Trawling The Past

Lately I am trawling through pages of World War One and I am discovering fascinating information all the time. I was not even alive at the time of the Great War, but I do admit an unmistakable attraction towards it and towards the men who fought and died during that war. I am not even sure, what are the reasons that draw me towards that war, fought so long ago in a world that now only exists in faded photographs, but I do believe that one of the reasons has to be the universality of the suffering that was endured by the combattants and non-combattants of that war.

Forgetting and ignoring the politics and the military strategies, the one common denominator that is left is the experience of humanity in the trenches. It was a war that, perhaps the only time it has happened, cut across the lines and there was no social or political or sectarian distinctions, but the commonality of a miserable, violent death that unified the experience of the war and made it such a bitter-sweet reminder of a suffering humanity. It was, and started out, as nothing more than a squabble of European nations that quickly seeped into colonial contributions to the war and the dead from the battles of Ypres to Somme and beyond included nationalities that were not even European.

From the Sikh regiments to Moroccan battlions to the Algerian Scouts, from Punjabi to Arabic and from food as varied as the men fought in that epic struggle, they all shared the specter of a death with the Germans, the Italians and Rumanians and the British and French and Russians and off course, the Austro-Hungarians and the Americans. When the war ended, the dead were littered across the fields but due to the constant shelling, their remains could not be retrived till the fighting had finally ended and thus, their remains were consumed in the mud and the sludge of Flanders fields and the remains were mixed up and in death, atleast, so many men from so many lands gained a sense of equality that they could attain while alive.

When irony smiles upon us, the occassion is always unforgettable.