Re: The War - Ken Burns Series on PBS
I can see what you're saying. I just think the stark crazed horror of the WW1 trenches, and its utter pointlessness, is hard to top as a sort of peak human experience -- of a negative kind. Heck, the french shelled their own troops when they didn't want to go soak up machine gun bullets just to wear out the enemy's ammunition stores. How insane is that?
Plus, there was the coming of the tank, which must have been mind-boggling and fearful, and those daring young men in their flying machines. And zeppelins! And this at a time when even the leading nations of the world had only a fraction of their roads paved, and some soldiers and many citizens still used horses, and most people lived on farms. What an odd dissonance, what a crazy coming of age the early part of this century was.
By contrast, so much of WW2 seemed to make sense.
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