One Hundred Years of War

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding  

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing           

Memory and desire, stirring       

Dull roots with spring rain.          

Winter kept us warm, covering          

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding               

A little life with dried tubers.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. 1922

 Friends, family, distant, relations, coworkers, former classmates and anyone reading this.


   One hundred years ago, the world ended. In August, 1914 Western Civilization came to the beginning of its end.  Nearly 100 years of (relative) peace ended in a four year orgy of destruction, and nothing has been quite the same since the nightmare ended.  This is The Great War, later to be called the First World War, to distinguish it from its sequel ,its child, its result, the Second World War.

  Some historians will argue with you that the First World War actually began in 1754 with what Americans and British call the French and Indian War and the rest of Europe refer to as the Seven Years War. This is partly true, in the sense that the French and Indian War covered at least two continents, but once France and England had a prolonged scuffle over who owned what land in the New World, everyone carried on as before. The Great war was different, it is the first of the wars that broke the world.

   2014 also marks 100 years since the the most successful failure in exploration and discovery occurred. On the cusp of this great war in August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and his companions set out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Their mission was to be first men to cross the continent of Antarctica.  They ended up getting stuck in pack ice for two years and having to row back to civilization in a life boat. The miraculous thing was, all of them survived. The whole endeavor was so remarkable that T.S. Eliot even makes a veiled reference to Shackleton's Expedition in his seminal poem The Waste Land. This small group of men were probably the last tiny capsule of innocence, locked away in the fastness of polar ice and unaware of the crisis through which the world they knew was passing.

  I plan to take a journey through these two events. Show their causes, their effects, and get intimately involved with the people who lived through it. My guidebooks are The First World War by John Keegan, and South, by Ernest Shackleton.  Please follow me, friends, for however long it takes to walk this road.

 I cannot say how long it will take or how frequently I will write. But I will say I plan to at least write something when I come to the end of each chapter.  Another post should follow in a few days.