And so it goes........

Just a little article to make you think, from Counterpunch.

The First Modern Killing Fields
The Ghosts of Passchendaele
By CLANCY SIGAL

Today is the 90th anniversary of the opening day of the first really modern killing field, the No Man’s Land in Flanders known as Passchendaele. Technically, the Third Battle of Ypres of World War One. It began on July 31, 1917 – before the United States was fully committed – and lasted for 100 days in heavy downpours and maggoty mud. The air stank of mustard gas and putrefying corpses. As the soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “I died in hell - (They called it Passchendaele)”.

Before the ‘battle’ – actually a suicidal stalemate – ended, more than half a million Allied troops, mainly British and Commonwealth, and a quarter of a million Imperial German soldiers, had been killed. Over what? Four months after the battle commenced with a ‘walking barrage’ over a narrow strip of barren marshland, both opposing armies stood exactly where they’d started.

Despite catastrophic losses caused by their own blunders, the Allied generals, British and French, kept promising politicians at home that one “final push” against the Hunnish enemy would achieve victory. Just one more surge. Offensive after offensive ended in stalemate. In each instance the Germans had had enough time to prepare hidden pillboxes and enfilading machine gun fire that cut down Allied soldiers, advancing in line abreast, like so much standing wheat. On the very first day of the Allied attack, the British had 27,000 killed, wounded and missing, the Germans about the same. The Allied commander, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, called July 31 a “fine day’s work” and the losses as “small”.

Haig was remarkably expert at losing men. The year before, on the very first day of the battle of Somme, he had sent his troops in an insane charge, again in line abreast, against German machine guns he dismissed as “overrated”. Sixty thousand were killed on his orders.
[...]
In London’s Whitehall, not far from my BBC office, a statue to ‘Butcher Haig’ still rides proudly astride his bronze horse. It’s a constant wonder to me that it hasn’t been torn down in grief and rage. He and his aides lived in luxurious comfort in a chateau – an early version of the Green Zone - at the rear while he ordered men into human-wave charges in mud so deep many soldiers who slipped off the trench duckboards simply drowned in the poisonous muck. After the war, he received a baronetcy and a hundred thousand pounds for his labors.

Passchendaele casts a long shadow today. Adolph Hitler fought bravely at Ypres and came out of the war to take his revenge on a world gone mad on soldiers’ blood. In a sense, Hitler is a child of Douglas Haig as much as he is of the Kaiser.

Iraq is not Passchaendale. Our casualties are ‘limited’ to a few each day, every day, a grinding attrition that is so numbing that our eyes skip over the lists and we become used to talking evasively about corpses as ‘foreign policy issues’. Our generals rarely share the pleasure of humping 80 pounds equipment on foot patrol in 120-degree heat with the troops.

When our troops finally do come home, if ever they do, the politicians who sent them into harm’s way will gracefully retire to write their memoirs and the generals will receive their Freedom Medals. Field Marshall Haig lives

And so it goes.....

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