History’s most disastrous, most tragic, most pointless mass slaughter finally ground to a halt on the 11th hour of the 11th month of the Year of Destruction 1918.
“Utterly incredible,” confided Arthur Ponsonby to his diary on 13 August 1914 …
The long expected European war has come. A dozen or so diplomats, a score of ministers, and two or three monarchs have been offending one another, so to make things straight they have ordered out millions of peaceful citizens to go and get massacred. The Government have been telling us lies and we believed them. We were committed and we did not know it, so without being attacked or our own interests in any way threatened we joined in. It is an end of Liberalism, of social reform, of progress itself for the moment. And no one can see what the future has in store.1
This year the Tower of London put on an extraordinary display to commemorate just some of those slaughtered millions: 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each Commonwealth soldier killed in World War I, filling the moat surrounding the Tower. And each evening, during the weeks leading up to Britain’s Remembrance Sunday, someone would read a list of some of the World War I dead. The picture above shows what the Tower looks like now.
Each one of them representing a human life snuffed out.
If there had been a poppy for all the sixteen million souls snuffed out during the mass slaughter,2 and another 100 million more for the souls taken in the following influenza epidemic3, the ceramic poppies would have buried the tower and the reading would have taken not just a few weeks, but more than thirty years – around the time it took for the forces this war unleashed to embark on another Great War that unleashed many more destructive forces, killing many millions more.
Those dozen or so diplomats, score of ministers, and two or three monarchs still have an awful lot to answer for.
1. Quoted in Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War, by Douglas Newton
2. Ref: ‘World War I casualties’ – Princeton.Edu
3. Ref: “1918 flu pandemic” – Wikipedia