RE: Major John McCrae -- The Story of the Poem "In Flanders Fields"
I remember learning about this poem at school. It is hard to imagine several generations of teenagers, young men, middle aged men and older all lost at the same time in a pointless war.
Some of those men were actually under 16 - there were a few boys from my own school who lied about their ages just to go off on what they thought was an adventure and never returned - one of them was 14 if I remember right and the others were 15.
Then if they tried to leave or told the truth later on they could get shot for attempting to desert - that's assuming they survived long enough mentally or physically to do that. It was just organised slaughter.
If you ever watch "Black Adder Goes Fourth" - it really illustrates the insanity of WWI with a lot of humour. Interestingly I recently saw this when I was visiting a cemetery for my most recent post:
yes, people didn't fully comprehend what horrors were being unleashed on the world and those fighting the war. Even today with mass media some still don't comprehend it.
The military had no concept of PTSD and would shoot people for cowardice who broke in combat.
Yes. There was an interesting psychological study I read about from WWII as a student that basically looked at people's behaviour during war and found that the idea of killing is so stressful that most regular people/conscripts will avoid it at all costs. They will deliberately miss shooting the enemy soldiers, make noise to alert them and things like that. It is only so long that one can survive like that in a military situation - one might see the mind breaking down very easily when confronted with the dissonance of the situation.