BS: Armistice Day (debate)

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 02:34 PM

Most of those standing in the cold were veterans.
Men who fought for him.
I am completely open to non-British historians, even if they contradict me.
I just can't find any.
Can you?

Jim, we know why men volunteered because we have their letters and diaries.
There are many reasons including all those on your sourceless (made up) list, but mostly for the reason given in your quote.
To try and stop the invading German armies.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Troubadour
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 02:07 PM

"Certainly not the million ordinary people who stood in the streets on a winter day in 1922 to pay their respects at the funeral of a revered national hero."

Which, of course didn't include the thousands mown down within ten yards of their own trenches at his command.

The dead don't get to complain, do they?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 01:44 PM

"And for American history you should avoid American historians?
They would be too inhibited by nationalism to be reliable?"

You are a prat!

Looking at both sides of an argument isn't avoiding either, except for bigots.

The British, the French and v\rious others would have a take on US history which would warrant examination.

The only one here who denies thaat is you!

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 01:18 PM

"I do not accept that those reasons were significant for many people."
"He will say the sources are irrelevant."
How on earth did you guess Musket?
I will now ask him why he doesn't believe and ask him for evidence of this and how he accounts for all the information he has been given, and he will ignore my question and fail to provide back-up for his beliefs
Good game this, isn't it
David Nixon would have loved it (remember David Nixon anybody?)
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 01:06 PM

Musket, the "revisionist" historians were those who emerged in the 20s and 30s like Liddel-Hart and AJP Taylor.

They have been discredited and forgotten as more evidence became available.
I have no particular brief for Hastings.
He is just typical of modern historians.
I have hardly used him as a source.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 01:01 PM

I do not accept that those reasons were significant for many people.
Your same Wiki page gives us the main reason.

"Recruitment in the first few weeks of war was high, but the real 'recruiting boom' began in the last week of August, when news of the British retreat following the Battle of Mons reached Britain. Recruiting peaked in the first week of September".[2]
" The timing of the recruiting boom in the wake of the news from Mons, though, suggests that men joined knowing that the war was dangerous and indeed many joined precisely because it seemed to be a threat to their home, district and country."

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket laughing
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 12:57 PM

Jim.. Why did you bother?

He will say the sources are irrelevant.

He thinks the sun shines out of the arse of the disgraceful revisionist Max Hastings. No comment on the article I supplied that just shows his true colours.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 12:42 PM

Guilt (not signing up)
White feathers (handed out by women to symbolise guilt and shame of not enlisting)
http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/151/the-white-feather-campaign-a-struggle-with-masculinity-during-world-war-i
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather

http://worldwaripropaganda.wordpress.com/

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/first-world-war-wwi


http://hubpages.com/hub/How-Were-Propaganda-Posters-Used-In-World-War-1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/pals_01.shtml

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 12:39 PM

"If you Google the list, you find it is a Wiki Answer provided by someone called Jmimins."
You appalling little shit
Every single reason on that list is covered in the links you have been given
Propaganda songs
Too well known to worth a mention
You have been given a list of recruitment posters and how they have been used for all the aspects in the list
The Wiki article on The rape of Belgium fully covers how the Government exaggerated German brutality.
White feathers and guilt were too well known to even merit a mention
Unemployment and regular food is included in the first Wiki article
God on our side and the role of the church can be googled at length
The Pals Battalion - google it
Patriotism - you want to deny that one?
Threat to family - Wiki again - as is travel and adventure

Have I missed anything? - if not, which of these do you deny as being a reason for enlistment
The list doesn't include the fact that some employers forced their employees to enlist.
Now - howe about a full apology and some honest responses from the corner you have painted yourself into.
Jim Carroll

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_British_government_encourage_young_men_to_fight_ww1#slide1

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 11:42 AM

Try it.
Songs
Posters
Economic reasons (money)
Glamour (uniform, bravery etc.)
German brutality (propaganda, eg. gorilla)
White feathers (handed out by women to symbolise guilt and shame of not enlisting)
Travel (adventure)
Money (fed regularly)
Women (popularity with heroes)
Guilt (not signing up)
Religion (god ensure survival)
Pals batallions (fought with friends)
Patriotism (King and country)
Fatherly instincts (protecting future children)

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 11:40 AM

I know you did not Jim.
If you Google the list, you find it is a Wiki Answer provided by someone called Jmimins.

Is he known to you or is he just some random bloke off the internet?
Does he/she know anything?
Why should we take any notice?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 11:30 AM

"Can you identify one I have missed Jim?"
Please, please say I invented that list Keith
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:56 AM

You have been given that list at last three times - it is a condensation of the Wikipedia article from a wikepedia site - look the ******* thing up - you persist in giving us unlinked articles

I have provided links for all my sources.
Can you identify one I have missed Jim?

Wikipedia gives sources for things like that list.
What was it?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:51 AM

Nobody ever called Haig The Butcher of The Somme. I just made it up, obviously.

I have no quotes. I don't even know how to google it.

zzzzzzzzzzz

You seem to have read "history." Why don't you tell us why he was the butcher of The Somme?



Did you read the article by the ex newspaper editor I just gave you the link to? Obviously, you must be left speechless by his callous disregard for decency. Perhaps that's why you aren't commenting?

You realise you are looking a bigger fool each and every post? Why not stop digging and get onto subjects you know more about such as

Err...

Ok. Let's carry on.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:51 AM

I apologise profusely for the length of that extract
But on the other hand - your postings have now reached`140 on this subject and you have said nothing other than old soldiers tell lies
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:43 AM

Where did you get that list Jim?"
You have been given that list at last three times - it is a condensation of the Wikipedia article from a wikepedia site - look the ******* thing up - you persist in giving us unlinked articles
On what frounds do you reject the articles - they are all contained in the (linked) Wikipedia article and are fully confirmed in the other links - some of which include the actual posters.
You seem now to be denying historical evidence in order to prove a veteran volunteer a liar - there really is no limit to the depths you will sink to protect the establishment
"I keep asking."
No you don't
I trust you went to church this morning - do all Christians behave the way you do or are you a one-off?
Jim Carroll


http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/151/4/the-white-feather-campaign-a-struggle-with-masculinity-during-world-war-i


I Tried to Stop the Bloody Thing'
Print
In World War I, nearly as many British men refused the draft—20,000—as were killed on the Somme's first day. Why were those who fought for peace forgotten?
By Adam Hochschild


Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on reddit Share on email An early autumn bite is in the air as a late, gold-tinged afternoon falls over the rolling countryside of northern France. Where the land dips between gentle rises, it is already in shadow. Dotting the fields are machine-packed rolls of the year's final hay crop. Up a low hill, a grove of trees screens the evidence of another kind of harvest reaped on this spot nearly a century ago. Each gravestone in the small cemetery has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses and one has a Star of David. When known, a man's age is engraved on the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 34, 21, 20. Ten of the graves simply say, "A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God." Almost all the dead are from Britain's Devonshire Regiment, the date on their gravestones July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Most were casualties of a single German machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here in a section of the frontline trench they had climbed out of that morning. Some 21,000 British soldiers were killed or fatally wounded that summer day, the day of greatest bloodshed in the history of their country, before or since.
From a nearby hilltop, you can see a half dozen of the 400 cemeteries where British soldiers are buried in the Somme battlefield region, a rough crescent of territory less than 20 miles long, but graves are not the only mark the war has made on the land. More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, and many failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people. Dotted through the region are patches of uncleared forest or scrub surrounded by yellow danger signs in French and English warning visitors away. More than 630 bomb-disposal specialists have been killed in France since 1946. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world so much formed by it.
The war's destructiveness still seems beyond belief. In addition to the dead, another 36,000 British troops were wounded on the first day of the Somme offensive. But worse was yet in store. "No, we do not pardon," Adolf Hitler fulminated soon after the war ended, "we demand—vengeance!" Germany's defeat, and the vindictive, misbegotten peace settlement that followed, irrevocably nurtured the seeds of Nazism, of an even more destructive war 20 years later, and of the Holocaust as well. The war of 1914–1918 was, as Simon Schama has put it, the "original sin" of the 20th century. Even the victors were losers: how could France, for example, be considered victorious when half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over?
Inaugurating industrialized slaughter on a scale previously unknown, the First World War remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way. It has few remembered moments of triumph or glory: no Waterloo, no Pickett's Charge, no D-day landing. Those who took part are not celebrated as the greatest generation. Today we usually look on it as an object lesson in multiple follies, such as the illusion that winning a major war can be quick and easy—or the illusion that wars do not have enormous unintended consequences. But oddly, despite the flood of histories, novels, and films that will only increase as the centenary of 1914 approaches (at least one major TV series is already in the works), we pay little attention to the people at the time who knew this war was an unmitigated catastrophe—and acted on their convictions. Ignoring those who argued for peace while the battles raged seems all the more strange today, when we have a vast and rising military budget and two ongoing wars that have created far more problems than they have solved.
What kings, emperors, and prime ministers did not foresee, many others did. From 1914 on, tens of thousands of people in all the belligerent countries believed the war was not worth the horrendous cost in blood, and some anticipated with tragic clarity at least part of the nightmare that would engulf Europe as a result. Moreover, they spoke out at a time when to do so took great courage. In Germany, antiwar radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were sent to prison—as was the American socialist Eugene V. Debs after he left a sickbed to give a series of speeches when the United States entered the conflict. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" More than 500 American draft resisters went to prison.
Or consider a scene that unfolded a few weeks before that notorious first day on the Somme, not far away. In the spring of 1916, Britain had begun conscription, and some 50 men who were among the first to refuse it were forcibly inducted into the army and transported, some in handcuffs, across the English Channel to France. Family members and fellow pacifists were horrified. When questioned about the men, Lord Derby, director of military recruiting, declared that "if they disobey orders, of course they will be shot, and quite right too!"
There was no news of where the men were. Then one day in early June a clue reached England: an official Field Service Post Card, designed to save army censors the time it took to read mail. These cards had half-a-dozen printed messages that a soldier could either underline or cross out, and this particular one was signed by a 27-year-old schoolteacher named Bert Brocklesby, one of the resisters. All the messages were crossed out, except two. One was, "I am being sent down to the base." The other was, "I have received no letter from you for a long time." But Brocklesby had lightly crossed out many individual letters, so that the message read, "I am being sent. . . to. . . . b. . . . ou. . . . long."
Supporters of the men immediately dispatched two clergymen to Boulogne.
But would they be in time? While the ministers were still crossing the Channel, a smuggled letter arrived from France, reaching the mother of a Quaker named Stuart Beavis. "We have been warned today that we are now within the war zone," he wrote to her stoically, "and the military authorities have absolute power, and disobedience may be followed by very severe penalties, and very possibly the death penalty. . . . Do not be downhearted if the worst comes to the worst; many have died cheerfully for a worse cause." To a peace group, he sent a brief message on behalf of himself and his comrades, ending, "We regret nothing." For a time, there was no more news of the men's fate.
It was in Britain that significant numbers of war resisters first acted on their beliefs and paid the price. They did not even come close to stopping the bloodshed, but their strength of conviction remains one of the glories of a dark time. By the conflict's end, more than 20,000 British men of military age would refuse the draft. Many, on principle, also refused the noncombatant alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, and more than 6,000 served prison terms under harsh conditions: hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict "rule of silence." This was one of the largest groups ever jailed for political reasons in a Western democracy. War opponents behind bars also included older men—and a few women—as well. If we could time-travel our way into British prisons in late 1917 and early 1918 we would meet the nation's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize, more than half a dozen future members of Parliament, one future cabinet minister, and a former newspaper editor who was now publishing a clandestine journal for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. It would be rare to find a more distinguished array of people ever imprisoned together.
A major reason many Britons opposed the war was that their country had not been attacked. Unlike France and Belgium, Britain saw no steel-helmeted German troops pouring across its frontiers. In the first few days of war, the conflict seemed to be other countries' business. It was only after Germany invaded Belgium—whose neutrality Britain was pledged by treaty to support—that opinion among the public and in the cabinet swung toward war.
For years, the most consistent, eloquent voice warning his fellow citizens against going to war was that of Keir Hardie. Born in great poverty in Glasgow, Hardie never went to school and by the time he was 21 had worked more than half his life underground, as a coal miner. Then he became a union leader, labor journalist, and member of Parliament. He was a believer in socialism with all the fervor, hope, and innocence that only the pre-1914 world knew: surely, surely, this was the best bulwark against the generals, because the workingmen of Europe, who cheered an advance for labor in one nation as an advance for all, would never fight each other on the battlefield. Right up to the last minute—a tumultuous peace rally in Trafalgar Square two days before Britain joined the war—Hardie called for a general strike in any country that took part. In portraits, his thick beard is dark red when he is young, white as a shroud when, in his fifties, he saw the bloodshed he had long feared shatter his dreams. His hauntingly sad, heavy-browed eyes seem to stare out at you so piercingly from any photograph that they might be staring beyond his own life, into an entire century of world wars and crushed hopes.
The war struck at Hardie's very core. After it began, people jeered him on the street in London and mobs hooted and sang "Rule, Britannia" to try to drown out his speeches. Late in 1914 he suffered a stroke, and for a time his arm was useless, and he could write only by dictating. One of his last public appearances was in the spring of 1915. "The little hall was crowded to suffocation and the lights were dimmed," a witness remembered. "Hardie's bushy white hair and his white beard shone out in the darkness with almost phosphorescent radiance. His head was held high, defiantly; his voice was strong and deep. . . . His voice nearly broke when he spoke of the tragedy of Socialists murdering each other." A newspaper printed a cartoon showing Kaiser Wilhelm II giving "Keir von Hardie" a bag of gold. Crushed and broken by the slaughter, he died of pneumonia later that year, at 59.
Unlike, for example, American opponents of our wars in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, or Afghanistan, the Britons who opposed this war had no major news¬papers and only a tiny handful of legislators on their side. For someone in a prominent position to advocate any compromise was considered close to treason. When Rev. Edward Lyttelton, the headmaster of Eton, proposed some possible peace terms, the resulting uproar forced him to resign. From Parliament to pulpit, ferocity reigned. "Kill Germans! Kill them!" raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon, " . . . not for the sake of killing, but to save the world. . . . Kill the good as well as the bad. . . . Kill the young men as well as the old. . . . I look upon it as a war for purity. I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr." The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican Bishop of London.
A West End theater put on a play mocking pacifists, called The Man Who Stayed at Home. Women stood on street corners handing out white feathers, an ancient symbol of cowardice, to young men not in uniform. Recruiting posters appealed to shame: one showed two children asking a frowning, guilty-looking father in civilian clothes, "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?" (Keir Hardie's friend Bob Smillie, leader of the Scottish mineworkers, said his reply would be: "I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.")
One dissenter was the 42-year-old Bertrand Russell, the Cambridge logician and mathematician. Not only was the pipe-smoking Russell his country's best-known philosopher, but his broad forehead, aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, ramrod posture, and arresting shock of hair made him one of the most striking-looking philosophers of all time. A young woman who fell in love with him recalled that Russell's hair "seemed almost to give off sparks like a heath fire."
Russell explored the most abstruse heights of theory—his greatest work, the coauthored Principia Mathematica, takes 347 pages before reaching a definition of the number 1—but he also wrote fluently for the general public. He denounced conventional marriage but attracted women like a magnet, hated organized religion but felt moments of spiritual ecstasy, and, during this greatest crisis of his generation, loved his country deeply but believed from the very first moments that the war was an appalling mistake.
Part of Russell's intellectual bravery lay in his willingness to confront that last set of conflicting loyalties. He described himself poignantly in the autumn of 1914 as being "tortured by patriotism. . . . I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation." What left him even more anguished was realizing that "anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. . . . As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart." Over the four years to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta."
Antiwar beliefs were tested most severely by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war." How hard it was, Russell wrote, to resist being swept away "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct." One night Russell heard a "shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames. The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street."
By the beginning of 1916, in response to recruiting drives, posters ("Don't Lag! Follow Your Flag!"), and music-hall songs ("Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go"), 2.5 million volunteers had enlisted in the British military. But as battles on the Western Front devoured men by the hundreds of thousands, compounded by similarly bloody operations like the disastrous Gallipoli landing in Turkey, the army's appetite for bodies was such that Britain finally began a draft.
The authorities started raiding soccer games, movie theaters, and railway stations to round up military-age men who were not in uniform. A pamphlet by "A Little Mother" typically declared that "we women . . . will tolerate no such cry as 'Peace! Peace!' . . . There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. . . . We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps." It sold 75,000 copies in a few days. "The conscientious objector is a fungus growth—a human toadstool—which should be uprooted without further delay," screamed the tabloid John Bull. In April 1916 the major group backing resisters, the No-Conscription Fellowship, or NCF, drew some 2,000 supporters to a London meeting hall while an angry crowd milled about in the street outside. The organization's chairman, wrote one delegate, "did not wish to incite further attack by the noise of our cheering. He therefore asked that enthusiasm should be expressed silently, and with absolute discipline the crowded audience responded." When Bertrand Russell addressed the gathering, he was "received with thousands of fluttering handkerchiefs, making the low sound of rising and falling wind, but with no other sound whatsoever."
Russell continued to write articles, books, and letters to newspapers in prose that rang with moral clarity. The longer the war went on, he said, the more it was militarizing Britain in Germany's image, while making certain an embittered and dangerous postwar world. He lent his enormous prestige to the NCF, and for much of the war his thick mass of graying hair was a familiar sight at its headquarters, for when the group's chairman went to prison, Russell took his place. He attended the courts-martial of conscientious objectors, visited COs in jail, and devoted hours to the most mundane office tasks, writing "Dear Comrade" letters to branches around the country signed "Fraternally Yours, Bertrand Russell."
The activists of the NCF scored a rhetorical point when, in the course of one legal case, a lawyer on the government side, Sir Archibald Bodkin (later notorious as the man who would get James Joyce's Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England) protested angrily that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong." Delighted, the NCF issued a poster with exactly those words on it, credited to Bodkin. The government then convicted an NCF member for putting up this subversive poster. In response, the NCF's lawyer demanded the arrest of Bodkin himself, as author of the offending words. The organization's newspaper called for Bodkin to prosecute himself, and declared that the group would provide relief payments to his wife and children if he sent himself to jail.
In the late spring of 1916, Boulogne, where the group of COs who had dropped from sight were apparently being held, was one of the ports through which supplies flowed to the British army in preparation for its great offensive near the point where the River Somme meandered its weed-choked way across the Western Front. The decisive assault, scheduled for July 1, 1916, was supposed to burst through German lines like a flood breaking open a dam. After an unprecedented weeklong artillery bombardment of more than a million shells, 120,000 men would attack on the first day alone. The plans even included a map with the British names to be given to German trenches scheduled for capture. Such thorough planning was hard to conceal. When one unit slated to take part moved into position, it found a sign held up from the German trench opposite: WELCOME TO THE 29TH DIVISION.
Preparations for the offensive were at high pitch when the first group of British COs forcibly transported to France were taken to an army camp parade ground with other soldiers and given the order, "Right turn! Quick march!" The other troops did as told; the COs remained in place, unmoving. The army fined them five days' wages, something that amused them since they were already refusing to accept any military pay. There was little else to laugh about. Periodically they were summoned to hear announcements of soldiers sentenced to death for desertion or disobedience.
They refused to do any work. Angry sergeants punished them by administering what was known as Field Punishment Number One, which meant being trussed to a fixed object for two hours at a time, arms held open in crucifixion position. "We were placed with our faces to the barbed wire of the inner fence," recalled one CO, Cornelius Barritt. "I found myself drawn so closely into the fence that when I wished to turn my head I had to do so very slowly and cautiously to avoid my face being torn by the barbs. To make matters less comfortable, it came on to rain and the cold wind blew straight across the top of the hill." But the men's spirits held, for when officers weren't looking, ordinary soldiers showed them unexpected kindness. One gave his dinner to CO Alfred Evans, and when his superiors were gone for the evening, a sergeant of the Irish Guards spent his own money buying cake, fruit, and chocolate for the whole group at the post canteen. Worried that the men's pacifism might influence the troops, the army moved them off base, to a fish market on the docks of Boulogne that had been turned into a punishment barracks. There, they were locked in group cells with no sustenance but water and four biscuits a day.
The men in one cell could talk to those in others only through knot holes in the wooden walls. As best they could, they held debates: on Marxism, Tolstoyan pacifism, and the merits of Esperanto. The Quakers among them held a Quaker meeting. For some, the convictions that had put them behind bars were religious; for others, political; for many, both. They sang both Christian hymns and labor songs.
Unable to comprehend so many people acting according to conscience, the military decided that Barritt and three other COs were ringleaders responsible for the larger group's mass disobedience. They were court-martialed and found guilty. No one knew whether the messages they had tried to send had reached their families and supporters in England—or would have any effect. On June 15, 1916, two weeks before the Somme offensive, the four "ringleaders" were taken out of their cells for sentencing.
They were brought to a large parade ground, and several hundred soldiers were assembled on three sides. The rumble of artillery sounded in the distance. "I cast many a glance in the direction of the white cliffs of Dover," remembered one, "for this might be our last opportunity." A command rang out for silence. "I caught a glimpse of my paper as it was handed to the Adjutant. Printed at the top in large red letters, and doubly underlined, was the word 'Death.'"
As each man stepped forward, the adjutant read out his name and serial number and the charge, and intoned, "Sentenced to death by being shot." Then there was a pause, "Confirmed by General Sir Douglas Haig." Then a longer pause, "And commuted to 10 years' penal servitude."
What the men did not know was that their supporters in England had been working feverishly. Russell had led a delegation to see Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and, as he put it, "I made him a speech of denunciation in an almost Biblical style, telling him his name would go down in history with infamy" if the men were brought before the firing squad. Asquith then sent a secret order to Haig, the British commander-in-chief in France, saying that no conscientious objectors were to be shot.
In the days that followed, while ships, trains, and truck convoys all around them sped last-minute supplies to the front, the men were returned to England and sent to civilian prisons—as would happen with all COs from now on. In an act of great collective courage that echoes down over the years, they had stuck to their beliefs even when threatened with death. "As I stood listening to the sentences of the rest of our party," one CO said later of that day on the parade ground, "the feeling of joy and triumph surged up within me, and I felt proud to have the privilege of . . . testifying to a truth which the world as yet had not grasped, but which it would one day treasure as a most precious inheritance."
It was only days after these COs learned they would live that thousands of British soldiers on the Somme realized they were doomed. The German machine gun emplacements facing them were built of concrete, steel, and sometimes even stone, and proved largely impervious to all but a direct hit by a high-explosive shell, something which seldom happened. Their crews waited out the British bombardment in reinforced bunkers as deep as 40 feet below ground, and when the shelling stopped and British soldiers advanced across no man's land, bugle calls brought the Germans racing up stairways and ladders to man their machine guns. It was these that took the bulk of the toll of British troops on that first disastrous day.
Not only soldiers perished in this war, for the conflict erased the traditional distinction between soldiers and civilians. Total war among industrialized economies meant that everybody was fair game, and each side tried to starve the other into submission. German U-boats torpedoed Allied and eventually neutral ships (which brought the United States into the war) carrying food and supplies to France and Britain. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy threw a tight blockade around Germany and its allies, sealing them off from all imports of food and fertilizer. Bad harvests in central Europe compounded the food shortages, and often the only meat on sale in Germany was that of dogs and cats. A foreign visitor described what happened when a horse collapsed and died on a Berlin street one morning: "Women rushed towards the cadaver as if they had been poised for this moment, knives in their hands. Everyone was shouting, fighting for the best pieces. Blood spattered their faces and their clothes. . . . When nothing more was left of the horse beyond a bare skeleton, the people vanished, carefully guarding their pieces of bloody meat tight against their chests."
If there were ever a war that should have had an early, negotiated peace, it was this one. After all, before it began the major powers had been exchanging royal visits and getting along reasonably well. In public, at least, none of them claimed a piece of another's territory. Germany was Britain's biggest trading partner. But once the conflict was on, neither side was willing to consider anything but total victory. From the beginning, Bertrand Russell had ceaselessly proposed peace terms. He suggested that a future "International Council" resolve disputes before they turned into war. In 1916, he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, urging him to use his influence to start peace talks, but with no result. Sometimes, however, encouragement came from unexpected sources. In December of that year, Russell received a letter that began, "To-night here on the Somme I have just finished your Principles of Social Reconstruction. . . . It is only on account of such thoughts as yours, on account of the existence of men and women like yourself that it seems worth while surviving the war. . . . You cannot mind knowing that you are understood and admired and that those exist who would be glad to work with you." The writer, 2nd Lieutenant Arthur Graeme West of the 6th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infan¬try, was killed by a sniper's bullet three months later, at the age of 25.
As the war went on, the number of resisters in British prisons grew. Fenner Brockway, editor of a socialist newspaper, was now, in Liverpool's Walton Gaol, editor of the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison papers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other resisters had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on 40 squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue—only one copy could be "published"—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared.
It was not only draft refusers who were locked up. In the spring of 1918, Russell himself was sentenced to six months for writings the authorities deemed subversive. When he arrived to begin serving his sentence, the warder taking down his particulars "asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and then remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.'"
Officials were so awed by Russell's fame and aristocratic ancestry (his grandfather had been prime minister and his older brother was an earl) that, alone among war resisters, he was allowed to be a "First Division" prisoner—an ancient, privileged status that permitted inmates to keep the tools of their trade, which for him meant books and paper. Russell had a lively and unconventional love life, and, evading the strict limits on prisoners' correspondence, was able to smuggle out letters to two women he was involved with, all the while still nominally married to a third. A set of letters to one lover, a young actress, were in French, which he knew his guards would not be able to read; Russell persuaded them that these were historical documents copied from his research materials. A letter to another woman he slipped inside the uncut pages of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, telling her the volume was more interesting than it appeared. Always self-disciplined, Russell wrote four hours a day, producing, among other work, 70,000 words of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
After the bloodshed had continued without respite for three years, dissenters like these were joined by an unexpected voice that rang out from the very highest reaches of the country's hierarchy. Lord Lansdowne was a great landowner and former viceroy of India, minister for war, and foreign secretary. His doubts about battling to an unconditional victory began after the Somme. Very much a man of his class, he was particularly appalled by the number of British officers slain. "We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands . . . " he wrote. "Generations will have to come and go before the country recovers from the loss."
When the shocked London Times refused to publish it, an open letter from him appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 29, 1917, laying out some proposals for a negotiated peace. "We are not going to lose this War," Lansdowne wrote, "but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it. . . . Just as this war has been more dreadful than any war in history, so, we may be sure, would the next war be even more dreadful than this." Nearly three decades before Hiroshima, he prophetically sensed something about the future: "The prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction is not likely to stop short." Lansdowne was attacked by many former colleagues, and in their confidential reports on the public mood, undercover intelligence agents began speaking darkly of "Lansdownism." Many soldiers, however, wrote to congratulate him on his bravery.
Government harassment of the antiwar movement grew steadily worse. The police raided the printer that produced the No-Conscription Fellowship's newspaper and dismantled the press. The paper quickly switched to a new printer, who soon also found his presses wrecked. Produced next on a small hand press, the paper promptly reappeared as a single page with the triumphant headline "Here We Are Again!!" When the two men who operated this press ran out of type for the large capital letters used for headlines, they borrowed them from friendly fellow printers on Lord Northcliffe's rabidly pro-war Daily Mail. For months to come, moving once or twice because of suspicious neighbors, this secret press continued to print the paper. Scotland Yard detectives never found it. Violet Tillard, an NCF activist, served two months in prison for refusing to reveal its location. Trying to figure this out, agents kept the organization's office under surveillance, but an impoverished-looking woman with a baby, who visited the building every few days apparently hoping for a handout, never attracted their attention. She was smuggling proof sheets beneath the blankets of her baby carriage.
The former editor Fenner Brockway was in his prison cell when he heard the news that an armistice was to take effect at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. Allowed no watch, he had learned to tell time by the position of a sunbeam on the wall.
I remember sitting on the shelf-table in the denuded cell, my feet on the stool, watching the sun creep along the wall towards eleven o'clock. I cannot reproduce the chaos and intensity of my thoughts.
"Was the slaughter of four years to end? . . . Was I to see my family and children? . . . Was I to see the fields and woods and hills and sea?
"The line of the sun on the wall approached eleven.
When horns all over the city suddenly sounded, Brockway wept.
Bertrand Russell, who had recently completed his prison term, walked up Tottenham Court Road and watched Londoners pour out of shops and offices into the street to cheer. The public jubilation made him think of the similar mood he had witnessed when war was declared more than four years earlier. "The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror. . . . I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet."
Over the years, as the war's toll sank in, they and others who had gone to jail for their beliefs began to win considerable respect from a public that had once scorned them. Brockway and several others became members of Parliament. Russell continued to write; in 1950, his top-heavy thatch of hair now completely white but as thick as ever, he would appear in Stockholm as one of the few writers of nonfiction ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones spent two and a half years in prison as a CO; 30 years later, he was in the British cabinet. Ramsay MacDonald, an antiwar Labour MP, had not gone to prison during the war but had been under police surveillance and was repeatedly stoned when he spoke at peace meetings. Angry patriots had even voted to expel him from his golf club. In 1924, he became prime minister.
"I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be," wrote Russell, decades later. "I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm." And stand firm and honor the best of human nature they did. Their battle was not won, but it remains an example for our own time, a time increasingly shadowed by conflict, a time when we still, as General Omar Bradley once said, "know more about war than we know about peace." As the 100th anniversary of 1914 approaches, who now seem the heroes—Russell and those like him, or those who dutifully marched off to be slaughtered at the Somme?
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Adam Hochschild is the author of six books. This article is drawn from his seventh, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, which will be published in May.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:24 AM

Er.. Nope. Still can't see anything with a consensus.

I have shown that many historians support my view.
No-one has found one that does not.
How is that not consensus?

Haig was called The Butcher of The Somme.

Really?
By who?
Any quotes?

Certainly not the million ordinary people who stood in the streets on a winter day in 1922 to pay their respects at the funeral of a revered national hero.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket shaking his head slowly
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 10:17 AM

As Keith relies on an ex newspaper editor as his war bible, I thought it would be fun to read his disgraceful diatribe on war.

Here he is in his favourite place, writing for The Daily M*il on why Alan Turing shouldn't have been pardoned for breaking anti gay laws and why it was right that deserters in WW1 were executed in front of as many soldiers as possible.

Nasty little bastard don't you think?

Makes me wonder why Keith idolises him......

Max Hastings defends our criminal past

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 09:50 AM

Keith (24 Nov 13 - 09:19 AM), we have seen that they disagree and keep changing their minds on some aspects. If they did not, the rest of my argument would still hold water: soldiers cannot be expected to be political analysts.

For a good illustration even from the Internet age, study the Iraq war. Means of mass destruction? Fostering democracy? Hussein, previously supported (!), suddenly an arch villain?

Or the Taliban, erstwhile Western heroes (sorry for the pun) when fighting Soviet troops, ...

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 09:43 AM

Er.. Nope. Still can't see anything with a consensus.

Perhaps you might post them some day. In the meantime, here's a few..

A huge number of men died.

Haig was called The Butcher of The Somme.

Hang on, I got that bit wrong.. My apologies, a fucking huge number of men died. I stand corrected.




Oh, by the way. I too have read some history. What an amazing coincidence! Rather than do your trick and select a few snippets out of context to prop up a preconception, I invite you to google the following in order to see where I am coming from;


History

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 09:22 AM

Musket.
Can you please state the items that have consensus. You haven't yet.

Certainly.

1. Britain had little choice but to stand against the invading German armies.
2. The people understood and responded by volunteering.
3. Despite some disasters as the new warfare was mastered, the British Army was well led.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 09:19 AM

Grishka.
As we have seen, historians in hindsight do not know what exactly was going on

I have seen no such thing, but then I have actually read some History.
The History is rich in contemporary sources and thoroughly researched.
However can you justify that ridiculous statement?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 09:14 AM

Jim.
The reasons for enlisting were more or less the fourteen given,

I deny that they were significant reasons why people joined.

Where did you get that list Jim?
I keep asking.
You seem reluctant to reveal your source.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 08:41 AM

"As we have seen, historians in hindsight do not know what exactly was going on, so how should "the people" have known, including soldiers?"
Propaganda during world war one was based on deliberately manipulating the realities of military life and distorting the reasons for going to war.
Below is an assortment of the "lies" Tommy Kenny told us as to why he and his mates enlisted to fight and die in World War One
Jim Carroll

Introduction
Upon Australia hearing the news of the declaration of war, the response was one of almost unanimous excitement and devotion. Not surprisingly, this initial eagerness resulted in Australia quickly fulfilling the quota of 20 000 men that she had pledged to the British Empire. Support, however, waned and measures had to be taken to ensure that the numbers the nation was offering could be met. Propaganda was used to influence people to think in a particular way. There were two types of war propaganda at the time. The first was recruitment propaganda, a popular method that influenced people to enlist. The second was conscription propaganda which encouraged people to vote for or against conscription.
The context of propaganda
From the beginning, Australians embraced World War I with an enthusiasm that had never been experienced before and will probably never be seen again. Australian men rushed to enlist in droves but many were turned away because they were not able to meet the rigorous physical standards of the time. These standards, which included a minimum height of at least 5ft 6in (167.6cm) and a chest size of 34in (86.4cm), as well as a full set of teeth without any fillings, may seem frivolous by today's standards but at the time for those who were unable to meet them the outcome was often devastating. Many men travelled hundreds of kilometres to attempt to enlist at a different office in the hope that perhaps a minor ailment, which was the reason for their previous rejection, could be overlooked.
While the initial response to war was one of extreme enthusiasm and patriotism towards Britain, support began to waver. It had reached a peak at the time of the landings at Gallipoli but it was not long after that the realisation of war hit Australian shores. With the first lists of casualties, the Australian public had a sudden and rude awakening that their fathers, brothers, sons, husbands and friends might not all return safely home as previously expected. The public's attitude turned quickly, which was reflected in weakened recruitment figures.
In response to Britain's request for more troops, the Commonwealth government realised that strategies had to be implemented to encourage more people to enlist. In July 1915 some standards for entry were amended to widen the target market for recruits. This included lowering the minimum height restriction to 5ft 2in (157.5cm), which enabled men who were not previously eligible to enlist, to do so. In that same July, a two-week recruitment campaign was run in Victoria to encourage more enlistments. As part of this drive, campaign meetings were held during which patriotic speeches were given, often by injured war heroes. In addition, films of heroic action on the battlefields of Gallipoli were shown. Among these various recruitment ploys, perhaps the most effective and popular types of propaganda were the colourful posters displayed everywhere across the nation.
Recruitment propaganda
Propaganda in World War I was particularly influential in the years 1915 and 1916 when it was at its peak, serving to recruit volunteers in the hundreds of thousands each year. The recruitment propaganda of the time achieved its aim in a number of ways. Firstly, it influenced men through means of persuasion, fear, guilt, confrontation and accusation. Secondly, it appealed to the emotions of the women, friends and family of those who were eligible to go to war but had not, to feel strongly enough to press them on the matter.
It was particularly the propaganda posters that were popular at the time. The reasons could be that they were cheap and easy to create, able to be displayed just about anywhere and, as with most visual forms, were immediately able to convey meaning to a wide audience. Their popularity and significance is confirmed even today by how frequently propaganda posters are referred to in books about the war.
Recruitment propaganda perhaps achieved success because it amplified the original reasons for Australians wanting to be involved in the war. It can be concluded that Australian propaganda posters utilised six different aspects to appeal to men to enlist. These included:
Appealing to their patriotism by summoning people to 'rally around the flag' and reminding them of their duty to the Empire and the British
Utilising a gender approach which made men feel they needed to enlist to prove their sporting aptitude, courage and masculinity.
Inviting peers and family to place pressure and shame on men for not applying in order to make them feel ashamed and cowardly.
Encouraging a spirit of adventure and a desire to see the world by using a recruitment poster which places emphasis on a physical, sport-like side of war.
Self-interest, including a chance to have a secure job which was relatively well paid.
Exaggerating the hatred and fear of the Germans by allowing people to think that they might attack their friends and families.
Recruitment propaganda, however, omitted important facts from the posters. These omissions gave people a false impression of what war was really like. The propaganda intentionally neglected to mention the realities which the soldiers had to endure, such as a rationed, unvaried diet, adverse climatic conditions, physically arduous training and, most importantly, the substantial risk of injury and death. See image 1
From image 1 we can see that this particular propaganda relies on persuasion to conform or 'join the crowd'. It gives the impression that their peers have joined and that they should do so, too, if they do not want to be left out. The poster tries to entice men to enlist by appealing to their competitive nature by making war seem like an adventurous sport. It does this by incorporating images of men with sporting equipment. As with all wartime propaganda, it does not acknowledge the harsh realties the men would face if they enlisted.
http://www.skwirk.com/p-c_s-14%20_u-42_t-47_c-139/propaganda/nsw/history/australia-and-world-war-i/recruitment-and-conscription

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/ww1posters/contents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_propaganda_during_World_War_I

http://www.authentichistory.com/1914-1920/2-homefront/1-propaganda/

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 07:40 AM

Keith writes

1. Britain had little choice but to stand against the invading German armies.

Even if we accept that as of 1914 (as we must for France), politics had (theoretically) had ample opportunities to achieve a more stable peace in the decades before. This applies to the governments of all other major powers, as has been written by many posters above. Historians can try to find some causalities, but for the purposes of this thread, all we have to know is that that way of doing politics must be thoroughly condemned for out times, and therefore must not be glorified in retrospect.

2. The people understood and responded by volunteering.

As we have seen, historians in hindsight do not know what exactly was going on, so how should "the people" have known, including soldiers? Without the Internet, they had to rely on their newspapers and official propaganda. Many were convinced and volunteered wholeheartedly, many others were coerced. Some wanted national glory - then considered more valid a cause than it is nowadays -, others were moved by stories of the enemy's atrocities (which the propagandists usually needed not invent, just select).

Also, soldiers in particular tend to take pride in doing what their leaders say, and to be happy to be praised by their governments. Once the war has been entered, civilians usually suspend any criticism as well - reactivating it afterwards is not always easy.

Exactly the same applies to Germany and Austria. Quite a number of former anti-monarchists and prominent moralists suddenly rallied behind the kaisers and their governments. Efficient propaganda, not a good cause.

3. Despite some disasters as the new warfare was mastered, the British Army was well led.

Compared with what? Most leaders would not waste their soldiers' lives out of sheer fun, but winning the war was considered worth all sacrifices. Technically good leadership does / would not make the cause any better.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 06:30 AM

We have now arrived at where all Keith's arguments do - the Establishment line is right, those who deny that line are wrong, traitors, Lefties or liars (in the latter case this includes those who actually fought in WW1)
The reasons for enlisting were more or less the fourteen given, in no particular order of importance.
Not only are all these reasons documented history, but the recruiters for the war actually recognised them and incorporated them into their recruiting campaigns, in the case of the Belgian atrocities, deliberately manipulating the facts in order to make them appear more significant than they actually were.
Nowhere is there any record of Britain objecting to the horrendous genocide carried out by the Belgians on their colonial citizens - this would have undermined the use of Belgium in their recruiting campaign.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket again
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 05:39 AM

Funny? Even the dodgy oracle Wikipedia has it. My O Level history course many years ago was where I learned of the black propaganda and was introduced to the word jingoism.. It is also where we were taught about using waves of men to run at German machine guns in the hope they run out of bullets before we run out of cannon fodder. It's also where I learned of Lloyd George calling for the heads of many of the generals for their deceit in reporting back to the war ministry.   I don't need a tabloid hack to airbrush it out for me.

Can you please state the items that have consensus. You haven't yet.

Anyway, it's Sunday. Piss off and give your weekly thanks to God for allowing you to be so just and holy. You so obviously are in his image.... Group sanctimony seems to be right up your street. Say a prayer for eminent historians whilst you are there, won't you?

By the way, stop saying eminent historians agree with you. Either say you agree with them or demonstrate where your unique knowledge comes from. As you contradict yourself so often, I doubt anybody, even your political friends, could honestly say they agree with you as you often don't agree with yourself!

Your wisdom on WW1 is about as good as your take on Palestine....

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 04:52 AM

Perhaps you might think on about the substance of what the consensus is you keep bleating about because be buggered if I can itemise it.

Once again!
1. Britain had little choice but to stand against the invading German armies.
2. The people understood and responded by volunteering.
3. Despite some disasters as the new warfare was mastered, the British Army was well led.

Jim, of course some of the couple of million were liars.
Musket's uncle was a WW2 vet and worse than a liar.

Please give us the source for your list.
Why do you ignore this reasonable request?

(Jim)if you keep posting facts,
I must have missed that.
Please repeat them.

Your half remembered aside on a quiz show is not worth mentioning.
Between you you have produced nothing.

Everything I say is supported by all the most eminent historians.
What you say is supported by none, because it is bollocks.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket again
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 04:33 AM

"Unspeakable shit." Rather perceptive for a Sunday morning Mr Carroll?

I must admit, if you keep posting facts, Keith will have more problems explaining what this consensus is about.

I reckon Jim has his finger on the consensus pulse more than Keith on this subject.

They were indeed told it was a righteous fight of good versus evil. The BBC reference I gave to QI discussing the hate lectures and black propaganda was screened on BBC 2 only a couple of weeks ago and even still available on iPlayer, but Keith said he couldn't find it.

Funny that.

Good versus evil. They played the God card to dupe men into seeing war as just and holy... About as sick as it gets. Ironic that it resulted in the oppressed German nation being duped by someone who puts your Lucifer bloke into shame when it comes to being evil.....

Pals battalions, white feathers, firing squads.... I wonder why they encouraged the former and supplied the latter if everybody was so objectively happy about going and dying?

Sorry Keith, you are the one exhibiting views that are a disgrace to the memory of a wiped out generation, not those who question the sanitised third and fourth hand accounts you keep handing out.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 04:09 AM

"Jim, it is possible to be a veteran and a liar."
You are are now openly calling a WW1 veteran a liar because his eye-witness account doesn't fit your jingoistic garbage - you are an unspeakable shit.
You have ignored the 14 reasons given for men joining up - many of which coincide with Tommy Kenny's "wildly unrepresentative" account - which continues to make you one of the most dishonest people on this forum
You have disgraced those who died by attempting to make one of the main reasons for the war the defence of an Imperial power which was responsible for the massacre and torture of ten million of its subjects - you have consistently refused to comment on Belgium's genocidal nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruitment_to_the_British_Army_during_the_First_World_War You are a fanatical jingoist
Jim Carroll

And some more unlikely accounts
Some were conscripted - this however was introduced in March 1916 when numbers of volunteers failed to match the rates with which they were being killed.
Patriotism - many joined up in a fit of patriotic fervour believing that they were fighting to protect their country and families.
Propaganda - WWI propaganda suggested that this was a necesary fight by exaggerating the way that Germans treated women and children. One poster claimed that German soldiers attacked nuns and another that a Canadian soldier had been crucified. Thus the war was sold in terms of a rightous fight against evil.
Peer-group pressure - it was seen partly as a civic duty to join, but also many men saw their friends, neighbours and work colleagues enlist and they joined up too. The British army had to form so many new battalions that they allowed people from the same towns and communities to join the same battalions. Called the "Pals Battalions" these units had a strong local identity to mostly northern towns.
Adventure - many of those who enlisted saw the war as a chance to grab a bit of glory. When war was declared it was genuinely thought that it would be over pretty quickly, men joined thinking that if they delayed a decision that the war would be over and others would get the honour of having participated.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket being patriotic
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 02:18 AM

You are up too early.

Go back to bed.

I've just checked my phone whilst letting the dog out and taking a coffee up for us both.

I suggest you do the same.

I'm going to read a book. Perhaps you might think on about the substance of what the consensus is you keep bleating about because be buggered if I can itemise it.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 24 Nov 13 - 02:08 AM

And for American history you should avoid American historians?
They would be too inhibited by nationalism to be reliable?

You find some other historians who dissent from the consensus, never mind where they come from, because I have tried and failed.
It is as if there are none.
Funny that.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Troubadour(I'm not yet used to printing this
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:40 PM

"Jim and Musket, I get my historical facts from the professional historians.
Where else would an intelligent person go?"

An intelligent person might go to more than one foreign historian, if he had any intention of acknowledging that every story has more than one side, and balancing the words of "more than six Brits".

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 01:24 PM

I suppose we could all be like Keith and choose our sources on the basis of those that flatter his prejudice.

No choosing.
There is nothing else to choose from.
That is why none of you have come up with a single one.

Nobody is rejecting the historians version of history on account of there not being one.
There are many, but on some things there is consensus.
That is my case.

Men died needlessly and whilst they may or may not have known, for no good reason.

There is consensus on that.
There was a need.
Even your AJP Taylor accepted that.
No-one with actual knowledge shares your view.
It is just political dogma.
Lies actually.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 12:13 PM

I suppose we could all be like Keith and choose our sources on the basis of those that flatter his prejudice.

zzzzzz

Nobody is rejecting the historians version of history on account of there not being one. There are thousands and you happen to find a few that sit comfortably with old men in blazers and false nostalgia. You then insult the intelligence of anybody who questions jingoistic spin because you reckon your spot near your war memorial the other Sunday had more gravitas than theirs. Which medal shone the brightest, the one with the pound sign on it?

Well fuck you, blue eyes.

Men died needlessly and whilst they may or may not have known, for no good reason. It isn't an insult to anything to dismiss nationalistic distortions of our past. There came a point where fighting was the only option but the decisions to fight for nationalist reasons came well before that point. When the point came, poor leadership and disregard for the lives of those they were responsible for marked the military fools of the day.

Your stance, if repeated by enough idiots would undermine why cenotaphs and other memorials haven't been demolished to make way for supermarkets yet. But they may as well do if blinkered fools reckon war to be just and glorious rather than shoddy and wrong.

Our soldiers today carry our tertiary social work, saving innocent civilians from attack by those who wish to persecute them. Far better than being told the other equal soldiers over that hill are a set of cunts.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 11:42 AM

Jim, it is possible to be a veteran and a liar.
I can not say that yours is, but his story is wildly unrepresentative.

Jim and Musket, I get my historical facts from the professional historians.
Where else would an intelligent person go?

There is a consensus that Britain was right to fight, and although it was a steep learning curve with some disastrous mistakes, the leadership was good.

You two, by contrast, reject the historians' version of history because you just somehow know what happened!

A bit like the fundamentalists' belief in creation.
Never mind the carefully researched facts, you just know the Truth.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST,Musket between courses
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 08:24 AM

So... half a dozen historians can't be wrong.

Over half a dozen mudcat.org members reckon you are talking out of your arse.

Historians are expected to be objective eh? David Irvine no longer a historian then? Max Hastings was paid by The Daily M*il to be objective?

They reckon Harlow is in the top ten in the UK shit place to live table most years but obviously the residents are blissfully unaware. Their testicle truly are rose tinted.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 08:05 AM

You appear to once again ignoring all the evidence put before you, and will no doubt continue to do so, instead choosing to scurrying behind the mythical non-statements of carefully selected 'historians'.
I would have thought you had arrived at the lower depths of your debating technique by describing the account of a veteran WW1 soldier as "lies" - no doubt you will prove me wrong on this one.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 07:17 AM

Not at all.
Be aware I have already referred to the work of the German Fritz Fischer.

of the imperial battles over African territories

Much rivalry, but no battles.
Britain went to war because of the German invasion of France and Belgium.

Do put up the views of any historian from anywhere, if relevant in any way to this discussion.

Please give yourself a name so we know if you are one person or four.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:58 AM

Don't bother by the way. I already know that you'll dismiss the others as liars.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:55 AM

If you quoted the writings of an equal number of French, German, Belgian etc. etc. historians from all sides of the imperial battles over African territories, and the lead up to war, what do you think the outcome would be.

After all, you claim that modern historians always get it right.

Good luck with that.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:43 AM

It seems to be unanimous.
I have referred to more than six, and no-one has found any with a dissenting view.
Not one.
Funny that.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:40 AM

"I said that one opinion out of millions is worthless as history."

So half a dozen historians out of how many?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:40 AM

Modern historians are expected to be objective and to base everything on reliable, verifiable sources, and they don't get locked up anymore when their findings are unpalatable.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:13 AM

"So historians do not know about history, but you do."

Since the first Tudor reign history has always been re-written by the winning side.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 06:00 AM

And by the way - publicly calling a WW1 soldier who you have never met a liar is as bout as disgustingly base as it gets
We recorded Tommy Kenny at the request of his grandson, who had been brought up on his reminiscences and had asked him to record them for posterity.
Tommy spent three days with us filling tape after tape with those reminiscences, covering WW1, The Depression and life on the Liverpool docks.
Writing him off as a liar underlines what a disgusting little shit you are.
Those reminiscences are now part of the British library sound collection
The genuine examples referred to by the BBC very much back up Tommy's version of events, as does the Daily mail extended "and rare" example given in the earlier part of this thread - before you dominated it with your agenda driven jingoism.
Your sole friend may be "impressed" with your contribution to this subject - I don't think anybody else had much reason to be
You really are an appalling little fanatic
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 05:53 AM

You have been presented with fourteen reasons for recruits joining

Just one short and simple question to you.
What is your source for that Jim?

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 05:50 AM

You have answered nothing, you have put up nothing of relating to either the causes of WW1 not of the reason why recruits enlisted.

That lie is obvious to everyone.
I have put up pages of well documented History on exactly those things.

You are in fact using the length of these selections to avoid answering the questions they raise

Why don't you expose me then?
Put them up a couple at a time and I won't be able to avoid answering.

Just put up one or two at a time, and I will knock them down one or two at a time.

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 05:44 AM

"Jim, I will answer anything you raise, but put them not more than two at a time.
I do not do long unreadable posts."
You have answered nothing, you have put up nothing of relating to either the causes of WW1 not of the reason why recruits enlisted.
As for my postings being "unreadable" - they are extreme simplifications of a fairly complicated and wide ranging subject - that's what Wiki does and it does it quite well.
If you can't cope with complicated subjects, as you obviously can't, stop dominating them with your inanities and one liners.
Maybe you should stick to The Sun until you find the time to take a literacy course - or maybe get someone to read them for you.
This isn't the first time you've whinged about "too much information"
You are in fact using the length of these selections to avoid answering the questions they raise
If you can't take the heat.... as they say.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 23 Nov 13 - 05:25 AM

On the basis you can't find something it must be made up shit.

No.
On the basis that you do make up shit all the time.
Like you claimed to have something by Sheffield that refuted my view.
Straight lie.
Last night you claimed I told you not to question the bible! (Militant atheism thread)
Wilful lie.

That is why I will only believe your latest "fact" when I see it.

And young Tate went back knowing exactly what it was all about, because he believed it was the right thing to do.