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Always a great opportunity to post my favorite passage of him about WWI- just hauntingly beautiful: “See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minute

Always a great opportunity to post my favorite passage of him about WWI- just hauntingly beautiful: “See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

cafard 2y ago
Odd to say that the Russians weren't any good, considering the devastating casualties they inflicted (mostly on the Hapsburg forces) and suffered during WW I, and the mass slaughter of WW II. How did the Marne stack up against Stalingrad? It is fair to say that the losses of WW I induced caution in the British, and left a huge demographic hole in France.
- shadowtree 2y ago
  "In November 1918, the University of Liverpool recorded 1,640 names on its Roll of Honour, including 176 fatalities and many others missing. Similar lists were maintained in every university. The exact number of casualties from UK universities is uncertain, but the numbers were awful. Estimates suggest that Oxford lost 19% of those who served, Cambridge 18%, and Manchester and Glasgow 17%." It wiped the best and the brightest, from a small population. Russia sent serfs into the grinder.
  - cafard 2y ago
    That must have been a great comfort to the Russians, Tsar down to the peasantry. [Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.
- csb6 2y ago
  I am not sure of the context of the passage, but I would guess that Fitzgerald was aware of the massive slaughter on the Eastern Front but felt that the cultural moment in Western Europe/America that lead up to the fighting on the Western Front meant that it was a different kind of folly than in the east. I don’t think he is commenting on which military was more effective.

cafard 2y ago

Odd to say that the Russians weren't any good, considering the devastating casualties they inflicted (mostly on the Hapsburg forces) and suffered during WW I, and the mass slaughter of WW II. How did the Marne stack up against Stalingrad? It is fair to say that the losses of WW I induced caution in the British, and left a huge demographic hole in France.

shadowtree 2y ago
"In November 1918, the University of Liverpool recorded 1,640 names on its Roll of Honour, including 176 fatalities and many others missing. Similar lists were maintained in every university. The exact number of casualties from UK universities is uncertain, but the numbers were awful. Estimates suggest that Oxford lost 19% of those who served, Cambridge 18%, and Manchester and Glasgow 17%." It wiped the best and the brightest, from a small population. Russia sent serfs into the grinder.
- cafard 2y ago
  That must have been a great comfort to the Russians, Tsar down to the peasantry. [Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.
csb6 2y ago
I am not sure of the context of the passage, but I would guess that Fitzgerald was aware of the massive slaughter on the Eastern Front but felt that the cultural moment in Western Europe/America that lead up to the fighting on the Western Front meant that it was a different kind of folly than in the east. I don’t think he is commenting on which military was more effective.