World War One and the Marne River Valley

[geoffsebesta]

World War One made a difference around here. Look:









These are the memorials in various Marne valley towns. If you look at them you'll see there's one unescapable conclusion -- a lot of people died in World War One. So many died that no-one died in World War Two.

Americans don't talk much about WWI because, basically, it had nothing to do with us, and we didn't have much to do with it. Around here they don't talk about much else. They don't seem to care about WWII at all, which makes sense, now that I know a bit about the history of the Marne.

As a matter of fact, this is the longest I've ever gone in my life without hearing anyone mention World War Two.

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The Marne

Given: the Marne valley lies east of Paris, and runs straight to the heart of the city. Paris lies at the junction of the Marne and Seine rivers.

The valley is made of old seafloor, dunno how old. At some point the plateau rose and the Marne cut through the old chalk beneath, and it seems to be chalk all the way down -- the Marne runs through alluvial soil (or "dirt" as you may call it), and I never did see much rock. It seems to me that this valley was plowed by a glacier, which left mesas everywhere and a broad, flat, meandering valley.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Why? Because the Marne has fertile bottomland surrounded by high hills, on which you can grow grapes, and a "microclimate" that shelters agriculture substantially.

Basically the Marne has always been farmland, good farmland, and because of its position it's consistently invaded farmland. Food, sheltered climate, flat bottomland perfect for marching an army -- it's the highway of choice for invading Paris. It's happened at least four times in the last two hundred years, and last millenium I bet it happened weekly. I bet you couldn't properly pillage a town around here without someone showing up at the east gate and pillage your pillaging.

So the folks here did what folks do, they picked up and headed for the hills, came down when it's safe and the Huns are gone. There are a lotta of castles in the hills, too, for exactly this purpose.

There are no lonely farmhouses in Champagne. It's not like America. People don't live in the bottomland, or at least they didn't used to. The old cities are all up in the hills, where it is hard as heck to walk. Let me tell you. Having toured the Marne on foot, I can say that Chatillion-sur-Marne is a hike to get to. I cannot imagine living there, much less lugging the stone up the hill it took to build a freakin' Chatillion. Let alone Chateau-Thierry. They built a mountain here. They were so worried about the security situation in the valley below that they went on top of a mountain, cleared a spot, and built another mountain.

I can't imagine how worried you'd have to be to build this chateau, the most massive handbuilt thing I've ever seen. The sheer tonnage is amazing; it's gotta compare to the pyramids (which I have never seen, so if the pyramids are bigger than this, they are very big indeed). It's easily the biggest preindustrial object I've ever seen, it's like a skyscraper lying on its side. What was down in that valley a thousand years ago that made this seem like a good idea? This castle is an entirely functional artifact. It was built for reasons and it seems to fulfill its burpose. It's still up there because they don't have the people it would take to tear it down.

There are no lonely farmhouses because they learned the hard way that being off by yourself gets you killed.

War has evolved. There have been some great advances in the western science of war since the syphillis-smallpox exchange.

The potato.
Artillery.
Effective training.
WWI.
Nuclear Weapons.
Superpowers.

I am going to do us all a favor and skim over this as fast as possible.

The humble potato ushered in modern warfare. Before the potato, soldiers would go through an area, eat all the food, the winter would come, the peasants would die, and the soldiers would die. Since no more peasants = no more soldiers, war was a self-limiting phenomenon. After the potato they could survive the winter, and their kids would live, and they could have more wars. This gave rise to the professional soldier and set the stage for Napoleon.

Napoleon was the first to exploit artillery, that's why he won so much. Artillery kills more people than the infantry do. Untrained soldiers, as a general rule, are trying much harder to stay alive then they are to kill the other guy, which is where the third great advance comes in -- with the advent of training and modernization, you could overcome the soldier's natural reluctance to murder the other guy. Plus you could do cool stuff like run man-o-wars (as much a linguistic feat as every other kind).

During this time war became more political, more abstract, more professional. This was the age of Empire, the colonial age. People went to fight in Africa and came back having learned terrible things. Lots and lots of new weapons were invented, like machinge guns, tanks, and poison gas.

Yes, war had become what it's always promised to be -- an absolute killing machine. They say that the early wars between Greek city-states were about as dangerous as a modern game of football -- they were trying to win, not kill each other.

World War One is notable as the first war in which pretty much everyone who went died.

America was smart to stay out of it, sure, but the important thing is that it didn't happen there. America has never had a war like this. Imagine a war as a tornado. In World War One they managed to amp that tornado up to a hurricane, and it was met by another hurricane coming from the other direction, and the entire front stalled. For three years, So in this area they had a permanent hurricane, for three years.

Few people died in the Marne in WWII because they were still dead from WWI. I haven't found a monument yet where the WWII casualties were more than half of WWI. Nearly two million French died in this war. 30% of the infantry were killed outright, who knows how many wounded. Remember, this is precisely where shell-shock was invented.

You can tell the towns that were in the war because the rocks in the walls have all been blown apart and mortared back together. Not a lot of nice squared-off quarried rocks around here. Not any more. Lots and lots of mortar.

The sheer violation of this never came clear to me until I went across the Marne:



This was somebody's HOUSE. They built it to shelter children and keep rain off, not to have a bunch of jackasses they don't even know run around it blowing parts off willy-nilly as part of some political maneuvers that have nothing to do with them on anything they know about. But they don't care, because they're probably dead. Everybody was dead.

War is fucking absurd.



Imagine if you were the engineer who built that beautiful bridge in the background. What would you say? "Oh, yeah, guys, I really like what you've done with the place."

War like this has never come to America. Never anything close. May it never still.



This is a farm. Farmers put thousands and thousands of hours, months, YEARS into tilling it, cultivating it, making it fruitful. Then they couldn't use it after this because of all the poison and unexploded ordinance these people left lying around.

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I learned a lot of this at The Battle of the Marne memorial.






That means "Wall against forgetting" or "Wall against oblivion." Good luck with that, guys, because I'm not sure exactly what this place is supposed to be teaching.


It's lovely on the outside...


And the view is beautiful... (that's Dormans down there)


The architecture is stunning...


and the grounds are well cared for...

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(side note: the Cathedral is built up above the site of an old castle, of which this is all that's left)


(dammit France stop turning all your castles into houses! This was the FIFTH time that I had visited the site of a former castle that had been torn down and turned into a nice place to live -- at the time of taking this picture I still had not seen an actual factual castle so I was bitterly disappointed. Since then of course I've seen Château-Thierry and now St. Lô, so I'm okay).
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Back to WWI! Le premiere guerre mondial, as they call it around here.




Those are the names of cities destroyed in the Battle of the Marne, I didn't take pictures of all the names because I'd rather this post be visually interesting than a textbook (though it's a bit of both) but there were lots and lots of names.

And this post doesn't even cover Verdun, which (all who have visited tell me) is a whole new level of depressing.



Let's go inside the memorial.



The Battle of the Marne memorial occupies a very small and strange point in history. It was built in the 20s, immediately after the war. France was still an extremely catholic country (and as a result of the war, reparations, an not having to share the wealth with all the dead folk, extremely rich -- we will get to this later). This place is cathedral.



Straight up, this place is a cathedral. Not only that, it's the last of the old-time cathedrals, and it is built in an art-deco style. It is a strange amalgamation, and it is gorgeous.





Freakin' beautiful. Beautiful everywhere. Unfortunately you can't tell from the pictures, but these stained glass windows are odd as hell to the modern eye, because they don't have saints on them -- they have Red Cross corpsmen and dudes with machine guns. Gotta be the only time a biplane and a tommy gun has ever been enshrined in stained glass.


Okay, that one has saints on it. But a lot of them don't.









These are the names of people who got killed. There are a lot, lot, lot more than I could begin to take pictures of, and seriously, what would be the point.

But it is interesting, if you remember the phrase from before; "Rempart contre l'oubli." It's the same as the Vietnam War. What is it about humanity that makes us "honor" the dead in a war by engraving their names on a wall?



Stained glass + floor = awesome.


Stained glass + photoshop = awesome.



I like these wall sconces. Look for them to appear in Cloudhopper at some ambiguous point in the future.


Crap, more saints. I guess the picture I took of the one with the truck didn't come out.




And now, those of you who have been right-click-saving along are probably wondering, why am I calling these pictures "French Nerd Heaven?" Well I will tell you. No wait, I will show you.

No, first I'll tell you something a bit, then show you.

According to this monument, there have been four great military moments in French history. When Saint-Loup turned back the Huns. When King Henry II (? could be wrong on this point) stopped the Mongols. When Joan of Arch expelled the English. And the Battle of the Marne.

Not only do they have this lovely monument to all those splendid dead, not only have they carved stunning freizes and bas-reliefs showing in great and completely sanitary detail the wonders of these battles...

They have display cases of Warhammer miniatures for each period:











click here to see huge pictures of these:

http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/atx2010/warhammer_france_A.jpg
http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/atx2010/warhammer_france_B.jpg
http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/atx2010/warhammer_france_C.jpg
http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/atx2010/warhammer_france_D.jpg
http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/atx2010/warhammer_france_E.jpg

This is A Thing around here. They love their fucking warhammer.

http://sylvain-figsethistoire1914-1944.blogspot.com/2009/11/dragons-cheval-et-taxis-de-la-marne.html

GDW has outlet stores all over the place. They love their tin soldiers. They love to play at war.

It makes you wonder, what are we not forgetting here? In this beautiful building built as a rempart contre the worst things that humans can do to each other? What memory are we keeping alive in this sterilized stained-glass habitat?

If a child came to the Battle of the Marne memorial, what would they learn?

Why they might learn that war is a holy thing.

But it isn't. That just isn't true.

Here's some more pictures of the actual war:








the last two are in Dormans, the place where the monument is today. This is what the cathedral looks like after they put it back together:




I like Dormans better like this. I like to see kids riding their bikes in the square without worrying about snipers. I like to walk down the Marne and not get blown up. I like to build a house and come home in the evening and find it still there, my animals unkilled by poison gas, my wife unraped, my children not prisoners in a foreign lang.

This shit is not a game and anyone who treats it like it is a danger to society in inverse proportion to their irrelevance to society. I played Warhammer when I was a kid, like a lot of people. Now that I'm a bit older and looking around at what I was pretending, I don't like it as much.

The most destructive force known to man is the teenage male. Don't get me wrong, I get along just fine with young guys, I used to be one myself. That's why I know how dangerous they are. The only thing that holds their annihilative impulses in check is society, and that's why when old men tell young men that it's okay to kill things go horribly, horribly wrong. Anyone who gives these people weapons and permission is the worst sort of scum that has ever existed.

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And now to tie it all together.

Why did World War Two happen? And why did France do so poorly? The information you need to figure it out is mostly here in this post, although there is one more detail that you may not be aware of. It is a very, very important detail:

After the war, after all the fine speeches were done, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, the Allies blockaded food shipments to Germany. FOOD.

http://libcom.org/files/blockade%20Germany_0.pdf

Now, as we all know*, when a population is under stress, that population expands. Prosperity brings a birth rate down. Adversity causes it to rise.

*if you do not know this, please do us all a favor and disqualify yourself from any future participation in politics until you, ya know, read a book or something.

Consider this situation. On the left (using of course the north-centric mapping system) you have a victorious but utterly devastated population, on the right you have a differently devastated population that is suffering under grinding poverty, punitive embargoes, and a freaking food blockade.

The different devastations are important. The population on the left lost men, women, children, and animals, in the single greatest dealing of death that the world had yet seen. The population on the right, since it was never invaded, basically only lost men of fighting age.

The population on the left is of course going to get richer, because there are fewer ways to divide the pie. But they are going to grow very slowly.

The population on the right is of course going to grow quickly, and stay poor, because they have to split the nothing they have several zillion ways.

Very, very quickly....let's say twenty years...you are going to have a giant population on the right. And twenty years of course is the prime age for war. On the left you will have a huge, empty, incredibly rich area...that points directly at Paris like the barrel of a gun.

In a situation like that wars can't help but happen. World War One caused World War Two. Discussing WWII without discussing WWI is like discussing murder without discussing motive, or a suicide without reading the suicide note.

Obvious parallels between this and the current situation in the middle east should only be drawn by people who are capable of adding two and two and getting...

who knows?