11th hour of 11th day of 11th month / Veterans Day / When you see millions of the mouthless dead

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The first systematic use of the perfected modern machine gun in war. Battle of the Somme, France, 1916. Note the gas masks.

To say that the poem at the bottom of this post is my favorite war poem is like saying that prostate cancer is my favorite kind of cancer. I wish it had never been written, I wish there had not been a reason why a young Scot wrote it or felt he had to write it, and then was shot through the head and died instantly in France during the Battle of Loos, on Wednesday 13 October 1915.

His body was lost, but his kit bag was found and sent home to his family in Aberdeen. They found this poem inside it.

The modern, effective, reliable machine gun made its appearance during World War One. Hiram Stevens Maxim, the American-English inventor who finally perfected the military combat machine gun, believed the weapon was so deadly and horrible that no sane national leaders would ever wage a war that employed such weapons. Maxim believed his machine gun had ended war.

I have had the interesting experience of crawling through dirt and mud at night while machine gun bullets whizzed about 2 feet = 0.6 meters above my head. It was a training exercise, of course, and I was guaranteed to live through it if I did not panic and stand up -- which a few trainees do every year. (This is, after all, a young man's very first experience crawling under machine gun fire, and some simply don't react to it very well.)

The training machine gun uses low-caliber low-energy ammunition, .25 caliber, so there is a good chance if you do panic and stand up, you'll just be perforated a lot, but might live through the experience. When you get out of the hospital, you might even get to return to training to learn to be a combat soldier, and so get another chance to crawl under machine gun fire.

Real war machine guns since Maxim's -- no chance. And when it was regularly employed in France during World War One, the standard infantry attack tactic was to climb ladders out of trenches, and then march toward the enemy, which was firing modern high-caliber machine guns at the attacking soldiers. So this was a tactic already known in advance to result in casualties of one half or three quarters of all the attacking soldiers. When the whistle blew and you were ordered to climb the ladder, go "over the top," run or march through "No Man's Land" straight into withering machine-gun fire, you were, statistically, a dead man.

If you lived through one or more of these charges, you got a new nickname: Lucky.

What do you think you are worth? Are you valuable? Or are you worthless, disposable? During peacetime, you are allowed and encouraged to indulge the fantasy that you are a valuable human being, that all society, and its leaders, consider you a valuable part of society worth protecting and saving and encouraged to live as long and as healthy a life as possible.

Well, that's total crap, which you quickly learn when your luckless ass gets caught up in uniform during wartime. What happens next is based entirely on the Reality that you and tens or hundreds of thousands of luckless dicks just like you are totally worthless, have no value whatseover, and can and will die, and that will further the cause of your side. By World War II, the branch of mathematics called Operations Research was able to analyze warfare very closely, and thus chart success or failure based on numbers of dead or wounded soldiers. If, for example, your side had 1200 young men killed during a battle, but the enemy side had 2700 young men killed, Your Side Wins The Battle, and your general is praised and promoted.

A particularly important moment for the new Operations Research was the World War II battle for the island of Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific. Neither the Americans trying to invade and capture the island, nor the Japanese defenders, could get reinforcements or new shipments of weapons and ammunition, so the day-by-day numbers of how the long battle progressed, measured in dead soldiers per day, became a textbook, with differential equations, for the mathematical way ferocious combat actually works. Since then they can put a number on what a soldier is worth.

Already war in the sky is getting rid of its human beings, and instead reconnaissance and ground attack functions are being given to a new generation of robot drone planes, without human pilots. The drones have pilots, but the pilots sit in trailers a thousand miles from the battlefield, and watch television pictures which the flying drone broadcasts.

Human fighter jet pilots also can no longer safely sustain the increasing g (gravity) forces which cutting-edge fighter jet airplanes subject the pilots to. As the technology gets better, faster, more maneuverable, the technology forces air combat to stop using human beings in combat airplanes.

Military weapons research is also trying to develop machines and robots for land combat which also will end the use of human beings on the battlefield. Soon our wars will be robots slugging it out with other robots, and supercomputers providing the leadership, tactics and strategy.

One of the problems is that the human nervous system is simply not robust and strong enough to withstand very much modern high-explosive machine gun and assault weapon combat. If we survive our combats physically, we are not so lucky psychologically and neurologically. We are real fucked up in the head for the rest of our lives.

An interesting depiction of the sequelae to the combat experience is the film "Gods and Monsters," about the Hollywood movie director James Whale ("Frankenstein," "The Bride of Frankenstein"). Whale was a British soldier in France during World War One.

The guns of World War One, on the Western Front, by agreement of both sides, fell silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Since then it is common to observe a holiday every year on 11 November dedicated to military veterans. In the UK and Commonwealth it is called Remembrance Day, in the USA it is called Veterans Day.

The United States, and an assortment of allies, is currently waging two wars in Asia, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Click here to see, in precise numerical detail, how many soldiers and military of all branches and allied forces, have been killed so far in these wars.

US war deaths are (if possible) flown home to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, which also houses the US military's central mortuary. Click here to see photographs of the ceremonies attendant to the return of our flag-draped coffins. See what we have done to our own children.

What we have done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan -- these numbers are startling, staggering, beyond the capacity of human beings to comprehend.

~ ~ ~

When You See Millions
of the Mouthless Dead

Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Original text: Charles Hamilton Sorley. Marlborough and other Poems. 4th edition. Cambridge: University Press, 1919: 78 (no. XXXIV). First publication date: 1916. Composition date: 1915. Form: sonnet. Rhyme: ababbabacdcdcd