP or the solar flare that hits the reset button and drags us out of the illusory world generated

Speaker 60: by our technological civilization

and

Speaker 60: back into the quote-unquote real world

People were waiting

Speaker 60: for something. No one knew

Speaker 4: what. Something that would bring about the moment of decision

that would be

Speaker 4: followed, they were sure of it

by a

Speaker 4: renewed sense of unity

It was not hard

Speaker 5: to believe that the moment had come in the summer of 1914. Americans who remember the days immediately following 9-11 will tell you how strangers passing on the street

Speaker 8: would exchange looks with each other, looks of acknowledgement. We don't know each other, but we're Americans. People were actually nicer to each other. That's

not my

Speaker 8: imagination. Anyone who was around will tell you that

You saw

Speaker 8: American flags everywhere. You saw

American flags everywhere. Less than

Speaker 5: a year after a contested election that came down to a few hanging chads on Florida voting sheets, George W. Bush had a 90% approval

Speaker 4: rating, something that is absolutely impossible to imagine in the decades before or since 9-11. This

is how it was in Germany and

Speaker 4: the other belligerent countries when the Great War broke out

only it

Speaker 65: was even more intense— Because back then, in the age of mass

Speaker 4: conscription, instead of boutique professional militaries like we have now, the outbreak of war meant that a whole generation of young men would be on the battlefield like in a month or two

Crowds of strangers

Speaker 4: in the streets would spontaneously break out into national anthems

Political opponents

Speaker 4: reached across the aisle. Socialist parties that had espoused international working-class solidarity

all

Speaker 4: of a sudden became

Speaker 47: nationalists and announced their fealty to king and country, and encouraged the working men of their own nations to take up arms against workers in neighboring countries

Hitler later recalled

Speaker 47: that when the German

Speaker 5: declaration of war was announced, I am not ashamed to say that, overcome with rapturous enthusiasm, I fell to my knees and thanked heaven from an

Speaker 4: overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time

Hitler was no conscript. He

Speaker 5: was a volunteer. Having previously been found physically unfit for service in peacetime, he wrote a letter to the King of Bavaria begging for the privilege of serving in his army. And later that day

after he sent

Speaker 5: the letter, as he stood in a crowd cheering the monarch

all he

Speaker 5: could think of was whether the King had received and read his

letter yet. The

Speaker 5: next day, a letter in

Speaker 40: reply

and

Speaker 40: Hitler says he opened it with trembling hands. It

was overjoyed

Speaker 40: that his request had been approved. He would be a soldier

After a short

Speaker 5: period of training, he, along with millions of other young men, went to war. Historian John Toland describes the

Speaker 60: atmosphere as this hopeful, naive generation waded into the bloodbath. Quote

A brigade

Speaker 4: lieutenant, a professional soldier named Fritz Wiedemann, watched with mixed feelings as Hitler and his comrades loaded into the cars. The regimental commander had not been on active service for years. Most of the companies were led by reserve officers, and the men had only perfunctory training. There

were few

Speaker 4: machine guns, the telephone equipment had been originally manufactured by a Nuremberg firm for the British Army

Speaker 5: and the men didn't even have iron helmets. Instead, they were going off to

Speaker 4: war in oilcloth caps, as did the volunteers of the 1812-13 Wars of Liberation

What the brigade

Speaker 8: lacked in equipment and training, it made up for in enthusiasm. As each train pulled

Speaker 4: out, the occupants laughed and sang. It was as if they were bound for a glorious party

There would be

Speaker 4: a few weeks of gallant and exciting fighting, and then victory by

Speaker 8: the new year

At dawn

Speaker 8: Hitler's train was running along the

Speaker 14: Rhine, a sight most of the Bavarians had never seen

The sun

Speaker 14: drawing

Speaker 5: up the mist from the river, suddenly revealed the gargantuan statue of Germania looking down from the Niederwald. All

along the

Speaker 4: train, the men spontaneously burst into Die Wacht am Rhine. I felt as though my heart would burst, recalled

Speaker 60: Hitler

Eight days later

Speaker 60: Hitler's company was thrown into battle near Ypres. End

Speaker 40: quote

Hitler's unit was

Speaker 38: at the tip of the spear of Germany's early push into Belgium and France. They

posted up

Speaker 98: overnight at a rear position, and the next morning

Speaker 38: under cover of fog, they pushed toward a forest that was already being bombarded with English and Belgian artillery shells. In a

letter to a

Speaker 38: friend in Munich, Hitler wrote

Speaker 45: quote, now the first shrapnel hisses over us and explodes at the edge of the forest splintering

Speaker 4: trees as if they were straws we watch with curiosity we have no idea as yet of

Speaker 8: the danger none of us is afraid everyone is waiting impatiently for the command forward

we crawl on

Speaker 8: our stomachs to the

Speaker 45: forest above us are howls and hisses splintered branches and trees surround us

Then

Speaker 45: again

Speaker 5: shells explode at the edge of the forest and hurl clouds of stone, earth, and sand into the air, tear the heaviest trees out by their roots, and choke everything in a yellow-green

Speaker 60: terribly stinking

Speaker 8: steam. We cannot lie here forever, and if we fall in battle, it's better to be killed outside

Speaker 38: End quote

So when all the units that

Speaker 38: were needed for an assault

Got

Speaker 38: in position, Hitler and his comrades rose and advanced

Speaker 99: in the direction of the enemy

Four times they

Speaker 99: pushed forward

Four times

Speaker 99: they were

Speaker 53: driven back

This was in the

Speaker 53: earliest part of the war, before everyone realized that it was really, really hard to go on the offensive

People hadn't realized

Speaker 53: the

Speaker 38: unassailable advantage New Tech had given to the defending force, so the Germans were just getting their faces ripped off on this initial thrust

A bullet

Speaker 38: tore through Hitler's right sleeve on his first day in battle, and

Speaker 5: of the batch of men with whom he started out, every single one of them, except him, went down dead or wounded. The

Germans had

Speaker 38: amassed enough forces to eventually push through, but it was incredibly difficult

not

Speaker 6: least because many units full of recent recruits and led by reserve officers

found

Speaker 6: themselves up

Speaker 5: against hard-ass, professional British regular soldiers. These were guys who did not hesitate, who knew where to be and what to do, whose discipline did not break, and who hit what they were

Speaker 63: shooting at

On the fifth

Speaker 63: try, Hitler's unit finally occupied a series of farms and

a bit

Speaker 63: of forest from which the enemy had been forced to retreat

And they went right

Speaker 63: back

Speaker 100: at it

And the

Speaker 100: fighting continued for another three days

Speaker 101: Hitler's regimental commander was killed and his XO went down seriously wounded. It was Hitler himself who actually ran to find a medic and then together they dragged their XO back to the rear

Within about

Speaker 5: three weeks, Hitler's regiment, which had started with roughly 3,600 men, had been reduced to less than

Speaker 102: 700

That's a 70

Speaker 102: attrition rate. That's

a 70% attrition rate. They

Speaker 43: were not a combat-ready

Speaker 4: regiment at that point But everything about the Germans' plan in this initial phase was based on speed and timing And so the regiment was thrown back into battle and told

Speaker 8: to press the attack

Hitler and another

Speaker 8: soldier were tasked with accompanying their new commander To reconnoiter way out front of the rest of the

German line on

Speaker 8: their way they were spotted and enemy machine guns opened up on them and without hesitation hitler and the other enlisted man jumped and put themselves

Speaker 85: between the bullets and their commander and pushed the commander down into a ditch when

they were back to

Speaker 8: safety the commander just shook their hands without comment but the next day he called hitler and the other man into his tent at Regimental headquarters

two

Speaker 5: other enlisted men were already there

and

Speaker 5: And the commander informed the four of them that he intended to recommend them for the Iron Cross for gallantry in battle. A

group of company

Speaker 5: commanders arrived for a meeting, so Hitler and the other men were shooed out to make room, and they had hardly left the tent when a British

Speaker 38: shell crashed down onto it, killing three officers and badly wounding the regimental commander

Hitler wrote to his

Speaker 38: friend in Munich that it was the most terrible moment of my life, We all worshipped Lieutenant Colonel Englehart

The great

Speaker 4: push of which Hitler's regiment had been a part was brought to a halt east of a small town called Ypres

Here I have to

Speaker 103: issue my first of

Speaker 8: many apologies. I am just warning you now, I am doing everything I can to practice to try to get them right, but my tongue and throat just tie themselves in knots

when I

Speaker 8: try to pronounce anything in French

I will

Speaker 8: do my best, but I hope you won't hold it against me when I inevitably take a hatchet to a very beautiful

Speaker 38: language. German pronunciations are a little easier for an English speaker, but I'm sure I'll butcher plenty of those, too. I will do my best, and those of you who are familiar enough with European languages to know when I'm embarrassing myself, I hope you will stifle your laughter and finish the

Speaker 2: episode anyway. But

Speaker 18: anyway... As I said, the great push, of which Hitler's regiment was a

Speaker 59: small part, was

Speaker 38: brought to

a

Speaker 59: halt when the Germans failed to overcome the resistance around the town of Ypres

Hitler was

Speaker 59: reassigned as a message

Speaker 101: runner for regimental headquarters. His biographers almost invariably used the fact that he was assigned to headquarters

Speaker 38: as an opportunity to denigrate his service, as if he was working a desk in the military bureaucracy back in Berlin or something

Speaker 104: nothing could be further from the truth

Dispatch

Speaker 4: runners were extremely important, and reliable ones, ones who a commander could count on to deliver his message or die trying, no matter what, they were invaluable

and they

Speaker 4: were often in more danger than even the

Speaker 8: front-line troops. If

you've seen that

Speaker 8: recent movie 1917, the main character

Speaker 5: in that film was assigned to be a dispatch runner

And

Speaker 5: his mission in the film was to deliver a message from headquarters to a front-line unit that had lost telephone communication

Runners were often

Speaker 5: tasked with moving out ahead of the front line, out into no-man's land, where small units had outposts and ditches and shell craters. These guys were often alone. Which was pretty

Speaker 105: unique in the First World War. They'd often be out alone in contested territory or territory of uncertain ownership where they might find themselves in close contact with enemy forces. Very

often they were sent

Speaker 4: out in blinding fog or torrential weather when most other soldiers were hunkering down

There were

Speaker 4: communication trenches that were theoretically in place so that a dispatch runner could move between the front and the rear, but since no one actually lived in those trenches on a daily basis, they were usually neglected to the point of

Speaker 80: being unusable

This was especially true

Speaker 8: during periods of heavy combat, when the men who might have maintained them were otherwise occupied and the comms trenches frequently got completely filled in with earth

Speaker 35: or flooded with water. Well, for whatever reason, Hitler was very good at this job

Speaker 97: something his peers and his superiors picked up on very early

The

Speaker 6: historian R.H.S. Stolfi writes, quote, Hitler evinced a genius for finding

Speaker 4: his way to forward command posts across an intricate system of routes in a lunar-like landscape of shell craters and other obstacles. Hitler appeared in situations of varying time of day or night, in rain, mud, and fog, and in frequently intense artillery concentrations. The duty was dangerous, because the most important messages were those carried during the heaviest combat under the massive British and French artillery bombardments in Flanders, in Artois, and on the Somme

During the

Speaker 4: heavier Allied bombardments, German troops in the line, in the line companies, entirely evacuated the deep

Speaker 5: fighting trenches, seeking relative safety in deeper dugouts off and around the trenches. During those critical and almost insanely dangerous periods, Hitler and other dispatch runners would commonly be moving through and around these empty fighting and communication trenches, delivering orders from regiment. Tellingly

The

Speaker 5: German fighting

Speaker 65: trenches contained niches cut at various intervals into their deep, steep sides for the specific use of runners forced to

Speaker 6: deliver the epistles under such dangerous circumstances while the line combat troops sheltered in the dugouts

Hitler's

Speaker 93: new

Speaker 6: regimental commander finally got around to pushing his citation recommendation up the chain of command. He was recommended for the Iron Cross First Class. which

Speaker 4: were given out only to honor acts of exceptional courage

But since he

Speaker 4: was assigned to the regimental staff by this point, his name was put at the bottom of the list of recommendees. It was a common practice to

Speaker 38: avoid looking like HQ was showing favoritism toward its own. And so he was instead awarded the Iron Cross second class. It

Speaker 100: made no difference to Hitler

He wrote back

Speaker 100: to his friend in Munich that this was the happiest day of his life

Soon after, he

Speaker 106: would be promoted to corporal

Hitler

Speaker 107: very quickly earned the universal respect of his leaders and the soldiers with

Speaker 38: whom he served. It

says something

Speaker 38: that they held him in such high regard, despite virtually all of them considering him to be a pretty weird guy. Several

of the men

Speaker 38: who knew

Speaker 8: him at the time remarked that his military bearing was lacking. He

Speaker 38: wore his helmet askew. He slouched rather than keep the erect posture expected of a soldier

His

Speaker 38: facial hair was frequently out of rags. He almost never shined his boots. He hated that

His mates found

Speaker 38: him socially awkward, but they still liked him

His seriousness

Speaker 38: was impenetrable

He had no

Speaker 6: interest at all in typical soldier small talk. You could not engage him in that kind of a conversation

He didn't

Speaker 4: play dice. He didn't play cards with the other men. When the other soldiers were spending their downtime joking or playing games... Hitler was invariably by himself in some corner, painting or drawing or reading a book

He was not a

Speaker 38: conversationalist, because again, he just couldn't feign interest in small talk

These all

Speaker 38: echo impressions of people who knew him before the war. It's just who he was

John Toland, in

Speaker 38: what I think is the best biography of Hitler that's been written yet, says, As long

as his

Speaker 38: comrades talked of food or women, Hitler kept to his reading or painting

but

Speaker 4: once the conversation turned to serious subjects, he would stop and deliver a lecture. His simple comrades were entranced by his fluency and loved to hear him spout on art, architecture, and the like

His

Speaker 108: reputation as an intellectual was enhanced by the fact that he always had a book spread out in front of him

Speaker 8: recalled one who served with him. He carried several in his

Speaker 4: pack, including a well-worn copy of Schopenhauer's philosophical tome The World is Will and Representation

Despite

Speaker 109: his lectures on the evils of smoking and drinking, Addy, as he was known

was

Speaker 110: generally liked because of his reliability in a

Speaker 4: crisis. He never abandoned a wounded comrade or pretended to be sick when it came time for a perilous mission

Moreover, he

Speaker 4: was a good companion during the long, tedious stretches awaiting action

Being an

Speaker 4: artist actually drew him closer to his barracks mates. He would draw cartoon sketches on postcards, illustrating comical moments of their life. Once, for instance, a man shot a rabbit to take home on leave, but left with a parcel containing a brick which someone had exchanged for the animal. Hitler sent the victim of the prank a postcard, with two sketches, one of the soldier unwrapping a brick back home, and the other of his friends at the front eating the rabbit." Despite

all this, Hitler's personality

Speaker 4: was just

Speaker 40: not built to be one of the fellas. The fellas looked up to him

They

Speaker 40: respected him, but

he

Speaker 4: could never quite be one of them

One of the men said he

Speaker 4: lives in his own world, but otherwise he's a nice fellow

The other soldiers

Speaker 4: received frequent care packages from home, especially early in the war when their families could afford to send

Speaker 38: food and candy and other goodies, but Hitler never received anything

Some assumed that he

Speaker 38: had no family, which was not exactly true, but to Hitler

He did

Speaker 38: have a family

Speaker 59: The army was his family. And his purpose in life was to do his part to win the war. He was a fully engaged frontline soldier. He wasn't somewhere else. He was there. His

mind wasn't

Speaker 59: somewhere else. He wasn't

Speaker 83: thinking about what to do after the war. He wasn't thinking about where he'd rather be. He wanted to be where he was. He

wasn't trying to

Speaker 83: get through the

Speaker 4: war. He was there to fight it. Toland says that

Speaker 8: whenever Hitler was asked where he came from, he answered that his home was the 16th Regiment

Stolfi, the historian

Speaker 8: I quoted

Speaker 38: a moment ago, says that the Greek biographer Plutarch, in his brief biography of Alexander the

Speaker 62: Great, wrote that, The most glorious exploits do not

Speaker 4: always furnish us with the closest discoveries of virtue or vice in men. Stolfi says this

Speaker 5: to preface his telling of a well-known

Speaker 38: story about Hitler

Right around

Speaker 38: this period, after

Speaker 4: he'd been assigned a regimental headquarters... While making his

Speaker 6: rounds delivering messages, Hitler came across a small

Speaker 8: white terrier, a little dog, that had somehow, someway made its way across no man's land from the British side and jumped into Hitler's trench in pursuit of a rat

None of the other soldiers

Speaker 38: wanted anything to do with the dog

It was

Speaker 38: enough to worry about their own survival without making this their responsibility

But

Speaker 38: Hitler was determined to save it from what was

Speaker 10: certain to be a death

Speaker 4: sooner rather than later. And so he chased after it, and he caught it

At first, and for some

Speaker 4: time, the dog squirmed and whined and tried to escape, but eventually, slowly, with patience, Hitler won

Speaker 65: it over

He named it

Speaker 65: Fuchsel, Little Fox

Having come from

Speaker 65: the British side, the dog didn't understand commands given in German, but very slowly, very patiently... Hitler taught it the basics, and then even taught it

Speaker 55: several tricks, like climbing up and down a ladder

And from that point on

Speaker 55: the dog never left his side, accompanied him on his rounds, and he would bring it

Speaker 77: along partly for

Speaker 5: companionship, but also because he would use its tricks and its silly antics to lift the spirits of the bored and tired men he encountered. When you've been sitting in a trench, nothing to do

Speaker 70: for that long, the sight of a little dog doing tricks is... probably the biggest joy you've gotten in a while well

they didn't make

Speaker 70: gas masks

Speaker 38: for dogs so when gas warfare started up he was forced to leave fuxel back at hq when

Speaker 2: he went out but his friends were fond of the dog by then and so they were happy to look after it until he got back he

was awkward with people

Speaker 112: and had trouble relating to the other soldiers but he had no problem with the

dog later

Speaker 112: hitler wrote that it's crazy how fond i was

Speaker 4: of the little beast I'll

see you next time. At

Speaker 4: night, little Fuxel snuggled up and slept with its new master on his bunk

Then, one day

Speaker 4: in April

Speaker 30: 1915, Hitler's

out

Speaker 112: making his round of message deliveries as usual, and

he encounters a

Speaker 112: French soldier alone, maybe a dispatch

Speaker 4: runner like himself. Well

Hitler got the

Speaker 4: drop on the Frenchman, captured him, and marched him back to the line as a prisoner

that this

Speaker 4: was not a small accomplishment for a junior enlisted soldier. To

put this in

Speaker 4: perspective, Stolfi writes

frontline units

Speaker 38: made enormous efforts to take prisoners for intelligence

Speaker 110: sifted verified information about the enemy, but commonly the associated trench raids ended with dead prisoners and friendly casualties

Speaker 5: But

now here was

Speaker 5: this dispatch runner, who could have avoided the enemy soldier, Could have kept his distance and given him a wide berth and still completed his

Speaker 10: mission, made his deliveries. He could have even justified it to himself

by telling

Speaker 10: himself that his mission was to deliver important messages and forcing a confrontation with the enemy put that mission at risk, but he didn't do that

Here was this

Speaker 10: dispatch

Speaker 5: runner, by himself, marching a French prisoner, complete with his captured rifle

Back

Speaker 5: to the line

Speaker 8: for interrogation It was not a small thing It's the kind of story your grandkids would ask to hear over and over Tell us about the time you captured the French soldier

John Toland says that by

Speaker 8: the end of the summer of

Speaker 110: 1915 Hitler had become indispensable to regimental headquarters The telephone lines to battalion and company command posts Were often knocked out by artillery And only runners could deliver messages

We

Speaker 110: found out very soon, recalled the lieutenant, which messengers we could rely on most. He was admired by fellow runners as much for his craftiness, he could crawl up front like

Speaker 39: one of the Indians he had read about in his boyhood, as his exceptional courage. Yet

there was

Speaker 39: something in Hitler that

Speaker 71: disturbed some of the men

He was too

Speaker 71: different, his sense of

Speaker 5: duty excessive

He

Speaker 5: was unnaturally eager to get up front and would often, without being asked, deliver messages for the other runners." As the

Germans dug in, the British

Speaker 30: increased the intensity of their attacks that summer. In

late

Speaker 47: September, at a time in the battle when Hitler's entire regiment was in danger of being overrun, all

phone

Speaker 8: communication from headquarters to the front suddenly went dark

Hitler

Speaker 8: and another man went forward to learn what had happened and came under heavy fire. They managed to

Speaker 4: escape, barely, and they got back and told the regiment that the lines had not been blown up, but cut

because a

Speaker 4: British attack was imminent. And

so Hitler was

Speaker 110: sent out into the storm to spread the warning to the front line units, and again barely made it back

He managed

Speaker 110: to escape so many brushes with death that he started to get a reputation for it

One time when he

Speaker 110: was eating his dinner in a trench with a group of soldiers, he suddenly had the urgent impulse. He says it came to him as a clear and insistent voice, telling him to get up and move over to another spot further down the trench. The

impulse

Speaker 113: he says

was

Speaker 112: so urgent that it broke no doubt or argument so he just mechanically got up and started walking and hardly had he sat back down when a shell came down and burst over the men he just

Speaker 114: left and killed every single

one of them later

Speaker 115: hitler wrote that by now quote

the

Speaker 101: romance of battle had been replaced by horror the enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal

Speaker 110: fear The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct of self-preservation and the admonitions of duty. I, too, was not spared by this struggle. Always, when death was on the hunt, a vague something tried to revolt, strove to represent itself to the weak body as reason, yet it was

Speaker 8: only cowardice, which in such disguises tried to ensnare

Speaker 4: the individual

A

Speaker 4: grave tugging and warning set in, and often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. Yet

the more

Speaker 4: this voice admonished one to caution, the louder and more

Speaker 8: insistent its lures, the sharper resistance grew, until at last, after a long inner struggle, consciousness of duty emerged victorious

By the

Speaker 8: winter of

Speaker 47: 1915-16, this struggle had for me been decided

At

Speaker 47: last

Speaker 4: my will was the undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter, I was now calm and determined, and this was enduring. Now fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing. The young volunteer had become an old soldier, and this transformation had occurred in the whole army." That

year

Speaker 5: 1916, Hitler's unit was moved

Speaker 38: south to take part in the gargantuan Battle of the Somme from Tolland

Speaker 5: Hitler and another runner were sent out

in the

Speaker 5: face of almost certain death, peppered with shot and shell every meter of the way. They cowered for shelter in watery shell holes and

Speaker 6: ditches. The other man collapsed from exhaustion, and Hitler had to drag him back to their dugout." The fighting

that summer

Speaker 83: was extraordinarily intense, and Hitler was always right in the thick of it

Speaker 5: For months, the Allies just threw men at the Germans

And

Speaker 5: when it was all said and done, they would take over 600,000 casualties trying to break the German lines

But the German

Speaker 61: lines remained intact

And finally, on the

Speaker 5: night of October 7th, 1916, Hitler's luck ran out. He was sleeping with the other messengers in a room when a shell exploded near their position, and they were all sent flying and landed in a heap. Hitler took a piece of shrapnel in the

Speaker 54: thigh

And most

Speaker 54: of his biographers tend to downplay this as a light wound, but he was evacuated to a field hospital, and there it was determined that he

Speaker 38: was going to need real treatment and rehab, so he was sent

Speaker 112: back to an actual military hospital in the vicinity of Berlin. They

kept him there to

Speaker 112: heal for two whole months, and then for three more months after that, he was assigned to a replacement

Speaker 6: battalion in Munich to recuperate

even

Speaker 6: before he was sent away for treatment and throughout the entire period of recovery Hitler annoyed his superiors with pleas and demands to rejoin his unit but it was five months from the time he was wounded before doctors let him go

Speaker 112: so it

Speaker 6: didn't take his

Speaker 38: leg off but it doesn't sound like what most people would call a light wound either

these

Speaker 117: months at the rear though were an important time for him at least by his own telling Thank you

He

Speaker 5: found morale in the replacement battalion to be in the toilet. Many

of the people

Speaker 5: there, Hitler suspected, didn't really need to be there. They were malingering or exaggerating injuries just to stay out of the fighting. He

was disgusted by

Speaker 5: their attitude

Speaker 8: especially their lack of respect, even contempt for the men fighting and dying at the front. At least that's how he perceived

it. He wondered

Speaker 8: what could be causing such a profound collapse of morale among the men who spent time on the home front because he didn't hear this kind of talk

Speaker 118: at the front

Before long

Speaker 118: according to Mein Kampf, he discovered the answer. After

spending two

Speaker 5: years without a break in the battle zone, here

he

Speaker 6: was now back in Germany, in safety, interacting with these rear echelon personnel who, by luck or choice

had

Speaker 6: managed to secure jobs that let them ride out the war in safety

He

Speaker 5: listened, appalled, as they denigrated the Kaiser and denounced the war in the hearing of recovering frontline

Speaker 65: soldiers

He says he

Speaker 65: could not avoid noticing that

so many of the

Speaker 65: administrative and supply

Speaker 8: personnel, the medical staff, a lot of the jobs back home, back on the home front, non-combat roles, seemed to be overwhelmingly manned by Jews, which he said was a surprise to him because he encountered so few Jews in combat roles at the front

Nearly every

Speaker 5: clerk was a Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf