Ypres Creepers!

When I was a little girl, World War I vets were, if not plentiful, at least somewhat easy to find. On Veterans' Day they would stand outside of stores and sell those little plastic poppies. At that time I had no curiosity about what they had been through, but now that they are virtually all gone, how I wish I'd had the chance to ask them about their experiences! There is no more fascinating war to me than World War I, which seems so immediate and yet so distant. We can still watch footage of it, and yet it is already part of the irretrievable past. In the US we seem to have so little collective interest in this war. Once I went to the local war store (and was already getting funny looks for being the only one without a Y chromosome in there) and I finally had to ask where the World War I section was. While there were large and prominent sections devoted to the Civil War and World War II, and respectable sections on the Revolutionary War, Vietnam, and Korea, yet World War I, the War to End All Wars, merited only half a bookcase off in a corner. In my high school history class, we skipped right over the World War I chapter in our textbooks. When I looked up the World War I monument in Washington, DC on Google, it asked me, "Do you mean World War II monument?" No, I saw the monument when I was in DC and know it exists, yet Google itself thinks nobody would look for it. Why is that?

I have always thought World War I is a far more interesting war to study for precisely the reasons that it seems to be shoved off in a corner by the general populace, the unacknowledged cousin of the war family. Don't get me wrong, I hate war and don't find it glorious at all, which may be part of WWI's lack of appeal for people. What could possibly be less glamorous than trench warfare? Then there is the moral ambiguity: which side was right or wrong? It is easy to oversimplify the Civil War and say the bad guys were the ones who kept other people in bondage, and of course WWII has a fantastic villain to blame everything on... as if WWII didn't arise directly from the ashes of WWI. For this very reason, we have much more to learn from studying the causes of WWI than WWII. The latter could have been prevented if the Treaty of Versailles had not been so harsh; but how would we have prevented the former? And who was the Bad Guy? The US dithered for a long time about joining, and though they do not tell you this in history class, part of our indecision was which side to join. That's right, we almost sided with the Kaiser. Not a fact we wanted to remember 20 years later when Germany was definitely the enemy!

Also, because the US had such late involvement, we lost fewer lives. The War is regarded with much more interest in Europe and Canada. I think it is time we got more interested in it too. It is a very real war - grimy, disgusting, no clear good or bad guys - and it was the first war on such a massive scale. Sometimes I feel it is disingenuous to call WWII by its own name; maybe it should just be WWI, Part 2. It is a sequel. If, God forbid, there is ever a World War III, the circumstances leading up to it will be much more similar to things in 1914 than those in 1937! Which means that if we want to keep WWIII from ever happening, we had better stop skipping over those chapters in the history books.

Famous Hat