The Great Slaughter

The interesting article ‘No plans to mark World War I Centenary’ expresses an accepted sentiment but uses a wrong analogy. The 1914-1918 conflict is referred to as “a worthy sacrifice of lions led to the slaughter by lambs”.

Perhaps, at the time, the only way for the public to make any sense of the utterly senseless slaughter was to accept the national rhetoric – that it was a noble sacrifice, a war to end all wars. However, after The Great War, the analogy used was that our brave soldiers had been “lions led by donkeys”. At the time only a few spoke out.

English poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as an infantry officer in the trenches, expressed the situation with cogent irony in The General: “Good morning, good morning, the general said when we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead and we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. He’s a cheery old card, granted Harry to Jack as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack but he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

It is said that the average survival time for infantry subalterns in the trenches on the Western Front was barely three weeks.

Some of those fortunate enough to survive The Great War and became generals in the second world conflict were always so much more conscious than their predecessors of the need not to hazard the lives of their troops pointlessly.

Finally, I do most sincerely hope that Malta will be preparing an appropriate commemoration of the cessation of The Great War in readiness for 2018 because, although it happened so long ago, we have all been touched by it.