So, there's this guy. And at first I was not paying much attention at all, but there are a couple of things that got me all in-geeked:
1. Troop mutinies of up to 70,000 Allied Soldiers
2. The Lusitania expedition confirming that, indeed, one of the reasons why it blew up so easily was it being full to the brim with ammo and weapons for the Allies.
3. The Aftermath or, as he put it: "...they were lamenting that this could happen in a so-called civilized world. And of course, one thing that happens after the war is that if you're an African or you're an Asian and you've been told that this is the great civilization, that the Europeans, they've got it all; you've been told that they're better than you. How do you reconcile that with what they're screaming at you in their little schools, trying to teach you their language? If they're so damn better, how could they bring all of this upon Europe?"
4. And this, and its gusebumps-inducing quality: "To end with something that Jay Winters leaves us with: He has a wonderful book about mourning and memory. And he begins with a film by Abel Gance, who did a very long over-rated film on Napoleon, but he did a movie called 'J'accuse!' He makes it in 1918 and 1919; before the war is over.
The hero is a soldier called Jean Diaz. He comes back from the war wounded and he begins to lose his mind, as so many people did, after all that in WWI. He escapes from a mental facility and he goes back to his village. He brings all the villagers together and he tells them about a dream that he's had in the asylum. In the dream you see a battlefield graveyard with all the crosses. They're all there. They're all askew and a big black cloud comes up behind the village graveyard in the movie, and magically these ghost-like figures emerge from the grave with tattered bandages, missing arms. Their bandages begin to unravel around their head. Some are blind...some are coughing up their lungs from the poison gas. And they leave the battlefield and they return to their villages to see if the sacrifices have been worth it. What they find is what Jay calls the pettiness of civilian life: the black-marketing, the profiteering. Their wives have been sleeping around. Things aren't the way they should be, whereas they have suffered. But they've come back, they're alive but they're really dead and their appearance so terrifies the villagers that they decide to mend their ways and to become better people and so these ghost-like people and their bandages, they march back to the cemetery and they go back into their graves and it's all over. But what's really interesting about it is that some of the soldiers who were on leave at the time were used as extras in the movie and you can identify them: someone who's lost his arm really, it's not a fake missing arm, and some of them who were there, in the movie, go back to the war and are killed. They die real deaths in their graves with their tattered bandages. And it's as if art and reality have merged. And that's and important theme in all of this because there's no war, no important moment in history that has brought us such great literature and all of this. And there's no war like this ever that unleashed so many demons into the world..."
Yale Courses: France since 1871 with Professor John Merriman