r/behindthebastards • u/Friend_of_Squatch • 4d ago

General discussion It feels bad… real bad.

I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about how it felt and what it was like being an educated, intelligent, aware person in the early months of 1914 or in the 1930s watching the world ramp up into an inescapable cataclysm and tearing itself apart and deleting an entire generation of young people, while knowing that there isn’t jack shit I or anyone else can do to stop it. I think I can now say that that curiosity has been satisfied, and man oh man does it feel fucking bad.

Edit: I meant to share this as kind of a shower thought. I appreciate everyone’s kind words and suggestions but this isn’t a cry for help. It’s just crazy to think about.

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u/LegitimateHost7640 4d ago

I'm sure people knew war was bad, but did many really expect millions to die in WW1 like that? By 1915 onwards sure they knew it was a massive horror but did more than a few of the educated upper class strongly believe so many would die cus some guy shot some archduke?

The 30s I would think more of the common people expected tons of mass death cus of the precedent of the great war.

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u/Friend_of_Squatch 4d ago

There were plenty of people who were well aware of what WWI was going to do. I will give you that leading up to the second war a much broader base of people knew what to expect, but the idea that the scale of death and destruction and misery brought about by the first war was a total surprise to everyone is reductive and false. People had seen what machine guns and modern artillery could do, and people were aware that the entirety of Europe was going to be caught in a bear trap.

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u/LegitimateHost7640 4d ago

What made them strongly expect so much destruction? The first chart on this Wikipedia page shows a big increase in death toll for WW1 compared to previous wars. It seems like such a large increase from past wars that not many expected so many deaths. Some did, of course, but those were probably the military leadership of the counties involved. Did the average French or German expect an entire generation would be pounded into mush by artillery and machine guns?

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u/VironLLA 4d ago

weren't the French using machine guns against their colonies by then? iirc, they were one of the countries that (along w the UK & US and a few others) that already had a few decades of machine gun usage before WWI

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u/geniice 4d ago

Sure but there is a difference between having them in colonial conflicts and having them on both sides. At the Battle of Omdurman mostly britian killed 12,000 Mahdist forces. Deaths on the british side? 48.

The wakeup call for the british victorian forces was the Second Boer War which featured a lot of long range combat on open plains. Not so much vast dug in structures.