Re:Sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I
by C1sc0cat on Thursday November 08, 2018 @07:12AM
(#18405731)
Pershing the American commander in WW1 did some thing similar got just under a thousand Dough Boys killed when he new the armistice had been signed.
Re:Sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I
by arethuza on Thursday November 08, 2018 @06:45AM
(#18405637)
I happened to be looking at pics of the War Memorial in the village I'm from (which I walked past multiple times every day for many years) and I noticed an odd thing - WW1 is "The World's War" and 1939-1945 is "The Great War"
Re:Sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I
by agurk on Thursday November 08, 2018 @08:40AM
(#18406128)
That's interesting, as in the UK I've always heard the term Great War for the First World War. Sometime the Second was known as The Last War, which always confused me as a child as I knew there had been wars since.
It's a shame that war memorials site doesn't have a copy of the inscription on the memorials - it would be interesting to do a frequency analysis of the terms used.
Re:Sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I
by arethuza on Thursday November 08, 2018 @10:36AM
(#18406963)
I guess there have always been "Great Wars" in history - I remember reading that the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 was called that for generations after (probably in Michael Wood's superb book In Search of England: Journeys Into the English Past). Now we don't even know where Brunanburh took place!
Re:Sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I
by AnimalMuppet on Thursday November 08, 2018 @09:14AM
(#18406340)
World War II was the last war of that scale, though. May that always continue to be true.
We did some research for him, and the guy had fought at Ypres twice, been part of the first gas attack, and got shipped off to Mesopotamia.
A week before the war ended, negotiations were underway but the generals decided they had to kill a bunch of Ottomans before it was too late. So our guy got sent to his death to win a war that was already won.
I just think of the waste of life. Wilfred Owen, the poet who wrote about the war, also died at the very end of the war. His stuff has done much to affect the mood surrounding WWI.