Two Wars and the Long Twentieth Century
LBC - Um artigo do "The New Yorker", comparando a Guerra Civil dos USA, entre 1861 e 1865, com a primeira guerra mundial. Extraí algumas das passagens mais interessantes.
...the Battle of the Somme, in July, 1916, still the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, with more than nineteen thousand dead and nearly forty thousand wounded or missing
The best calculation of the number of men from the British Isles who died in the Great War is 722,785. Although records from the Civil War are inaccurate and incomplete, the most recent and sophisticated analyses indicate that approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, from the North and the South, perished between 1861 and 1865.
The American North was fighting to preserve a nation, the Confederacy to establish one, Britain to defend one.
The railroad was central to both conflicts, enabling unprecedented rapid resupply and movement of armies, and reducing the decisiveness of battle. The telegraph revolutionized battlefield communication. And industry was essential to the production of new weaponry that shaped the character and deadliness of both wars.
Although ninety-four per cent of battlefield deaths in the Civil War were caused by the rifle, in the Great War it was artillery that inflicted sixty per cent of British fatalities—with an inhumanity that the London Times war correspondent Lt. Col. Charles Repington called the “butchery of the unknown by the unseen".
Half a century earlier, many Civil War soldiers had discarded their bayonets along their marching routes, relieving their load of what they had come to regard as superfluous equipment. Fewer than one per cent of Civil War casualties resulted from bayonet wounds. In the First World War, they were so rare as to be statistically subsumed into a “miscellaneous” category that totalled 1.02 per cent, the official weapons manual notwithstanding. Soldiers reported the bayonet more useful for opening tin cans or drying clothes than as a weapon against enemy fire.
by June, 1917, eighty per cent of the weaponry and ammunition for the British Army was made by Munitionettes, as the women were called. Safety conditions had not markedly improved in the half century since the Civil War, however. Dozens of women died of T.N.T. poisoning that turned their skin yellow, and explosions in Britain killed more than three hundred workers in the course of the war.
National economies and war production, in particular, came to depend on women in ways that were unprecedented in either American or British society.
Scholars of the First World War have often observed that it was Britain’s first literate war, the first in which most common soldiers could write home and describe their experiences, uniting home and battlefront in a newly close connection.
In a Britain where the fissures of class portrayed in “Upstairs/Downstairs” or “Downton Abbey” remained firmly in place, the Commission stood resolutely by the principle of equality in death; war and its casualties proved to be great levellers.
As David Crane observes in a recent book on Britain’s war losses, “A war that had started with the Timesprinting casualty lists of officers only had ended with a nameless, rank-less, classless soldier enshrined ‘among Kings’ ” in Westminster Abbey.
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