The Off Topic Topic

[Razgovory]

I took my written driver's exam today.  I had let my driver's license expire years back when my dad died.  I missed one question; the same question I missed 24 years ago when I took my driver's exam as a teenager.

[Syt]

Well, now you know for next time.


Still listening through Behind the Bastards podcast, still in 2019 episodes. Their anti-vaxxer episode was already  in hindsight. On the one I listened to this morning (about border militias and lovely people like Chris Simcox or Shawna Lorde) he and his guests (Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston of Some More News) talk about how the should cover the 2020 elections and go to CPAC etc. Working title: "2020 - The Worst Year Of Our Lives" .... some of this stuff just doesn't age so well in hindsight.

[Sheilbh]

Oh RIP Benjamin Zephaniah

Weirdly sad as I have very strong memories of reading his poems as a kid. The only ones I really remember 25-30 years later are him and Carol Ann Duffy.

[Syt]

Anyone here? Sheilbh?

[HVC]

The rich guy gets to stay home, though, right?

[Sheilbh]

The rich guy gets to stay home, though, right?

Although to take it serious - actually, no.

WW1 has a weirdly outsized resonance in the UK compared to the casualties suffered and the actual impact it had here rather than in, say, the rest of Europe. One of the theories is that the highest casualty rate was among junior officers - so it was precisely the rich kids (or - as they saw it in the interwar period - the flower of a generation) who were most likely to die. I feel like that was possibly also just a change in the nature of the war that kept going in the 20th century?

And they did. The Prime Minister's eldest son was killed in the Somme, over forty MP and Lords or former MPs (including Gladstone's son) died, Kipling's son was killed at Loos, pre-war Oxbridge aesthetes and great hopes of English poetry like Rupert Brooke (already in the Bloomsbury Group with Woolf and Keynes) died. I think Kipling's particularly interesting as the great propagandist of Empire and derring do - I think he definitely had a bit of Yeats', "did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?"

The whole commemoration/memory of WW1 is really interesting - there's a good Alan Hollinghurst novel (not his best though) basically about the impact on his family, which is aristocratic, (and his upper middle class gay lover from university) of the death in WW1 of a minor poet just up from Oxford which is really good on the class side of things. There's an incredible book I can't remember the name of on exactly how it's remembered as I did a unit on the Poet as Witness.

The popular memory is of course lions led by donkeys (a phrase made up by an author, later a particularly rogue-ish Tory MP, to use as the title of his book, which he later made up an attribution to Ludendorff to justify ). But the experience at the time and the cultural memory in the inter-war years was absolutely not that.

[Josquius]

So it wasn't that WW1 was bad for people overall, it's just it was bad for the literary sect who record our memories?

I must say, I don't think any of my family, that I know of anyway, fought in WW1.

[Admiral Yi]

So it wasn't that WW1 was bad for people overall, it's just it was bad for the literary sect who record our memories?

This is not a reasonable inference from anything Shelf posted.  He was rebutting what Hillary said about the rich staying home.  "Rich people didn't stay home" is not synonymous with "it wasn't that bad for ordinary people."

[Tamas]

Cannot just be simpler than that? WW1 had to be quite a shock to every society. It was nothing like any previous wars ever fought, and while by comperative and modern standards Britain may not have lost THAT many people, I assume it was still the very first time that losing family members in a war was such a widespread and shared phenomenon.

[Sheilbh]

This is not a reasonable inference from anything Shelf posted.  He was rebutting what Hillary said about the rich staying home.  "Rich people didn't stay home" is not synonymous with "it wasn't that bad for ordinary people."

Rich people didn't stay at home, died disproportionately and that might be part of why it (to this day) remains an out of proportion national trauma and how we remember it.

I would be willing to bet that the most read piece of literature in schools in this country is still Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est) - and you can see why. It's a good poem but also a really good/easy one to teach.

I must say, I don't think any of my family, that I know of anyway, fought in WW1.

Same or WW2. Though there's rumours/myths of my grandad's activities in the Irish War of Independence

Cannot just be simpler than that? WW1 had to be quite a shock to every society. It was nothing like any previous wars ever fought, and while by comperative and modern standards Britain may not have lost THAT many people, I assume it was still the very first time that losing family members in a war was such a widespread and shared phenomenon.

Definitely part of it but I think it's more how out of proportion it is here compared to other combatants (especially given the lower casualties or consequences for the UK/Britain). Although some of that was also the Boer War which is the first war, famously, when we know the identity of the dead - and the first war which has widespread memorialisation.

Remembered the book, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory which is excellent - and in its way also a WW2 book (Fussell was a veteran who wrote about his wartime experiences) and a Vietnam book as it was a product of the 70s.

[Tamas]

I know for sure of 2 great-grandfathers and one great-great-grandfather who fought in WW1, the latter died at the Isonzo  (a helpful acquaintance from the village claimed a shell took his head off just after going over the top), the other two survived. It's interesting all three ended up on the Italian front (one for sure was in Serbia at the start though).

[Zanza]

Some of my relatives fought in WW1, but I only know details about those that fought in WW2.

[The Brain]

A granduncle fought in WW1. FWIW he wasn't rich.

The rich dying more in war has to be fairly common in history, given the tendency of nobility or similar to have a strong martial identity. In the Great Northern War Swedish nobles died in droves compared to ordinary people, since most able-bodied noblemen were in the armed forces, unlike the poorer classes. "Sweden fought to the last nobleman" is much more true than the more common "Sweden fought to the last Finn".

[Habbaku]

A granduncle fought in WW1. FWIW he wasn't rich.

On purpose, or did your family have some Germans or Russians in it?

[grumbler]

Part of the reason WW1 resonates so much more in the UK than the continent may be that the other W1 nations suffered much more in WW2 than the UK, so WW2 became their great national trauma.