A Tale of Two Wars

Soldiers set out to kill each other, not because they want to, but because they are told to—and they obey!

Sgt. John Russel, a decorated combat veteran of the Iraq War, stands accused of shooting eight fellow servicemembers at a clinic in Baghdad May 11th 2009. U.S. Army photo

(CALGARY, Alberta) - On May 11, 2009 Sgt John Russell, a 15-year career soldier, walked into Camp Liberty, a counselling centre in Baghdad, and shot to death two counsellors and three young soldiers, before being restrained. This is a multiple tragedy from all vantage points.

Wars are about killing with the devil in the details—who does the killing and how they do it.

Soldiers set out to kill each other, not because they want to, but because they are told to—and they obey!

In the 1960s there was a rhetorical question posted on psychedelic posters: What if they gave a war and nobody came? At Christmas 1914, over much of the Western Front of what came to be called The Great War, nobody came.

On both sides of the front lines in Flanders, the soldiers of two grandsons of Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V, faced each other (we now know that European royal families are among the most dysfunctional families in the world). By December, commanders on both sides were beginning to be concerned about a developing “live-and-let-live” attitude among the soldiers on both sides. By the first week of December, wintry rain had made forward movement on either side impossible. There was, as yet, no overt fraternization, except that neither side fired during mealtimes.

On the morning of December 19, Geoffrey Heinekey wrote to his mother, saying: “…a most extraordinary thing happened…Some Germans came out and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole morning and I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed like extraordinarily fine men….It seemed too ironical for words. There, the night before, we had been having a terrific battle and the morning after, there we were smoking their cigarettes and they were smoking ours.”

There were extraordinarily fine men on both sides, but to no avail.

General Horace Smith-Dorrien of Britain was worried about the overall progress of the war and wrote in a memo to his commanders: “I have issued the strictest orders that under no circumstances is intercourse to be allowed between the opposing troops. To finish this war quickly we must keep up the fighting spirit and do all we can to discourage friendly intercourse.”

The main theatre, the Western Front, stretching in a continuous line of trenches from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, was deadlocked for the entire four years of the war, except for a few months at the war's start and a few months before its end in 1918. By 1916 the forces of Germany, France and the British Empire, millions of men, measured advances in terms of a few kilometers gained over just months. Casualties for each big push ran into hundreds of thousands on both sides.

At Christmas 1914, German, British and French soldiers disobeyed Smith-Dorrien and his commanders, and openly fraternized with “the enemy” along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops lifted Christmas trees out of the trenches with signs: "Merry Christmas" and "You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed across no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. They worked together to bury the dead from both sides. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons and, in those situations, to aim high.

In a sane and rational world, the war would have been over the soldiers from both sides who could have just packed up and gone home. There wouldn’t have been enough officers to arrest and contain them.

The high command on both sides saw a potential disaster unfolding: soldiers affirming brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial. By March, 1915 the fraternization movement had been successfully stopped and the war machine put back in full operation. By the time of the armistice in 1918, more than ten million people would be slaughtered—there being no other word for it.

The lesson here is that it is irrelevant what politicians, industrialists and generals want if they don’t have millions of soldiers willing to blindly obey orders. The Great War marked a collapse of the old autocracies and empires in that the Austro-Hungarian alliance (formed in 1867) was broken up. The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was fatally weakened and, after the Second World War, was no more. The soldiers fighting in the Great War had been born and raised in social atmospheres of autocracy and class structure. Disobedience on any significant scale would never have been predicted yet, in December 1914, there it was.

The soldiers’ high level leadership believed in war’s larger picture even though some as high as colonel did discreetly support the fraternization. Soldiers deserting or fraternizing with the enemy would be, and were, punished on a small scale. This happens in every war. But what if the dissidents had numbered into the hundreds of thousands, even a million? Courts martial and prosecutions would have been impossible as even some of the officer class would probably have opted for peace and cooperation.

Who were those millions of anonymous soldiers? On both sides I think the vast majority would have been—outside the war zone—fundamentally good people as Heinekey noted earlier. They believed what their leaders told them to believe and fell prey to both the power of propaganda and to the bullets of those others who were similarly manipulated. They were ordered to kill each other and that’s what they tried to do.

Through the acclaimed HBO ten part series Band of Brothers, (Part 1 first aired September 9, 2001) some of the featured soldiers made brief comments at the beginning of each episode. At the opening of Part 9 Shifty Powers said:

“A lot of those soldiers, I’ve thought of this often, that man and I might have been good friends. We might have had a lot in common. We might have liked to fish. He might have liked to hunt. You never know. Course, they were doing what they were supposed to do. I was trying to do what I was supposed to do. But under different circumstances, we might have been good friends.”

Another soldier, not identified, said, “I think we thought that the Germans were the evilest people in the world, But as the war went on we found out also that it wasn’t the Germans per se.”

The First World War, said economist John Kenneth Galbraith,

“revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now [1973] expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It’s a difference that still persists.”

It’s no different in the U.S. now, thirty-six years later. It is seen as unpatriotic—not supporting the troops—to oppose the spending of $10,000,000,000 (ten billion dollars) a month on the Iraq and Afghanistan war, yet advocating universal health care, at a fraction of that cost, is also seen by many as equally unpatriotic—heading down the road to socialism.

The real cost, given only lip service, is the destruction of the cream of society. It happened in the Vietnam debacle. It’s happening today. In the Great War the proportional losses were even higher throughout European society and set the stage for future horrors.

In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:

“We owe to the first war and its aftermath Russian Communism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism. We owe to the first war the creation of a chaotic unstable world where there is every reason to fear that the Second World War was not the last, where there is the vast horror of Russian Communism to be combated, where Germany, France and what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire have all fallen lower in the scale of civilization, where there is every prospect of chaos in Asia and Africa, where the prospect of vast and horrible carnage inspires daily and hourly terror.

“All these evils have sprung with the inevitability of Greek tragedy out of the First World War. Consider by way of contrast what would have happened if Britain had remained neutral in that war. The war would have been short. It would have ended in victory for Germany. America would not have been dragged in. Britain would have remained strong and prosperous. Germany would not have been driven into Nazism, Russia, though it would have had a revolution, would in all likelihood have not had the Communist Revolution, since it could not in a short war have been reduced to the condition of utter chaos which prevailed in 1917.

“The Kaiser’s Germany, although war propaganda on our side represented it as atrocious, was in fact only swashbuckling and a little absurd. I had lived in the Kaiser’s Germany and I knew that progressive forces in that country were very strong and had every prospect of ultimate success. There was more freedom in the Kaiser’s Germany than there is now in any country outside Britain and Scandinavia. We were told at the time that it was a war for freedom, a war for democracy and a war against militarism. As a result of that war freedom has vastly diminished and militarism has vastly increased. As for democracy, its future is still in doubt. I cannot think that the world would be in anything like the bad state in which it is if English neutrality in the first war had allowed a quick victory to Germany.”

While there are clear lessons to be learned from the Christmas Truce of 1914, it is not likely to be repeatable. War has become mechanized with soldiers never meeting each other face to face except under chaotic conditions which could never lead to any kind of fraternization. And dehumanization of the “enemy” continues apace.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place. Write to Dan at this address: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com