Guns of August

I'm in the midst of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August right now, about the days leading up to The Great War (ha ha), trying to figure out why the hell anyone got involved in that bloody mudfest in the first place. Why it wasn't confined merely to a squabble between Serbia and Austria-Hungry while the bigger nations went about their business. Germany and France were looking for a fight, evidently. Itchy trigger fingers. They'd been looking for an excuse for years. I have yet to understand why Russia and England got involved. Treaties were in place, yes, but descending into nightmare just because your neighbor asks if you can lend a hand seems a bit hard to believe. Maybe people just took conscription much more seriously back then. Some perverted sense of honor. Or less focus on their own sense of discomfort.

The whole fiasco comes across as one big Rube Goldberg machine, starting out with an archduke getting smacked with a flyswatter and ending up in trench warfare. Four years of mud, shrapnel, barbed wire, mustard gas, and mortar fire. I have no idea how Wilson convinced America to get involved, having no great catastrophe to "avenge" a la Roosevelt and Bush. Yeah, Germany had a habit of sinking our boats which was most uncharitable of them, but was that enough to warrant hundreds of thousands of American deaths? I imagine America had recently emerged from the Spanish-American War with our uniforms barely mussed and figured this new one would be a similar jaunt. Go over, kick a few Germans while they're down, and be back in time for lunch. Certainly global warfare on this scale was unimagined and it never occurred to those in charge it would cost as much as it did. "Here, son, grab your bayonet and go make the world safe for democracy." How abstract. The lack of television probably had a lot to do with it, from America's perspective. Easy enough to send your young off to the majesty of battle when there's no carnage at your doorstep to disrupt your illusions of grandeur. After Cronkite's Vietnam we started to realize the whole thing was a lot messier than we'd imagined from all those Robert Mitchum flicks where children seldom had their faces ripped apart by grenade shrapnel.

And poor Belgium, getting trampled over because they had the misfortune of being situated between two bullies and contained some lovely flat real estate that made for superb parade grounds. Maybe in the future belligerent nations can conduct their warfare in the virtual realm and leave innocent bystanders alone. No, that won't happen. We like to get our hands dirty.