More War...Good God Y'all

I'm slightly ashamed of myself. I found the website below early this morning before starting work, and slung out a quick post. Then I started thinking about how little I know about WW1. I mean, apart from the bloody awful poetry, it's all a bit of a blur - after all, it was a long time ago, and I was a very young man at the time. (As a matter of fact it's only one of many subjects, many of them much more life-threatening, about which I know fuck-all, but I don't like to think about those, and if I think one of them's going to happen I don't go out.)

Some lunchbreak surfing later, I know a few interesting things. Woodrow Wilson was pretty much elected on an anti-war ticket not long before entering the war, which might explain the "belligerent pacifists"...

When Wilson proposed his "Fourteen Points" on which the Armistice was based, there were objections from:

- the French, who wanted to screw more reparations out of Germany. Ah, the French, like them or loathe them, who can stand them? (Although I suppose when you've had four years of combatants from several different nations shelling your country your claim for money to pay for filling in the holes deserves to be treated sympathetically.)

- the British, who presumably believed that the tactic of having our soldiers walk very slowly towards German heavy machine-guns in broad daylight would pay off in the end. ("If only we'd been allowed to try our Very Secret secret strategy". "The Very Secret secret strategy where we go back to dressing our men in those bright red tunics with the brilliant white cross-webbing?" "Yes, that's the one. Damned shame we didn't have time to try that. And how did you know about it?")

Anyway:
that's all the war (dah dah!) (pause) (hyuh!)
(pause) (pause)
a lunchbreak gives you time for (dah dah!) (hyuh!)
(uh!)
Say it again...