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WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems incomprehensible,

WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems incomprehensible, maybe because of how coldly logical it was. You read these accounts of charges on fortified machine gun positions across flat fields, the only cover being the mounds of bodies that eventually piled up, and you wonder how anyone could go into that. I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?

trevyn 7y ago
>you wonder how anyone could go into that They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  The podcast Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin is fantastic too. I thought I had a general idea of what happened in WW1, I was very wrong.
kkarakk 7y ago
You know how people today generally can't wrap their head around data driven results and AI generated photography/AR lenses? They treat it like magic or as not relevant to them. Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.

trevyn 7y ago

>you wonder how anyone could go into that They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.

lostlogin 7y ago
The podcast Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin is fantastic too. I thought I had a general idea of what happened in WW1, I was very wrong.

kkarakk 7y ago

You know how people today generally can't wrap their head around data driven results and AI generated photography/AR lenses? They treat it like magic or as not relevant to them. Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.