First World War: Same Protests of Futility, Folly Heard Today
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12543-wwi-same-protests-of-futility-folly-heard-today
A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench during the Battle of the Somme. The date is believed to be July 1, 1916, the first day on the Somme
First World War: Same Protests of Futility, Folly Heard Today
Sunday, 11 November 2012 07:11
By H Patricia Hynes, Truthout | News Analysis
Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace – "The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror." (1)
World War 1 was the first industrial war, with poison gases, flamethrowers, aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensifying the scale of war wreckage and setting the norm for 20th century war. It quickly became a total war, moving inexorably toward total defeat, with no political space or will for early truce. By policy, British war dead was not sent home lest the public turn against the war. Instead, they were buried in vast graveyards near battle sites in France and Belgium. Even today, Belgian and French farmers plowing fields in places of intense, interminable fighting and mass death on the western front unearth an estimated one-half million pounds of war detritus and soldiers’ bones each year.
In Britain, a vast, unbreachable gap arose between war-ruined soldiers and war-fevered citizens suffused and infected with martial music, uniformed parades, and war propaganda – a chasm widened by pervasive government censoring of soldiers’ mail. A pliant media shamelessly published false accounts that turned mass battle losses and defeats into victories. War-loyal British editors were rewarded with knighthoods and peerage; and it was wryly noted that the war couldn’t have lasted more than a month without the newspapers. (2)
From the unyielding ugliness and butchery of World War I emerged soldier poets, notable among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose unsparing style and content severed them from the traditions of epic war poems and British romantic poetry. Living and dying in a trench war fraught with dead bodies and rats that fattened on them, with rear guard commanders who sent battalions of teenage boys into the slaughter of machine gun fire, the soldier poets castigated their homeland’s war-mongering politicians and industrial profiteers. Their sense of betrayal encompassed not only politicians giving war orders securely from home and complicit generals holed up in remote chateaus, but also war-clamoring citizens. Among these were patriotic mothers, recruited to publicly shame unenlisted young men into joining and to heckle war resisters and pacifists. The war poets’ realism countered – but never superseded – the homeland novelists, artists, playwrights and poets, among them the empire-loving Rudyard Kipling, procured by the government to ennoble the war through facile appeals to patriotism and uniform, glory for country and honor of serving.
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There you are. I'm mixed race . . . I never knew my Great Uncle Jesse - but he served with the French Soldiers as well. My great grandfather (Papa Georges) was a pip - and he was soooooooooo impressed with his future Grandson In Law 
with his multitude of stripes (Dad was a Green Beret) that my mom brought home in the late 1960's. 
He knew how tought it was in World War I - and assumed it was still pretty bad for the Black American soldier in the 1960's.
He had shared with us about the 'shock and wonder of the black Americans' of just being treated as soldiers by him. And the idea that he and the Francs would share a bottle of wine (drinking straight out of the bottle) was a completely foreign thing to a group of soldiers that hailed from the deep South . . . It actually made him kind of laugh. That's not to say the French did not then and do not now have race issues - but when it came to their country back then a man with a gun was a man with a gun.
Tell me everything you know! 
So far I only have the family stories and a picture of my grandfather in uniform with 2 buddies. The problem is they are standing in front of some plastic looking Greek and Roman statues. It looks like one of those studio photos people use to take back then to send to relatives. I have since learned I can try getting service records from other archives but it may be difficult. The fire in the seventies destroyed a lot of service records from that time.
I do remember one incident I am trying to look into. I remember visiting my grandparents and my grandfather getting very angry and tearing up a letter. Black soldiers from WWI had sued for decades over things like recognition of certain service, unequal pay, and benefits. They had won a case and my grandfather received a letter signed by Nixon and congratulating them. That just made him angry and he threw the letter in the garbage. 
My grandmother retrieved it and told him you fought for this and you should keep this letter. I was young at the time and of course only half heard or cared 
Just two pieces of a puzzle I am trying to put together but it is fun. I think this is why my father gave these things to me before he died. We shared an interest in history.
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation
*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.
"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
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But George W. Bush said "When the final history is written on Iraq, it'll look like just a comma."
