The title of the post is a based on one of my favourite quotes:
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. - John Milton
In June, I started listening to “Blueprint for Armageddon,” a six-part series on World War I from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. At approximately 23 hours long, it takes a considerable amount of time to get through the entire series. It’s about 23 hours long, so it takes a while to get through it. The show is so bloody brilliant that I wrote this after I finished listening to the first episode:
What makes the show [Hardcore History] special compared to other WWI podcasts is Dan Carlin’s deep, gravelly, and intense voice. There’s something about his tone. The man’s voice can evoke an orchestra of bloody and violent horrors in your head. The undulating intensity of his voice slowly heightens the tension and keeps you hooked.
I’m halfway into the third episode, and it’s now clear to me that I didn’t fully understand what I meant by “an orchestra of bloody and violent horrors in your head.” As you start listening to the first episode, you get a fuzzy sense of the horror that’s about to unfold on a global scale, but it’s still vague. Dan is just warming you up with the background in which the catastrophe is about to unfold.
The horrendous and gruesome brutality of the “primordial catastrophe,” as WWI is often described, doesn't unfold until the latter half of the second episode. It's then that the war really gets going. Until then, you also don't realize why this disaster was called the “world war.” But as the true scope of the conflict starts to become clear, you can't help but feel a little disoriented listening to Dan's intense descriptions of the violence that's unfolding.
What makes the show brilliant is the care Carlin takes to put humans at the center of the calamity. It's not just a dry narration of a historical timeline but rather a humanistic description of an immense tragedy.
Like a veteran conductor of an orchestra, Carlin effortlessly transitions between dry descriptions of the machinations of those in leadership, the drama unfolding in the great halls of power, and gut-wrenching depictions of what it was like to be a soldier in the war. You can almost feel him trying to put himself in the shoes of the soldiers, which is a futile endeavor, as he often admits.
As the war spirals out of control, millions of men, with their entire lives ahead of them, are thrown into industrialized meat grinders. When Carlin quotes the words of the soldiers themselves to convey the harsh realities of this cataclysm, you can’t help but feel a growing sense of depression as your mind goes into overdrive, painting bloody images of 1914–1918.
As I listened to the show, I couldn't help but think how humans can be capable of both extraordinary feats of kindness and unthinkable brutality. This perplexing duality becomes apparent multiple times throughout the podcast. I'd like to share some poignant excerpts from the series.
By the second week of August 1914, full-scale conflict had broken out on the eastern borders of France and in southern Belgium. One of the earliest and most gruesome battles unfolded on August 21, 1914. Dan Carlin describes the battle as follows:
One of the things that this war changes is that whole view. The people in 1918 at the end of this war would feel very similar to the way we do about how stupid it is to stand up in a hailstorm of steel and just sacrifice your life for nothing.
The generation that does that in 1914, and most of which doesn't make it through the war, they had a different way of looking at things - an older way. That's why this war is often seen as a separation point in history between one world and another.
Historian David Stevenson describes these offensives by Joffre and the French to strike against what is certainly a weak German center:
"The result was a multiple disaster. The French forces entering the Ardennes were weaker than the Germans in reconnaissance Cavalry. And on the morning of 22nd August, mist grounded their aircraft. Groping forward in echelon along the few roads through the forest, they blundered not into weaker forces, but into 21 divisions against their own 20. Their 75 millimeter field guns were ineffective in the hilly terrain and poorly linked by telephone with the infantry. They were no answer to the German machine guns and field howitzers, which wreaked havoc."
Historian Peter Hart writes about the stumbling into each other that are these battles in the middle of the front through this forested hilly terrain:
"In these battles, few people at any level of command had much idea of what was happening. And for the troops on the ground, it was all utterly baffling. Pre-war tactics seemed to have no impact. Bayonet charges led only to more slaughter, while calling up artillery support was often doomed to failure."
Hart quotes a captain from the 103rd Regiment who was caught in desperate straits:
"My company was sustaining heavy losses. Evidently its action was hampering the enemy, who concentrated the combined fire of his infantry, artillery, and machine guns on us. We were surrounded by a heavy cloud, which at times completely veiled the battlefield from our eyes... Among the men lying on the ground, one could no longer distinguish the living from the dead... The wounded offered a truly impressive sight. Sometimes they would stand up, bloody and horrible looking. Amidst bursts of gunfire, they ran aimlessly around, arms stretching out before them, eyes staring at the ground, turning round and round until, hit by fresh bullets, they would stop and fall heavily. Heart-rending cries, agonizing appeals and horrible groans were intermingled with the sinister howling of projectiles. Furious contortions told of strong youthful bodies refusing to give up life."
27,000 Frenchmen died on the 22nd of August. Many, many more were badly wounded, maimed, and scarred for life.
To put this in perspective, a hundred years before, Napoleon used to brag to his opponents that "you cannot stop me, I spend 30,000 lives a month", as though that was a big deal. And back when Napoleon said it, it was. The French had just lost 30,000 lives in one day. And their contact against the other major army that had precipitated all those deaths had only been about 24 hours long.
What's tomorrow gonna look like? And the next day?
Another aspect that stands out is Carlin’s vivid and unsettling descriptions of daily life in the iconic trenches and the brutal trench warfare:
The First World War is able to take one of the most extreme activities humans ever take part in, warfare, and make it worse. Start, for example, with what trench warfare means for the soldiers on the ground in terms of day-to-day living.
Go out in your backyard, dig yourself a hole, sit down in it in the rain, and just live in it day after day without any bombs, guns, bullets, or murderous combat - and it's horrible. That's what these soldiers face, most of them in Flanders, one of the rainiest parts of Europe. They live in the mud. And they can't quite get their mind around how that changes this whole romantic idea of adventurous combat that so many of them signed up for.
Take, for example, some of the most elite units in France's military - men who are in the French Foreign Legion and who find themselves in holes in the ground. Alan Seeger, who will die on the Western Front in 1916, writes as this trench warfare is getting started:
"This style of trench warfare is extremely modern, and for the artillerymen, is doubtless very interesting, but for the poor common soldier, it is anything but romantic. His role is to simply dig himself a hole in the ground and keep hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually under the fire of the opposing batteries, he is yet never allowed to get a glimpse of the enemy. Exposed to all the dangers of war, but none of its enthusiasms or splendid elan, he is condemned to sit like an animal in its burrow and hear the shells whistle over his head and take their little daily toll from his comrades. His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he's not allowed to make a fire. He's not even permitted to light a candle. He must fold himself up in his blanket and lie down cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best as he may. How different from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the songs, and the good cheer."
It's after the battles up in Flanders, on the Aisne and at Ypres, where this trench warfare sets in. A German soldier, Rudolf Binder, tries to explain what's happening in 1914 when he writes:
"The war has got stuck into a gigantic siege on both sides. The whole front is one endless fortified trench. Neither side has the force to make a decisive call."
It's important to remember that most of the people who are finding themselves stuck in this business in 1914 aren't really soldiers. Soldiers might be expected to deal with this kind of incredible experience, but most of the troops in these uniforms and carrying weapons, which, for all intents and purposes appear to be soldiers, six or eight weeks ago were civilians. They were shopkeepers, and delivery boys, and students, and insurance salesmen, and teachers, who all of a sudden find themselves in circumstances that they just can't make sense of - horrible situations.
Many of these people had never seen a dead body in their lives, and then all of a sudden find themselves in situations like this German soldier in 1914, describing this new phenomenon of trench life - day-to-day living in a hole in the ground with combat going on all around you:
"The dangers of trench life may be realized when I say that often neither the dead nor wounded can be removed. If you put up as much as a little finger above the edge of the trench, the bullets come whizzing around immediately. The dead bodies must therefore be allowed to remain in the trench. That is to say, the dead man is got rid of by digging a grave for him in the floor of the trench... A few days ago, a soldier was so badly hit by a shell that he was cut into - his shattered body could not be removed without risk to the survivors and was therefore allowed to remain. But presently he gave rise to a horrible stench and whatever they did, the men could not get away from the mutilated, blackened features. Sometimes arms and legs torn away from the body are allowed to lie about the bottom of the trench until someone can bury them. One gets hardened in time."
This stood out to me because I re-watched the brilliant movie 1917 by Sam Mendes a few weeks ago, and the film offers a vivid, albeit somewhat sanitized, portrayal of WWI trenches:
The most disturbing thing I've heard up until now in the podcast is the first time the Germans launched a gas attack:
Here is a cleaned up version of the transcript that you can use for quotes in a blog post:
If anybody still had any of those old 19th century, truly going back to ancient times, versions of the romantic, glorious, heroic duel that they had been raised to believe that war was, Operation Disinfectant will cure them of such ills. That will be the German name for the program. And the code word to start the operation will be "God Punish England".
The operation involves almost 6,000 cylinders containing chlorine gas, a byproduct of the German dye manufacturing industry that the Germans had planted in the soil carefully over time around the battlefield at Ypres. In August 1915, they took the tops off the containers when the wind was right, and let the chlorine gas blow across the battlefield toward the allied trenches, which were occupied by French Algerian forces, which involved both French troops and Algerian troops, and also the newly arrived Canadian forces.
They didn't know what to make of this, but they figured out pretty quickly it was hell on earth. As one Indian soldier would write his father afterwards, "This isn't war, this is the end of the world."
The end of the world to some of these people at the Second Battle of Ypres looked like a cloud of greenish-yellow gas that was floating across the battlefield so slowly, you could actually walk ahead of it. But because these soldiers didn't know what they were looking at, most of them didn't move until it hit them.
Historian Eric Dornbrough writes:
"Stretching 6,000 meters along opposing lines and bellowing high up into the air, a thick, ghastly looking green-yellow cloud of gas moved eerily and threateningly with the breeze across no man's land. The gaseous monstrosity took on a pinkish hue from certain angles as the descending western sun shone through it. To compound the shock and terror, German heavy artillery began to lay down a pounding barrage. Two French colonial divisions and a Canadian division were caught completely unaware.
'Take a look at this, sir,' said one Canadian artillery observer to his superior as he stared through binoculars at what was coming towards them. 'There's something funny going on.' Then he dove for cover from the incoming shells, but just then the wind shifted, compressing the gas cloud over the Algerians, whose forward units were engulfed. The soldiers grabbed their throats, choking and writhing in excruciating pain from the searing chlorine gas. In minutes, many hundreds lay drowning in fluids given off by the lungs. Seeing this, others panicked, dropped their rifles and ran, leaving a six kilometer gap in the line."
Private William Quinton, a British soldier, experienced his first gas attack only about a week after the first time it had been used. That affair had caused the high command to tell the troops to soak flannel in water and just put it over their noses as a cheap, easy attempt to try to forestall the gas. But none of these soldiers knew what they were facing until they actually had a gas attack hit them, which Quinton had hit him on May 1st, 1915:
"Suddenly, over the top of our front line, we saw what looked like clouds of thin gray smoke, rolling slowly along with a slight wind. It hung to the ground, reaching to the height of eight or nine feet, and approached so slowly that a man walking could have kept ahead of it.
"'Gas,' the word quickly passed round. Even now, it had no terror for us, for we had not yet tasted it. From our haversacks, we hastily drew the flannel belts, soaked them in water, and tied them round our mouths and noses.
"Suddenly, through the communication trench, came rushing a few khaki clad figures, their eyes glaring out of their heads, their hands tearing at their throats as they came on. Some stumbled and fell and lay writhing at the bottom of the trench, choking and gasping, whilst those following trampled over them. If ever men were raving mad with terror, these men were.
"What was left of our section still crouched at the support end of the communication trench. Our front line, judging from the number of men who'd just come from it, had been abandoned, and we now waited for the first rush of Germans. But they did not come. Our biggest enemy was now within a few yards of us, and in the form of a cloud of gas.
"We caught our first whiff of it. No words of mine can ever describe my feelings as we inhaled the first mouthful. We choked, spit, and coughed. My lungs felt as though they were being burnt out; that they were going to burst. Red hot needles were being thrust into my eyes. The first impulse was to run. We had just seen men running to certain death, and knew it, rather than stay and be choked into a slow and agonizing death. It was one of those occasions when you do not know what you are doing. The man who stayed was no braver than the man who ran away. We crouched there, terrified, stupefied.
"A large shell burst on the parapet just where we were sheltered. We were almost buried beneath the falling earth. Young Addington, a chap about my own age, was screaming at the top of his voice and trying to free his buried legs. He got free, and before we could stop him, he rushed off, God knows where. We then saw the reason for his screams. His left arm was blown off above the elbow. He left a trail of blood over my tunic as he climbed over me in a mad rush to get away."
Quinton and his unit of Canadians will block, heroically, the hole that develops in the line, keeping the Germans from breaking through.
Yet despite the unending horrors of the WWI battlefields, there were rare moments when the highest virtues of humanity broke through, like an old dam bursting free. One such moment occurred on Christmas Eve of 1914, an iconic and heartwarming event now known as the Christmas Truce.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this—I have an uncontrollable smile on my face and goosebumps all over my body as I type this, even though I already knew the story. I'll let Carlin describe this miraculous moment in his own inimitable way:
You can find stories like that all throughout the war. People whose humanity shines through on an individual basis. On all sides, by the way. No one had a monopoly on that. But there were times when the humanity sort of just burst forth en masse. Spontaneously, none more famous, maybe overrated, some people say, but I don't see how it can be overrated, than what happened on Christmas Eve, 1914, especially on the Western Front.
The conditions are horrible. It's freezing. Your feet are stuck in gruel, mud, water, that you think can't get any worse and then it all freezes and you're stuck out there in the cold. And then all of a sudden, the people on the Western Front see something relatively unbelievable in a conflict where you have shells going on every second, snipers picking off anyone who raises his head above the trench. And then all of a sudden, soldiers reported hearing singing and seeing weird colored lights.
The colored lights were often coming from the German trenches. Soldier Julius Kochen was in one of those trenches, opposite the French, saying the conditions were horrible. But on Christmas Eve, this is what happened:
"Christmas in the trenches. It was bitterly cold. We had procured a pine tree, for there were no fir trees to be had. We had decorated the tree with candles and cookies. We had imitated the snow with wadding. Christmas trees were burning everywhere in the trenches, and at midnight, all the trees were lifted onto the parapet with their burning candles, and along the whole line, German soldiers began to sing Christmas songs in chorus. 'O thou blissful! O thou joyous! Mercy bringing Christmas time!' Hundreds of men, he writes, were singing the song in that fearful wood. Not a shot was fired. The French had ceased firing along the whole line. That night I was with a company that was only five paces away from the enemy. The Christmas candles were burning brightly and were renewed again and again.
"For the first time, we heard no shots. From everywhere throughout the forest, he writes, one could hear powerful carols come floating over. 'Peace on Earth.' The French, he says, left their trenches, and stood on the parapet without any fear. There they stood, quite overpowered by emotion, and all of them with cap in hand. We, too, had issued from our trenches. We exchanged gifts with the French. Chocolate, cigarettes, etc. They were all laughing, and so were we. Why, we did not know. Then everybody went back to his trench, and incessantly the carol resounded, ever more solemnly, ever more longingly, 'O thou blissful.'"
Private William Quinton, in the trenches on Christmas Eve, on the British side, wrote about a similar situation farther down the line:
"All around us lay about three inches of snow, a typical picture postcard Christmas. Things were very quiet. That peace and goodwill to all men feeling seemed to be in the air. We could hear the Germans still strafing up Ypres Way, but the next night, Christmas Eve, even up there was much quieter. Something in the direction of the German lines caused us to rub our eyes and look again. Here and there, showing just above their parapet, we could see very faintly what looked like very small colored lights.
"What was this? Was it some prearranged signal and the forerunner of an attack? Or was it to make us curious and thus expose ourselves to a sudden raking of machine gun fire? We were very suspicious and we were discussing the strange move of the enemy when something even stranger happened. The Germans were actually singing. Not very loud, but there was no mistaking it. We began to get interested. The enemy, at least, were going to enjoy themselves as much as the circumstances would permit. Suddenly, across the snow clad no man's land, a strong, clear voice rang out, singing the opening lines of 'Annie Laurie.' It was sung in perfect English and we were spellbound. No other sound but this unknown singer's voice. To us it seemed like the war had suddenly stopped. Stopped to listen to this song from one of the enemy. Not a sound from friend or foe. And as the last note died away, a spontaneous outburst of clapping arose from our trenches. 'Encore! Good ol Fritz!'"
All along the line, the two sides would have this interesting moment where they kind of began to emerge from the trenches little by little, a place where they couldn't stick a finger up without having it shot off just hours before. And everybody must have been so incredibly brave to try, but one side would raise themselves up a little bit and the other side would raise themselves up a little bit more, until both sides, in this hellish environment where nobody could go anywhere near the open air, were standing apart from each other, gazing right at the enemy in No Man's Land, on Christmas.
Private William Quinton again wrote:
"As daylight crept in, we were surprised to see the Germans waist high out of their trenches, gazing across at us with impunity. Imagine the position! Whereas yesterday the mere sight of a bit of field grey uniform would have caused a dozen British rifles to crack, here was the enemy, in full view of us, gazing serenely across No Man's Land at us. And we at him. To us in the front line, the whole world had changed. We could take stock of our surroundings at our leisure.
"At nine o'clock precisely, the German burying party climbed from the trenches, shovels and picks on their shoulders. They advanced about ten yards in our direction and waited expectantly. A word from our company officer and our party were soon out. The officers looked on, apparently conversing. The digging party soon lost interest in their task and before long were busy fraternizing. Cigarettes were being exchanged, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. Needless to say, before very long, we in the trenches were soon out on top, sauntering about the snow, but keeping this side of our wire entanglements. Likewise the Germans.
"For the whole of that day, and for many days to come, friend and foe mixed freely out on no man's land. Except for the fact that a few of the enemy could speak a little English, we found the language difficulty a bar to conversation. But we made do with signs and gestures. I remember distinctly a German holding out an open box of chocolates for me to take one. The Germans wanted to play us a football match on no man's land, but our officers would not allow it."
There are reports, though, of British and German troops engaging in soccer matches. Up and down the line, it was an amazing, spontaneous outburst of humanity. And it so appalled the higher leadership that they made sure in future Christmases, nothing like this would ever be allowed again.
I first learned about the Christmas Truce from a brilliant talk by Robert Sapolsky, one of my all-time favorites. I had written about the video some time ago.
I wanted to share another aspect that stood out to me, but the post is already fairly long so I’ll end this week’s post here.
It seems that all people need is a permission to look at another as same as them and kindness results. Unfortunately most of nation building, religion etc is built on a constant din of looking at another as the 'other'.