Increased death toll when we moved from monarchies to democracies

Chapter two of Leonhard’s Pandora’s Box is entitled “Antecedents: Crises and Containment before 1914.”  Most interesting (and alarming) is his drawing attention to the sorts of wars princes engaged in during the period of the monarchies vs. what came later with democracies.  If a prince wanted to go to war with a neighboring prince, he would raise an army assign a commander and off it would go to do the prince’s bidding.  If the commander lost the army, he would not be given another. 

But with the American Civil War all that changed.  With everyone a citizen, the armies that could be raised were limited only by a nation’s population.  More soldiers were killed in America’s Civil War than in all the subsequent wars America was engaged in.  Grant set the standard for Haig.  If you had more soldiers your enemy,  you could trade with him in battle after battle, confident that your enemy would run out of them before you did. 

Princes were indeed involved in WWI’s beginning, but they had lost much of their power.  Ordinary people were citizens and had rights.  They could also be drafted into armies.  But in 1914 it wasn’t just nations that were contending, it was empires.  Britain, in splendid isolation could draw upon the manpower of an empire larger than anyone else’s. 

Nevertheless the German’s thought they could whip the British and French.   The war degenerated into a trench-warfare stalemate.  The Germans decided to sink the American ships bringing aid to the allies and when they did that America declared war on Germany.  American armies were subsequently assembled.  Initially, Germany wasn’t too worried. It would take America a long time to get their armies to Europe, but when the war dragged on longer than expected, and when the American armies started arriving . . . it was sort of like a chess game.  The Germans seemed to be doing okay, but its best thinkers could see several moves ahead and with larger and larger numbers of Americans arriving, they stood no chance of winning, so they resigned. 

Poorer thinkers later on challenged that decision.  Germany wasn’t properly defeated, they told each other, so they resolved to play the game again and this time all the way to the end.

Leonhard didn’t say all the above.   I have taken the liberty of reasoning from what he has said.  His book is a bit overwhelming – as overwhelming as House of Government, but much more interesting in my opinion.  I have read several books about WWI in the past, but have never encountered much of what Leonhard is presenting, e.g., the increased death-toll of war when we moved from monarchies to democracies.

1918 Spanish flu and WWI deaths

I just began Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and as it happened during my researching “The Spanish Flu,” I ran across the following in Wikipedia:

“This increased severity has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War.^[95] In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave began, and the flu quickly spread around the world again. Consequently, during modern pandemics, health officials pay attention when the virus reaches places with social upheaval (looking for deadlier strains of the virus).^”

And, “Academic Andrew Price-Smith has made the argument that the virus helped tip the balance of power in the latter days of the war towards the Allied cause. He provides data that the viral waves hit the Central Powers before the Allied powers and that both morbidity and mortality in Germany and Austria were considerably higher than in Britain and France.”

And, “Also, the outbreak coincided with the deaths and media focus on the First World War.^[126] Another explanation involves the age group affected by the disease. The majority of fatalities, from both the war and the epidemic, were among young adults. The number of war-related deaths of young adults may have overshadowed the deaths caused by flu.^[85]
 
“When people read the obituaries, they saw the war or postwar deaths and the deaths from the influenza side by side. Particularly in Europe, where the war's toll was high, the flu may not have had a tremendous psychological impact or may have seemed an extension of the war's tragedies.^[85] The duration of the pandemic and the war could have also played a role. The disease would usually only affect a particular area for a month before leaving. The war, however, had initially been expected to end quickly but lasted for four years by the time the pandemic struck.”

COMMENT:  Over the years, I’ve read of World War I and attributed the huge number of British deaths to the ineptitude and insensitivity of General Haig.  Now we know that the Spanish flu played a significant role.  How large a role perhaps no one is prepared to guess.  But the large death toll of all the participants (and all were affected by the Spanish Flu) induced many, especially in France and Britain to become pacifists, unilaterally intending to not go to war and to handle all military threats by negotiation.  Seeing these two nations, as well as the Isolationist U.S. as militarily weak, Germany and Japan saw their chance and pounced.   I can’t recall the statistics but my impression is that the total deaths of WWII far exceeded those in WWI.  

All the historians I’ve read on the subject assert that had it not been for WWI, there would have been no WWII.  But perhaps we could also say that had it not been for the Spanish flu, the death tolls among British and French soldiers in WWI would not have been so outrageously high.  Perhaps the numbers would have been reasonable enough to prevent the large numbers of important British and French politicians from becoming pacifists. 

The U.S. wasn’t overtly pacifistic after WWI, but by returning to their prewar isolationism, what they became was similar.  They returned to George Washington’s advice, “avoid foreign wars,” they saw no need to maintain a large army.  Roosevelt had a background with the Navy and saw to it that it was larger and more potent than many realized, and did engage in “lend lease” in order to supply weapons to Britain and the USSR, but the picture the U.S. presented to both Germany and Japan was that of a militarily weak nation that could be taken advantage of.  

“Yes, the U.S. has the ships of a potent Navy,” Yamamoto argued, “but we can wipe out most of it, especially the carriers at Pearl Harbor.  I have a plan to do that.”  He had a good plan, but the carriers didn’t happen to be at Pearl Harbor when he carried it out.  “Not to worry,” he thought.  “They aren’t a military nation.  We can sink their carriers later on. . . long before they can change their impressive industrial system into a war machine.”

There were lots of misunderstandings rising out of World War One.  We Americans, British and Russians have learned from the mistakes of WWI and WWII and now practice the old adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum. . . at least so far. 

More on memory

From the May 20, 1999 issue of the NYROB is a book review by Hilary Mantel: Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny. 

Mantel is conflicted.  She has had bad experiences with the Medical Profession and doesn’t trust Sereny or her solutions.   Nevertheless she does think something should be done.  At the time, ten year old Mary Bell could be tried as an adult.  While disagreeing with Sereny’s proposal that such children should immediately see a psychologist, not be tried in an adversarial courtroom or subject to decisions by untrained jurors, she does think that trying Mary Bell at age 10 in a court-system designed for examining adults was wrong. 

She interviewed Mary’s mother, Betty, who apparently tried to kill Mary on several occasions if she could make it look like an accident.  Sereny has difficulty believing Betty and has her go over Mary’s childhood several times:  Mantel writes, “The innermost secrets of Mary’s childhood are yielded up with difficulty.  She gave Gitta Sereny at least four versions of events, the last of which I have decided is probably as close to the truth as her memory could manage.”

Mary Bell is now age 57 according to Wikipedia.  Her name has been changed and her identity is hidden by order of the court.  In her criticism of Sereny, Mantel writes, “The problem is also the nature of memory, the passage of time and language itself, the language of the many versions, and the meaning that slides away between them.  ‘I must have done, I must have known, I must have thought. . . .’ says Mary, responding on her state of mind as she killed Martin Brown.  I must have the eleven-year-old child speaks through the mouth of a woman forty.  It is hard not to think that Mary is a giant translation problem.  If we could solve it, would we hear a language that means anything to us . . . ?”

COMMENT:  I mentioned an accident I had on 8-15-19, coming down my stairs, feeling struck from behind by one of my dogs, falling on the kitchen tile floor and breaking my right knee-cap.  Everyone I’ve discussed this accident with wants to know how it happened, but I have to use language like Mary’s in order to describe it.  I don’t know which dog ran into me from behind.  My eight-year-old 125-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback could most easily have done it, but he is very mild-mannered, and it is unlikely that he would have done that of his own volition.  My three-year-old Irish Terrier, Jessica, does like to horse around, and if she chose that moment to horse-around with Ben, she could have driven him into my legs from behind.  She could have done it on her own, but I can’t think why. 

When asked, I always say that my dogs knocked me down from one of the lower steps of my stairs, but as the technician was doing an EKG to see if I was in good enough shape to have my knee operated on, I asked if there was any indication of a stroke or a heart-attack.  She poured over the EKG for a moment and said, “no, you’ve never had a heart attack or a stroke.”  I asked that question because I had begun to doubt my memory of what happened.  I “thought” one of the dogs ran into me, but perhaps I had blacked out from a mini-stroke? 

My son who sees Jessica dashing about mere inches from my bad leg has no doubt.  He thinks Jessica is the sole culprit.  But I couldn’t prove it by means of my memory. 

In case anyone wonders, my affection for Jessica hasn’t lessened.  It seems comparable to what I might have felt for Susan if she were driving while I was in the passenger seat and was injured.  I knew when we were just dating that she was a terrible driver.  She had been in several serious accidents.  In one she ran into a stanchion holding up part of an overpass in her VW.  She wasn’t wearing a seat belt and broke her front window with her head.    I knew what I was getting.  By a similar token, Irish Terriers are very ferocious, willful, fearless little dogs.  I knew it would take several years before she settled down.  Planning ahead I decided an Irish Terrier would be good as my last dog.  Small enough for me to handle, but tough enough to handle coyotes at the river by herself if need be.  She’ll probably still be good in that role.  I’ll just be limping a little when I take her for walks or hikes at the river. . . assuming covid-19 ever lets us go hiking there again. 

The impulse to transcend ones physical limitations

From the 2-28-2020 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “Clouds Left Far Behind, the impulse to transcend physical limitations through writing,” an article by Darran Anderson, the author of Imaginary Cities, 2015, and Inventory: A River, a city, a family.

The title had me thinking of Tolkien who literally got so caught up in the world he had created that he transcended his limitations, but the author has in mind prisoners who transcend their circumstances by writing.  His first prisoner wrote,  ‘Come then, let us start!  Follow me, all ye whom the ‘pangs of despised love’ or slights of friends keep within doors – follow me far from the meannesses and unkindnesses of men.  Be ye unhappy, sick, or weary, follow me.  Ye idle ones, arouse ye, one and all.’

Anderson tells us, “These exultant words are to be found in A Voyage around my Room (1794) by the aristocrat and military man Xavier de Maistre.  Placed under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days after a duel.  De Maistre kept his spirits up by imagining his navigations between the walls around the furniture as a great journey.  His ‘voyage’ is like an Oulipian attempt to exhaust a place and poetically reframe the familiar.  This ‘travel writer’ thinks of his bed, for example, in universal terms; it ‘sees us born and sees us die.  It is the ever-changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies.  It is a cradle decked with flowers.  A throne of love.  A sepulchre’.  Though it is an intentionally absurdist work, A Voyage Around My Room is a testimony to the transporting power of writing.  ‘Be he miserly or prodigal, rich or poor, young or old, born beneath the torrid zone or near the poles’, de Maistre tells his readers, ‘he may travel with me.’  It was a best-seller, and he eventually wrote a follow-up, charting his room at night – a ‘cell’ to which, this time, he voluntarily confined himself.”

Feeling a need to transcend physical limitations during 42 days of house arrest does seem absurd.  De Maistre knew it was absurd and never expected that it would be published.  His brother did that on his own, but De Maistre lived to be 88 so perhaps he later on became physically limited for a longer period of time. 

While disappointed with the article, I did look about at my house and yard and think about the limitations I now face as a consequence of covid-19.  I have a very nice library and can have books delivered to my door in a very short time, or immediately by means of Kindle.  I don’t have TV but I have a wide variety of movies and TV programs on Amazon Prime and Netflix. 

I thought, if I am truly to be limited to here more completely than I presently am, I should take better care of my yard.  Japanese gardeners have created marvels with much less space than I have.  At present I have some California Poppies in a small planter area back there and all my rose bushes are ready to burst into flower, but I could do more.  

Or . . . I could write. 

Baum's Oz novels

I just read the article “The Oddness of Oz” by Alison Lurie.  This article appears in the 12/21/2000 issue of the NYROB.  I was surprised to learn that L. F. Baum wrote a number of Oz books, none of which I read when I was young, and Lurie mentions that “in the 1930s and 1940s they [Baum’s Oz books] were actually removed from many schools and libraries.” 

In 1941 I was seven just two months before Pearl Harbor and since the Oz books were intended for children, and I was doing my best to read books for the more-mature, perhaps I chose not to read them.  Or perhaps my grandmother steered me away from them. 

Also, my parents took me to see the movie, “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939 when I was five and I was empathetically terrified when the tornado took Dorothy away from her home in Kansas.  I was appalled, or I assumed that she wouldn’t be able to find her way home again.  I certainly wouldn’t have been able to if a tornado swept me away.  I have had a very poor sense of direction my entire life and was apparently very aware of my limitation while sitting in the Grenada Theater with my parents at age five.

Of course in reading Lurie’s articles I now learn that Baum didn’t intend Dorothy’s adventures to be bad things.  Also, she did later find her way back to Kansas, but she didn’t stay there.  Furthermore, after the bank repossessed the family farm, she moved her Aunt and Uncle to Oz; which would have helped me a lot watching the movie, had I been told that by my parents – or maybe they did tell me and I didn’t believe them. 

Also, Lurie writes, “Though the Oz books have always been read by children of both sexes, they have been especially popular with girls, and it is not hard to see why.  Besides being a world in which women and girls rule, it is also, as Joel Chaston has pointed out, a world in which none of the major characters has a traditional family.  Instead, most of them live alone or with friends of the same sex.  The Scarecrow stays with the Tin Woodman in his castle for months at a time, while Ozma, Dorothy, Betsy, and Trot all of rooms in the palace of the Emerald City, and Glinda lives in a castle with a hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz.” 

Well, now, if Lurie had ended her comment with the word “rule,” I wouldn’t have questioned it, but the rest of it seems a feminist assumption, but none of the girls I grew up with seemed desirous of living alone or with friends of the same sex.  I had a girl-friend when I was five.  Her name was Arlene Cooper and she made a tremendous impression on me.  I can recall asking her if she liked me, and she replied, “I don’t like you.  I love you.”  I would ask her that question every day just to hear her say that.  I recall missing her when, probably, her family moved away and she had to go to school elsewhere, but I suspect that whatever became of her, she preferred a world in which there were boys, and then later on men.  And, it would seem, so does Alison Lurie.  She was born in 1926, married her first husband in 1948, had three children, divorced in 1985 but married again in I think 1989.  She seems to be living happily with her second husband today, and would have been married to him when she wrote the above paragraph in 2000.