![]() Here, too, Jankowski delivers the goods and his answer is keystone to his larger thesis. Ignoring the chiasmus we remain stupid.īut ten months. Humans wage war but war also wages humanity. He uses the flotsam and jetsam of culture to make a cultural argument. Jankowski makes his case refreshingly with a wide array of source materials: Of course official transcripts, reports and documents, but also newspapers, magazines, soldiers’ letters home as well as mail plucked by military censors, movies, novels, memoir, music. ![]() We make narratives of our war-making, narratives that flatter, apotheosize, vilify, dehumanize, excuse and defend. Both fact and legend have realities we must understand. These constructions can depart quite far from actual events. Battles and wars, Jankowski suggests, often define cultures, but just as often cultures define battles, transfigure them. He offers understanding of war and ourselves: the way they are fought and the way we remember them. Jankowski intends more than fife and drum military history or beginner’s social theory. The industrialized savagery of World War One rearranged humanity’s psychic furniture, causing great crises of faith that would lead to modernism itself. With this material Jankowski is adept, but not much will be revelatory to anyone who read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school. Here is the stuff of traditional military history: the plans, the tactics, the strategies and contingency of battle. The book properly begins with an examination of the general facts of warfare at the time, but also of the daily, indeed, weekly and monthly, particulars of this very battle. Scholarly yet readable analyses of the realities and myths of Verdun are the highest achievements in his enlightening study of the battle. It is on this point-the battle as it was and the battle as it has been memorialized-that Paul Jankowski’s book Verdun is particularly useful. But to Politicians, journalists and novelists as well as filmmakers and musicians on both sides, Verdun was so terrible that it easily “lent itself to symbolic and allegorical overload.” To the soldiers in the trenches the battle was a miserable existence of mud, artillery roulette, little contact with command or comrades, and little explanation of what the hell was going on. And continued for almost a calendar year. Yet the armies were massed, the trenches dug. The Germans had little reason to attack at Verdun the French still less reason to defend it. To the commanders, the western front presented the inescapable logic of stalemate. Apologies for and mythologies of the battle began even before it was over. Pointlessness seemed to be its point.īut our psyches abhor life and especially death without meaning. What was lost was clawed back at the expense of exterminated souls and rubbled townships. What was won was dear and unable to be held. It led to no political changes, no significant re-drawing of maps or even battle lines. The massive ossuary over which a cold monument was erected in the town contains a mountain of human remains, yet merely a third of all the French and German soldiers who died in the battle. That number, however, swelled-in the minds of the partisans, in the estimation of historians and memories of the cultures-as if the facts weren’t grand enough to express the horror. When momentum of the German attaque brusquee petered, they slowly surrendered their gains and more lives. The Germans took ground in the early weeks but they lost as many men as the French in doing so. The battle and the war were waged like this: shelling, advance, resistance over and over again. The machine gun alone made for rates of death previously unimaginable and gave a certain edge to the defender. Machine guns, flame throwers, poison gas, artillery shells weighing as much as a horse. This was, for the first time on this scale, mechanized warfare, the materiel of industry. The way a fire makes its own wind, Verdun sustained itself, a blood-letting that demanded only more blood to let. A writer likened his time at the front to a rainstorm of paving stones and building blocks.Īt Verdun advance was impossible and likewise withdrawal. An ambulance driver called Verdun the slaughterhouse of the world. Those that survived the mortars often went mad from the ceaseless explosions. Limbs avulsed, bodies sprayed, bones pounded to mud. The fighting would go on, a war within a war, for 10 more months. It is estimated that on February 21, 1916, the first day of the battle of Verdun, one million artillery shells fell.
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