Today is the anniversary of the opening offensive in Ludendorf’s attempts to win World War One for Germany in 1918. While memories of that war have all faded, the world we live in is the product of that four years in the trenches. Because of what they did – and failed to do – we live in a bent and broken world…but those men of long ago battles still call to us, and tell us that we still can retrieve the situation. That we can save civilization. So I believe, and so that war still holds my imagination – and part of what I do is to try and set right what went wrong back then. Let’s hear Winston Churchill tell us what that opening day was like:
Before I went to my bed in the ruins of Nurlu, (General) Tudor said to me: “it is certainly coming now. Trench raids this evening have identified no less than eight enemy battalions on a single half mile of front.” The night was quiet except for a rumble of artillery fire, mostly distant, and the thudding explosions of occasional aeroplane raids. I woke up in a complete silence at a few minutes past four and lay musing. Suddenly, after what seemed about half an hour, the silence was broken by six or seven very loud and heavy explosions several miles away. I thought they were our 12-inch guns, but they were probably mines. And then, exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear. “At 4:30 am.” says Ludendorf in his account, “our barrage came down with a crash.” Far away, both to the north and to the south, the intense roar and reverberation rolled upwards towards us, while through the chinks in the carefully papered window the flame of the bombardment lit like flickering firelight my tiny cabin.
I dressed and went out. On the duckboards outside the Mess I met Tudor. “This is it,” he said. “I have ordered all our batteries to open fire. You will hear them in a minute.” But the crash of the German shells bursting on our trench lines eight thousand yards away was so overpowering that the accession to the tumult of nearly two hundred guns firing from much nearer could not even be distinguished. From the Divisional Headquarters on the high ground of Nurlu one could see the front line for many miles. It swept around us in a wide curve of red leaping flame stretching to the north far along the front of the Third Army, as well as of the Fifth Army on the south, and quite unending in either direction. There were still two hours to daylight, and the enormous explosions of the shells upon our trenches seemed almost to touch each other, with hardly an interval in space or time…The World Crisis, Volume II, pps 1,280-81
They fought in that – in that red inferno of shells and bullets and poison gas. They fought because they believed – that some of them, no doubt, believed wrong doesn’t change the sublime devotion to duty they showed. A generation was destroyed in that four years – and a civilization received a blow which it still has not recovered from. But we can. If we just recapture morality – if we, that is, just become what our ancestors were and do the right thing, we can heal ourselves, as far as humans in this life can. Remember those men – and all their like – who did give their all for a cause higher than the self. And as you go through your life, ask yourself if you have shown a measure of devotion in any way like they showed. If we do, then the world will swiftly be made a better place.
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