Atrocitology by Matthew White

Author:Matthew White [White, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857861252
Publisher: Canongate Books

And the young letter writer, Adolf Hitler, survived the war.

Elsewhere

More than most wars, the First World War killed people you might encounter in other contexts. Henry Moseley, the physicist who had discovered the secret behind atomic numbers, was shot down at Gallipoli. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian sculptor of the Futurist movement, died in a training accident. The British writer H. H. Munro and the American poet Joyce Kilmer were killed in combat. The French cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon died of typhoid fever in camp. George Llewelyn-Davies, one of the children who inspired J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, was shot through the head in Flanders. This was probably the most democratic war in history. The nations of Europe sacrificed an entire generation, regardless of individual talents, accomplishments, or connections.b

It’s easiest to think of the First World War as a black hole or bonfire of a war—a static line of trenches cutting across western Europe, hungrily devouring the resources of an entire world. It wasn’t just the nations close to the front—Germany, France, England—that shoveled their sons into the flames. Young men were imported from all over the world—America, Australia, India, Senegal—to feed the monster.

Obviously that’s not the whole story, and the world war certainly lived up to its name. Ottoman Turkey, which controlled most of the Middle East, jumped in to prevent its old enemy Russia from gaining any advantage in the Balkans. This attracted small, mostly British, colonial armies to nibble at the edges of the Ottoman Empire, trying to punch through and hook up with Russia. The British pushed into Palestine from Egypt, capturing Jerusalem and incidentally fighting a battle at Armageddon (yes, it’s a real place). An army from British India invaded Mesopotamia but was cornered and besieged at Kut. After several months of eating horses, rats, and belts, this force surrendered to the Turks.

The most ambitious effort against Turkey began with a British naval attack directly into the Dardanelles strait to capture Constantinople and to open access to Russian ports on the Black Sea (February 1915). The plan failed right from the beginning, mostly because the British had not considered the possibility that this crucial pathway through the heart of enemy territory might be heavily guarded. Maritime minefields and shore batteries sank three warships and damaged all the rest coming and going. The Allies then decided that they needed to land a full army on the Gallipoli Peninsula and take the Turkish shore batteries, but unfortunately they had brought only enough troops to parade through Constantinople after it fell. The fleet popped across the Mediterranean to pick up untested Australian troops training in Egypt, and then waited while veteran British troops were shipped over from the western front. This delay gave the Turks a chance to reinforce and dig in. The Allies were slaughtered while landing on the beaches, then slaughtered some more as they tried to break out of the beach head, and slaughtered again as they crept uphill against the defenders. After banging uselessly against the Turks for several months, the Allies gave up and sailed away.

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