Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • July 30, 2014 ‘And what they fought each other for’ Robert Southey wrote a poem that has appeared in many an anthology. Kaspar, an old peasant, sits in the sun after a day’s work, resting as his grandchildren, Peterkin and Wilhelmine, turn up a round smooth object that puzzles them. “’Tis some poor fellow’s skull, said he, who fell in that great victory!” Kaspar, who is not a deep thinker, ends every couplet with, “But ‘twas a famous victory,” while describing the vast slaughter of soldiers and the incidental loot- ing and killing of civilians, including his grandfather’s family. The American youngsters of today, many of whom are left at the mercy of a school system where the Social Studies Department is an adjunct of the Sports Depart- ment Parade, are very much in the same condition as Wilhelmine and Peterkin, although they do not usually dig up human skulls and the plow land in New Jersey. World War I started about this time 100 years ago, and the last few veterans died just a few years ago. The last American veteran was an ambulance driver who took risks and saved some lives, but never pulled a trig- ger, very much in the manner of American ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway and German stretcher bearer Erich Maria Remarque. Hemingway and Remarque found war horrible and a betrayal of those who fought. The last American World War I veteran tended to justify the whole thing, lumping World War I with World War II as a patriotic endeavor to save us all. Hemingway and Remarque did not justify World War I. The last two British veterans were more cynical than the American. One Englishman, a Lewis gunner who was the last infantry veteran, had waited to be con- scripted. He said he aimed his light machine gun for the legs when fighting the Germans and hoped they did the same. He tried not to kill any enemies who were not a personal threat. He wanted no part of any patriotic observances afterward. Several British officers who were decorated for valor, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, opposed World War I while it was in progress. They returned to combat so as not to run out on their men. Sassoon was wounded a second time and Owen was killed in action a week before the war ended. His mother learned he was dead on Armistice Day. Why World War I? Was it German aggression? No sale. The Germans had been desperately preparing for a war they knew they were likely to lose as soon as Tsarist Russia signed an improbable alliance with dem- ocratic-socialist France. Terence Zuber, a retired U.S. Army major with a German doctorate in history, and Hew Strachan, an Oxford don and renowned expert on World War I, not fond of the Kaiser or Germans in general, concur that the German Social Democrats and Catholic Center Party used their financial power over the budget to restrict conscription to 55 percent of healthy males. This left the Kaiser with too small an army to take on Russia and France at the same time. Some of the German infantry- men pictured in Strachan’s book are obviously middle- aged and overweight, as he points out. Was it Russian aggression? Advisers to Tsar Nicho- las II knew that a war with Germany circa 1914 would be a disaster because they were simply not organized despite their vast manpower. Sergei Witte, the bright- est star in the tsar’s cabinet, described the Serbs Russia was supposed to be protecting as “Turks who got bap- tized by mistake and not worth the risk.” Grigori Rasputin, the drunken and lecherous but kindly healer on whom Tsar Nicholas relied to keep his hemophilic son alive, told the tsar forcefully that war was evil, too many poor people would die, and that the war might bring down the Romanov dynasty. Rasputin also told the tsar to stop the brutal pogroms against the Jews and, above all, to let the peasants own their own land. I wonder what brand this guy drank. Can we send some to our present diplomats? Was it revenge-crazy France? Some French politi- cians may have wanted war, but many French workers and farmers manifestly did not. The French tolerated peacetime military conscription that led to five years of active service and possible service in North Africa or Indochina. Once they saw what it was like facing machine guns and quick-firing artillery, many of them were horrified at the loss of life and limbs. The Germans routinely evaluated the French as better soldiers than the British, but the French shot 600 of their own men for cowardice, most of them in the first year of the war, and desertion became endemic. The British, whose troops were all regulars until 1916, shot 346 of their own men. Many French divisions mutinied in 1917, as did the whole Russian army. The war ended when the German navy mutinied and the German army refused to shoot them. Was it Jewish bankers? Most of them favored Ger- many because the Kaiser was nicer to the Jews than the tsar was. A German Jew named Fritz Haber kept the war effort alive by inventing a process to consolidate nitrogen for ammunition and fertilizer from the nitro- gen in the atmosphere. (Haber also invented mustard gas. When his wife found out, she killed herself.) Walther Rathenau saved the nation’s credit and orga- nized war-time rationing. More than 100,000 German Jews served in the German Army, in the infantry like author-designer John Weitz’s father; in the artillery, like Anne Frank’s father; or in the medical corps, which was the best in Europe. The corps was so good that the French often left their seriously wounded behind for the Germans to pick up and save. German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, not the sharpest tool in the political shed, recognized Jewish loyalty and insisted that all Jewish veterans retain their civil service jobs. When he acknowledged a “stab in the back,” he was talking about socialists and trade union- ists, not the Jews. Having eliminated the usual suspects, it seems that those countries that had a present like France or Ger- many or a future like Russia were dragged into the war by those countries that had a past, but probably no future. The tsar destroyed Romanov Russia, rapidly becoming a powerful modern country, to help Serbia, which shortly became Yugoslavia. Austria-Hungary, which restricted the rights of Protestants and Jews, dragged Germany, which had no such restrictions, in on their side. Italy broke the alliance with Germany in the hopes of getting back some territory from Austria- Hungary, which fell apart at the end of the war. When Pope Benedict XV proposed a peace with German agreement that would have led to an inde- pendent Polish state and returned Alsace-Lorraine to France, the British seemed interested. However, the Italians joined the French in rejecting the pope’s peace plan until they could throw fresh American troops into the meat grinder of the Western Front. This cost the lives of at least 125,000 Americans. We’ve all been the new kid in the schoolyard, and it can be an easy sell to argue that World War I was a case of the strong bullying the weak. The evidence sug- gests that it was a case of the weak getting the strong to do their fighting for them. The American people fell for that, too. The American people should never fall for that again. Area On their way! Congratulations to the graduating class from ECLC of New Jersey’s School in Ho-Ho-Kus for children with special needs. The graduates are (front row) Marty Theresa of Wanaque, Adrienne Benaquista of Westwood, Eric Feinstein of Emerson, and Theresa Korsgen of Norwood; (middle row) Elliot Lee of Closter, Bonnie Cueto of Union City, Fabio Giangrasso of North Arlington, Zachary Ziaya of Saddle Brook; (back row) Barry Taorimina of Upper Saddle River, Jason Annitti of Midland Park, Stephen Worrall of Lyndhurst, Joseph Schnabel of Westwood and Cesar Fermin of Hackensack.