What do you mean by “Cause and Effect” and “That Matters”
While many of us sit in history classes, learning about all the wars that the U.S. has participated in, learning about the political triggers and the fallouts of treaties that lead to the next war and the next, we tend to forget about the actual important parts of the wars: the people who suffered. Now we tend to try to block out this factor of the war for the same reason many people ignore modern day veterans and worldwide international conflicts: it isn’t pretty. But if we manage to move past that shroud we cover ourselves in, to take that leap to understand why soldiers joined up, how hard their loved ones worked back home to support them, and how these soldiers return home to a cold welcome, we can see why one of the most basic rights of humans are shattered in the face of war, and that is the right to fairness.
The following links are the videos that I have looked through, two of which focused on the pull/allure of soldiers to join up, despite their families struggling back home, and the other two being about the cold reception these brave volunteers faced.
Why did British people volunteer for the Great War? – YouTube
The Great War Episode 8 Why don’t you come and help! – YouTube
A Land Fit for Heroes? The Treatment of WWI Veterans in Great Britain – YouTube
The HORRIFYING Fate of WW1 Soliders Who Returned Home – YouTube
Why did British people volunteer for the Great War?
This video, while short, is an incredibly important clip from a documentary of the Great War (I couldn’t find the name of it from the channel), but it follows interviews from actual former WW1 veterans, who, given their normal backgrounds, to this day come to feel the patriotism that inspired them as young men to march off to war. Now, while this clip is entirely about British veterans, from our past class discussions, history classes, and even just general knowledge of both historical and modern warfare, we know that patriotism and a sense of responsibility is the undeniable primary motivations for young men, and women, to step up and fight for their country in any regard.
But the questions us modern college students can ask when learning of this basic reasoning is: do these young men and women, no older than we are, know what they are getting themselves into? Do they know of the horrid situations they will find themselves in, while they watch their friends fall around them? Even in modern society, do American, British, or any countries students know what they are getting into by enlisting into the armed forces? Did these soldiers in WW1 know that the war they marched off to was simply because of some politicians disputes and a few assassinations of people they didn’t even know? And finally we can ask: Was it worth it?
The Great War Episode 8 Why don’t you come and help!
This video, being the longest in my collection, covers a broad selection of effects of the Great War, but only covers one of the many causes that triggered these effects. It focuses on the British Munitions Scandal that took place, where the British, and later the French militaries found themselves running extremely short on artillery shells. Aside from bullets, the shells were the second most used munitions on the front, but they were excessively more complex to create and expensive to produce. This video covers how the majority of women and the few men who stayed at home felt compelled to work in the factories, and work for next to nothing in dangerous production processes, having to handle explosives regularly. It also goes on to cover how the strain on sending supplies to the front, such as food rations and medication, took away from the families of soldiers, while they were already trying to survive on a soldiers pay.
It also manages to cover a common form of propaganda, one used to bring more soldiers into the fold and help the struggling families back home to feel more at ease about the circumstances their sons ran off to: comic strips. The most common one presented in this video was of a character called “Old Bill”, who was used to portray that despite a long and stressful situation being a soldier, he can have fun in the trenches and find joy in the mud.
One of the sub points this video talks about that leads us to the last two videos is the talk about the return of the maimed and disabled soldiers to their already struggling families. It ended up being extremely common for these men to be unable to take over their families working situations, and with the lack of the already small pay of a soldier, they were led to even deeper poverty. Was it worth it?
A Land Fit for Heroes? The Treatment of WWI Veterans in Great Britain
This video, despite it’s 2000’s style animation, helps to show us the atmosphere of the soldiers timelines. Even though it is also on the shorter side, it easily manages to portray to us the struggle of being one of the survivors of WW1, and how many of them wished to have been one of the ones who didn’t survive. As soldiers returned home, almost all of them were missing limbs, burned across their bodies, had damaged organs, or had severe chemical burns, and were deemed completely disabled. However some weren’t as physically damaged as others, but were nonetheless psychologically scarred all the same, and with the past few generations not having any sort of experience in caring for veterans like that, and medical care being almost non existent for these poorer families, they never received proper care. Then leads onto the fact that these young men needed jobs, so their moms and sisters would stop working day and night to provide, but because of their disabilities whether physical or not, they were sent away. Yet while much of what we know as students is of modern veterans and the complicated levels of care and benefits they receive upon retirement, we are brought to the attention of how many of these foreign soldiers, British, German, French, etc, were found to end up being forced to live on the streets, asking for charity, leading to the conclusion that in 100 years, we haven’t come that far for these former warriors. Was it worth it?
The HORRIFYING Fate of WW1 Soliders Who Returned Home
The final video I would like to go over gives us a broad view of how soldiers suffered throughout the war, and what specifically could have led to their conditions after the war. Mens hands and feet blistering from the rain gathering in trenches, unable to stay warm, known as Trench Foot. A lack of hygiene and the muddy, unclean surroundings led to infections because of Trench Foot, which would lead to amputations regularly. When it came to WW1’s war machine, we also saw the dangers of chemical warfare for the first time, namely Mustard Gas, Chlorine, and Phosgene, which when used lead to a staggering amount of casualties, but from those numbers we found a low death rate, meaning soldiers suffered permament effects even after the war. Other watys for soldiers to face a previously unknown danger is by the unseen attacks, specifically ones from long-range artillery cannons, and aircraft. These bombing runs lead to any number of injuries, and when it comes from seemingly nowhere, it strikes permament fear as well.
Now the video comes to end with talks about some forms of empathy towards soldiers, such as the creation of plaster face masks to cover up facial deformities, but that only paled in comparison to the struggles that awaited them as they came home. Was it worth it?
Overrall Conclusion
The main thing that we can get from videos such as the ones I picked out, and all forms of media about pretty much any war in history, including the very books we read in class, is questions. Why did these soldiers go to fight? Why did they leave their families for a cause? Why did they feel so compelled and responsible, despite being anywhere from 18-30 years old? Could I fight like that? Would I fight like that? Could I go sign up tomorrow and go through a similar hell to what these men faced? How would I turn out? Would it be worth it?
Yet another medimajor question we can ask about soldiers before, during, and after the war, while we now know the reasons they marched off to said war, and how it may be seemingly have been pointless and unfair for all those deaths and lives destroyed is not just “Was/would it be worth it?”, but instead “Was any of this fair? Was it fair to the soldiers who died? To those who survived, yet lost everything? Was it fair to the families who lost their sons and husbands, no matter how they turned out?”
