The Moral and Cultural Values of Soldiers

In the larger picture, soldiers argon the canon fodder that makes state of war possible. Their own value ar unimportant to historical study, and the impact that war has on those set becomes worth considering by history only when it turns into a social impact that can be studied on a larger scale.

In 1914, a war broke break through that became the grand War, the War to End All Wars, a war that seemed, for the first time in innovational history, to be a war that involved the whole world, or, at the really least, alveolate its major nations against one another. In 1914, to be neutral was to be irrelevant. Germany was fighting Britain, and everyone else had to choose a side, because something more important was happening. As Modris Eksteins writes, "For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy" (119).

Whatever was happening on the larger scale, for the individual soldier, called to fight for his country, the war was a very individual(prenominal) event. Each brought his own motivations and values to his task, and Eksteins contends, "There was something in the motivation and sensibility of the front-line soldier in December 1914 that was to leave as the war progressed, a set of social values and a psychological disposition that were to be drastically altered by the course of the war" (109).

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. capital of Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Little could we foresee how strong would be the tides that would bear us forward or apart with resistless force; steady less the awful convulsions which would shake the world and shiver into fragments the structures of the nineteenth century (370).

The world in which the British and Germans fought had been shaped by colonialism and by the powerful influence of British civilization, and this environment would arrest had a profound influence on the personal strengths that soldiers from some(prenominal) sides brought to sustain themselves in the trenches.

Ideological constructs supply the means indispensable to persuade individuals to join in combat, providing them with motivation sufficiently corking that they are willing to risk their lives, even in situations . . . wherein they stick up to reap quite little in the way of personal gain (140).

Lincoln argues, "A warrior must . . . dehumanize himself onwards he can become an instrument of slaughter, effectively eradicating much(prenominal) human tendencies as guilt, fear, and compassion" (145). The men who fought in the Great War were probably new to combat. Their superiors likely had battlefield let, but for the common soldier the experience was new. Trench warfare was in addition a new invention, and even the Germans, advocates of new ways, found the experience grueling and haunting. World War I invented many of the characteristics of modern warfare, and combat fatigue was one of those inventions. The common soldiers on twain sides found this a particularly changing time. They clung to their patriotic picture and their faith in their country to survive the devastation.

Churchill, Winston. My Early disembodied spirit: 1874-1904. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

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