Unnumbered Tears - what if?

[davem]

Well, the soldiers didn't have to obey their orders to kill, so we can't absolve them entirely of any moral resposibility for their actions. They were moral beings, not robots.

Also, we can't say how much deliberate cruelty, & therefore 'evil', was committed by individual soldiers. I just think its too simplistic to say the 'evil' ones were all in the war rooms, & everyone on the battlefield was morally good.

What you have to keep in mind is that WW1 was the first war of the Machines - planes & tanks appear for the first time, there is the use of such things as heavy machine guns, barbed wire, high explosives, barbed wire stretched across the battlefield, & yet the men, from the commanders down are still basically 'victorians'. Men are sent across the mud into machine gun fire with fixed bayonets! There are still cavalry divisions - officers riding horses into battle & fighting with swords.

If you think about that madness surely you're struck by the presence of something beyond callous or incompetent commanders dispatching innocent, unthinking young men to their deaths. There was something else. It was hell & hell is suffused with the presence of evil. there was something'evil' in all that waste, a good part of a whole generation thrown away, the soldiers themselves throwing their own lives away. Some thing more than insanity was going on there, & I don't know what else to call it but 'evil' - not evil individuals, but evil nonetheless.