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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 15, 2021 20:36:48 GMT
Spot on. Like the chaps in Mad Max some people like war and see it as a freeing of the spirit. The reasons for joining up in 1914 ranged from a sense of duty to avoiding the wife. Another point for free divorces, huh? If the only escape from a bad relationship is to go to war ... But I can't imagine that the sense of adventure was still a reason for Hodgeson. 1914? Maybe. Mostly volunteers. 1918? After he was in Ypern before? It must have been an obsessive sense of duty which compelled him. I am not very familiar with his work, I mean the nuts and bolts and details. Is this sense of duty mirrored in his heroes? It is hard to understand the people of this time. And it doesn't matter which side. To think it was perfectly acceptable for all to throw hundreds of thousands lives away just because they thought that one day they must succeed with this tactic is beyond me. Isn't this a definition of insanity according to Einstein? "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". I'm not an expert on Hodgson Andy. I just came across something in research but I need to do some more work. I know a bit more about WW1. There were many factors in the rush to get yourself killed but one was stronger social cohesion, supported by the population's greater belief in God in the 1900s. The men from my town largely joined up because of pressure. Politicians and women folk were exhorting them to do so and publicly shaming them if they didn't. The fact that God was observing one's actions must have given a kind of security. After the horrors of war many men asked the simple question why would God allow this and answer there came none but prior to this almost everyone was into God, king and country. Hodgson had been a seaman, and it's interesting that he didn't join the navy. I'm kind of speculating that he wanted a more tactile and less remote involvement. Another factor for him rejoining his men is that almost all soldiers could not discuss the horrors of war with civilians, only with their comrades. Ironically, it was sometimes psychologically easier to go back to the front
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Post by andydecker on Jul 15, 2021 21:19:49 GMT
I'm not an expert on Hodgson Andy. I just came across something in research but I need to do some more work. I know a bit more about WW1. There were many factors in the rush to get yourself killed but one was stronger social cohesion, supported by the population's greater belief in God in the 1900s. The men from my town largely joined up because of pressure. Politicians and women folk were exhorting them to do so and publicly shaming them if they didn't. The fact that God was observing one's actions must have given a kind of security. After the horrors of war many men asked the simple question why would God allow this and answer there came none but prior to this almost everyone was into God, king and country. Hodgson had been a seaman, and it's interesting that he didn't join the navy. I'm kind of speculating that he wanted a more tactile and less remote involvement. Another factor for him rejoining his men is that almost all soldiers could not discuss the horrors of war with civilians, only with their comrades. Ironically, it was sometimes psychologically easier to go back to the front WWI is an endless facination for me. I read a couple of books over the time and recently watched all episodes of The Great War on Youtube. Which rekindled my interest. If I understood it correctly, conscription was introduced in 1916, which I guess left the average man not much choice. Aside from the reasons you cited. Quite a different situation than in 1914, where all expected to be home by christmas. It is indeed interesting that Hodgson didn't join the navy. Or at least the merchant fleet. He must have been a father figure for his much younger comrades. Another reason for a strong sense of duty.
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Post by Swan on Jul 16, 2021 0:22:42 GMT
Hodgson had a negative impression of his years at sea. He was bullied, often remorselessly, because of his small size and average build. It's probably the main reason he became a bodybuilder, to compensate. In a later, evocative letter to his wife he describes the shell blasted, pockmarked landscape of the Front as resembling the Night Land. Maybe his surviving letters will give a clue to his reasons for returning. He seemed to have had great physical courage. I'll see if any are available at my end. Perhaps the Library Priestess can find some.
I see the basic timeline seems to be he was injured on the 10th April, was back in action by 17th April as that's when he volenteered as Forward Observing Officer, and was killed on the 19th. Do you know how long he spent in hospital?
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Post by helrunar on Jul 16, 2021 2:27:08 GMT
Good post, Swan. And Craig, those stories from your own reading are sad and harrowing. It's shocking that WHH was returned to the Front that quickly. The trenches ate men alive.
I watched a rather superficially written drama serial this past week while staying with my Mom for a few days and some episodes involved the characters' experience of World War I. It's one of those "life upstairs and and downstairs in a grand manor house" things that have supported many actors in Britain for generations. At the end of the sequence of shows depicting this period, one of the lead characters asked a parlor-maid something like "Did any of it mean anything?" There was no response.
H.
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peedeel
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 61
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Post by peedeel on Jul 16, 2021 7:59:31 GMT
On TV a few days ago there was an Antiques Road Trip on in the background, and it mentioned another action man, a professional soldier who had lost an eye and an arm, possibly in one of the Boer Wars. He led his men into battle like that, at the terrible Somme and, because he only had one arm, he carried a bag of grenades around his neck and would pull the pins(is that right?) out with his teeth and throw them at the enemy. He was like these action men have to be to survive, lucky, all the senior officers above him were killed and he took command, holding the trench they had gained, by running up and down it encouraging the men. He won a VC for it. In WW II he survived a plane crash into the sea, and was interned in a prisoner of war camp, where he made efforts to escape. War is truly monstrous, but it creates the most amazing men sometimes. There seems to be something great in many people, if only we could find a better way of allowing it to get out, than by killing each other. I can't remember his name unfortunately, and couldn't find him on a brief search. On retirement he took up fly fishing. His name Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. He served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear. During WW1 he was badly wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in dispatches six times. And those woundings, incidentally, do not include the terrible damage he did to his fillings pulling the pins from grenades!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 16, 2021 11:50:17 GMT
Good post, Swan. And Craig, those stories from your own reading are sad and harrowing. It's shocking that WHH was returned to the Front that quickly. The trenches ate men alive. I watched a rather superficially written drama serial this past week while staying with my Mom for a few days and some episodes involved the characters' experience of World War I. It's one of those "life upstairs and and downstairs in a grand manor house" things that have supported many actors in Britain for generations. At the end of the sequence of shows depicting this period, one of the lead characters asked a parlor-maid something like "Did any of it mean anything?" There was no response. H. I have a friend who is an expert on WW1. He actually interviewed nine of the men who survived the first battle of the Somme where 20,000 allied troops were killed in one day. The whole thing is genuinely heartbreaking. Hodgson's initial injury was a broken jaw and concussion at a training camp in Salisbury Plains in 1916. He was discharged but returned in October 1917. My guess is he would have felt duty bound to go. Within a year the fighting was more or less continual and the Germans in 1918 were pressing, the allies retreating, to the extent that German Storm Troopers penetrated the British lines and came within 200 yards of Hodgson's Field Artillery Brigade. Hodgson had survived Passchendaele, which was simply hell on earth. He was probably suffering from concussion; the noise of guns could burst your eardrums. They had taken heavy artillery and gas attacks as well as the Storm Trooper attack. Hodsgon's unit would be dragging guns and horses out of craters and mud and setting them up in new positions. At some point he volunteered to man the Forward Observation Post, some distance in front of the firing line. Patched up and released from a field hospital on the morning of Thursday 18 April, he was last seen walking off with his NCO signaller. On 19 April they were heard from once and then nothing. Both men were reported missing. Next day the battery commander went out under heavy fire to find out what had happened. He met a French officer who showed him a helmet with the name Lieutenant W. Hope Hodgson on it. Makes you think that despite everything, now isn't a bad time to be alive
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Post by Swan on Jul 16, 2021 12:36:52 GMT
My initial confusion was the mention of returned. It seems he didn't see action until 1917, prior to his major accident he seems to have been used in a training capacity. Everything suggests he would have been someone who couldn't remain on the side lines. His own fearlessness, commented on by a senior officer, no doubt contributed to his death.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 16, 2021 12:40:35 GMT
My initial confusion was the mention of returned. It seems he didn't see action until 1917, prior to his major accident he seems to have been used in a training capacity. Everything suggests he would have been someone who couldn't remain on the side lines. His own fearlessness, commented on by a senior officer, no doubt contributed to his death. I misread that too. The timeline is serious injury in 1916 while training. Return roughly a year later when he had recovered but he had also been patched up in 1918 in some incident - artillery, shot at by stormtroopers or gas just before he volunteered for a very dangerous post during a retreat.
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Post by Swan on Jul 16, 2021 12:49:33 GMT
My initial confusion was the mention of returned. It seems he didn't see action until 1917, prior to his major accident he seems to have been used in a training capacity. Everything suggests he would have been someone who couldn't remain on the side lines. His own fearlessness, commented on by a senior officer, no doubt contributed to his death. I misread that too. The timeline is serious injury in 1916 while training. Return roughly a year later when he had recovered but he had also been patched up in 1918 in some incident - artillery, shot at by stormtroopers or gas just before he volunteered for a very dangerous post during a retreat. I look forward to what else you may discover.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 16, 2021 13:38:58 GMT
Return roughly a year later when he had recovered but he had also been patched up in 1918 in some incident - artillery, shot at by stormtroopers or gas just before he volunteered for a very dangerous post during a retreat. It is a wonder anybody survived this. Medicine was a bit more advanced than, say, in the American Civil War, where doctors basically had one method: amputate. But living in this horrible conditions, where any cut could give you tetanus, without any antibiotics. On the Macedonian front 162000 British soldiers died from malaria alone, not to mention all the victims of cholera and other diseases on the Western Front. It is hard to understand that the men coming home from the front could adjust at all. But maybe they were more resilient than we are today. If you grow up without indoor plumbing or a bath, you are not prone to get sick so fast.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Jul 16, 2021 14:19:40 GMT
Return roughly a year later when he had recovered but he had also been patched up in 1918 in some incident - artillery, shot at by stormtroopers or gas just before he volunteered for a very dangerous post during a retreat. It is a wonder anybody survived this. Medicine was a bit more advanced than, say, in the American Civil War, where doctors basically had one method: amputate. But living in this horrible conditions, where any cut could give you tetanus, without any antibiotics. On the Macedonian front 162000 British soldiers died from malaria alone, not to mention all the victims of cholera and other diseases on the Western Front. It is hard to understand that the men coming home from the front could adjust at all. But maybe they were more resilient than we are today. If you grow up without indoor plumbing or a bath, you are not prone to get sick so fast. The poet Rupert Brooke didn't even make it off his ship to the beaches. He died of an infected mosquito bit on a French hospital ship. I cried when I read that. He was 27. He was buried in an olive grove on Skyros. He was on his way to another terrible place: Gallipoli.
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Post by samdawson on Jul 16, 2021 15:21:34 GMT
Return roughly a year later when he had recovered but he had also been patched up in 1918 in some incident - artillery, shot at by stormtroopers or gas just before he volunteered for a very dangerous post during a retreat. It is a wonder anybody survived this. Medicine was a bit more advanced than, say, in the American Civil War, where doctors basically had one method: amputate. But living in this horrible conditions, where any cut could give you tetanus, without any antibiotics. On the Macedonian front 162000 British soldiers died from malaria alone, not to mention all the victims of cholera and other diseases on the Western Front. It is hard to understand that the men coming home from the front could adjust at all. But maybe they were more resilient than we are today. If you grow up without indoor plumbing or a bath, you are not prone to get sick so fast. In terms of medical aid WW1 was surprisingly modern and set the template for battlefield medicine, the British Army having finally learnt the lessons of the Crimean War and, in particular, the Boer War: give immediate treatment and remove the casualty (rather than wait till they are at a hospital ). So the relatively new and unified Royal Army Medical Corps instituted what was known as the chain of evacuation, at each step of which the treatment became more sophisticated. I'm not sure I remember this properly but there would be a frontline aid post where first aid would be given then the wounded/sick solder would be moved out of the immediate danger to a collecting post and from there to an advanced dressing station, then further back to a casualty clearing station, then to hospital, usually in the UK, and reached by a hospital ship. There was also early psychiatry and plastic/reconstructive surgery, as well as provision of and training for prosthetics taking place back in GB. The model still works, greatly assisted by using petrol driven transport, including aircraft in WW2 (see the Burma campaign) and then the helicopter from the Korean war onwards for fast medevac, plus mobile and quick to set up hospital units near the battle zones (you can get an idea of what they can do from the 7/7 bombings in 2005 when doctors who were Territorial Army RAMC members were just returning to work after a training exercise and applied the lessons to the King's X bus casualties, using post-it notes on patients' foreheads as triage indicators etc and preventing the hospital from being unable to cope with the unprecedented scale of unexpected casualties)
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 16, 2021 15:31:06 GMT
It is a wonder anybody survived this. Medicine was a bit more advanced than, say, in the American Civil War, where doctors basically had one method: amputate. But living in this horrible conditions, where any cut could give you tetanus, without any antibiotics. On the Macedonian front 162000 British soldiers died from malaria alone, not to mention all the victims of cholera and other diseases on the Western Front. It is hard to understand that the men coming home from the front could adjust at all. But maybe they were more resilient than we are today. If you grow up without indoor plumbing or a bath, you are not prone to get sick so fast. In terms of medical aid WW1 was surprisingly modern and set the template for battlefield medicine, the British Army having finally learnt the lessons of the Crimean War and, in particular, the Boer War: give immediate treatment and remove the casualty (rather than wait till they are at a hospital ). So the relatively new and unified Royal Army Medical Corps instituted what was known as the chain of evacuation, at each step of which the treatment became more sophisticated. I'm not sure I remember this properly but there would be a frontline aid post where first aid would be given then the wounded/sick solder would be moved out of the immediate danger to a collecting post and from there to an advanced dressing station, then further back to a casualty clearing station, then to hospital, usually in the UK, and reached by a hospital ship. There was also early psychiatry and plastic/reconstructive surgery, as well as provision of and training for prosthetics taking place back in GB. The model still works, greatly assisted by using petrol driven transport, including aircraft in WW2 (see the Burma campaign) and then the helicopter from the Korean war onwards for fast medevac, plus mobile and quick to set up hospital units near the battle zones (you can get an idea of what they can do from the 7/7 bombings in 2005 when doctors who were Territorial Army RAMC members were just returning to work after a training exercise and applied the lessons to the King's X bus casualties, using post-it notes on patients' foreheads as triage indicators etc and preventing the hospital from being unable to cope with the unprecedented scale of unexpected casualties) That's a good summary. On return you had Spanish Flu killing millions. One small street in my hometown had sixteen dead men. Think of the widows, the mothers, the brothers and fathers who didn't go. Some women spent their whole lives waiting for their men to return. Many men returned mad or in pieces. My own immediate family had five casualties. Two dead, one wounded twice in one day. Worst of all the only people they could take solace with were fellow soldiers. No one wanted to talk about the horrors of war, and the civilian population only knew about glorious victory and brave deeds.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 16, 2021 16:00:15 GMT
That's a good summary. On return you had Spanish Flu killing millions. One small street in my hometown had sixteen dead men. Think of the widows, the mothers, the brothers and fathers who didn't go. Some women spent their whole lives waiting for their men to return. Many men returned mad or in pieces. My own immediate family had five casualties. Two dead, one wounded twice in one day. Worst of all the only people they could take solace with were fellow soldiers. No one wanted to talk about the horrors of war, and the civilian population only knew about glorious victory and brave deeds. It is astonishing how well the censorship and propaganda machine worked at the time, laying a smoke screen on reality. I have read somewhere that in England at the channel you could hear the artillery barrage in France, but still most had no real idea how bad this was. I can only recommend (again, I think) The Great War Week by Week on Youtube, originally from 2014 to 2018. Every week of the war is covered in 10 or 12 minutes, illustrated with computer maps or short film news strips. Also they did seperate background episodes. All narrated by a guy called Indy Neidell who also wrote this. This was so successful that currently they produce WWII and did a lot of seperate projects, like the Suez Crisis or the Cuba Crisis in 6 or 8 somewhat longer episodes format. WWI is such an unwieldy topic, but they managed to make it transparant. A format like that would be impossible on tv, which makes it so fascinating.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 16, 2021 16:20:48 GMT
THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT by William Hope Hodgson
āI am only an old ā man.ā
The eponymous Voice thus spake. Yet the sailor aboard a ship in the endless doldrums of the Pacific, the one who heard this voice in the night, is also called āold manā by his master Will. The voice that tells of a plague that has beset him and his fiancĆ©e, islanded after shipwreck and, despite the hope of clear whitened bands of sand between grey fungal growths, those growths surround and finally reside upon and within them. I also then went off nodding in the mist, a one man ghost-ship, seeing something now unmissed in that meaningless mist, something sad and swaddling that can only swaddle someone who happens in real-time to be old todayā¦a selfās travelling grey grave. And soundless wave. Even if my middle name is Hope.
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