Men could be mown down like grass. Never before had a well
organized charge been able to be consistently broken by an inferior force at such a
distance. Another tactic that seemed more promising was a slow advance, another
time-proven operation. Eventually an army could be forced up against a natural
barrier, and then overrun. One rather famous example of an entrapment like this
comes in the story of Moses. “The Egyptians pursued the Israelites and overtook them
as they camped by the sea,” states the Biblical account. In that case there was Divine
intervention and the people of Israel escaped, but when applied correctly, many armies had been
broken. In the trenches though, barbed wire and shelling broke apart any slow
advance. To continue to push the trenches forward simply required too many lives
poured into the advance to be feasible. Another strategy was lost. As the
war drug out over the years, the closest analogue to former battle strategy that could be drawn was
that of the siege. Sieges commonly did take an extended time to
complete. The taking of the city of Troy by the Greeks is recorded to have taken ten
entire years before Troy fell. The generals and leaders in the Great War were not
prepared to fight a siege battle, especially with nothing to surround and siege. Since
all of these tactics had broken into shards upon contact with enemy machine guns and shells, men
on both sides of the wars simply dug into the earth, the best cover around. Once there
they simply lay waiting to either kill or die.
The Great War, World War I, The War to End All Wars; many names
given to the same conflict. A conflict that was a bloody confrontation both between
the major powers of Europe, and eventually the whole globe, as well as a collision between the past
and future, between men and technology. The war was a killing field for millions, and
the death of millions more toward ever being able to inherit the full benefits of the societies they
risked their lives for. The very technologies that had helped create the promise of a new world of
peace as the nineteenth century closed stole men’s honor, slaughtered heroes, and destroyed the
hopes of a peaceful globe as the twentieth century dawned. Perhaps there could have
been no more fitting epitaph for Paul Baumer, symbol of the young soldiers in the war, than
follows: “Grown old while young, he died while no one was watching.”
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