It was when I locked eyes with a white-and-black cow across the street from the Langemark German cemetery that I began to contemplate the cost of The Great War. The cow, of course, had no idea that where she was standing was once part of Flanders Fields, or that a century previous, the same spot would have been a shell-pocked hell-scape of mud and shattered men. Looking at the cow and her field of green grass, it was impossible to picture the carnage of 1917 taking place on that very same spot.
Picturing the hundreds of thousands who died there was equally impossible. Our minds are not built for innate understanding of numerals beyond the counting numbers: a million is a hundred-thousand is a billion. In front of me was the mass grave of almost 25,000 German soldiers. The space seemed too small for 25,000 bodies -- it's roughly the size of a decent Seattle backyard -- and the number too large to comprehend. 25,000 fans is a good turnout for a pro football game; 25,000 soldiers is slightly less than half of the number of American soldiers who died fighting in the Vietnam War (for grim comparison's sake, the British lost almost this many on the first day of the Somme); 25,000 days is the approximate lifespan of a Western man in 1945. And yet that number, if any of these comparisons helped you grasp its enormity, is only 1/10th of 1% of the total number human beings who died in the Great War: it is what a centimeter is to a kilometer.
Looking beyond the mass grave, past a two-lane road, past the cow and her plot of grass to the farms and house beyond, it was equally hard to comprehend another mass grave contained there. Whereas the 18 million men, women and children paid folly's price in blood by the liter and flesh by the pound, Western civilization would pay a much higher toll: the near total disintegration of a worldview that had held it together since Jan van Eyck cleaved the modern world from the medieval with his Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in 1432.
Barbara Tuchman's famous pronouncement, "and of it's kind, the last." and Edward Grey's (perhaps) quote about the lights going out all over Europe are both dramatic and pale. Like those multi-digit numbers, the cost to Western Civilization of World War I is simply beyond the ability of our modern minds' grasp. Only the most devout and ardent can still picture a world guided by the idea that ideals are paramount and divinely gifted; that the hand of God guides every political action in Europe and therefor the world; that white civilization is somehow the zenith of man's existence on Earth; that there is a clear dividing line between savage and civilized, drawn by God and race. These ideas and the certainty with which they were believed and lived convulsed and died when the first gas clouds rolled across the fields not so far from where I was standing. Most will not be missed, but the highest cost to the Western world was the loss of ideals. The idea and ideal, lived with the certainty of sunrise, that somehow Man has a higher purpose, if not to the divine than at least to to the betterment of Mankind as a whole, should not have been lost, nor was it completely. Like everything that survived the Great War, it was morphed to a new reality. But never again would there be such certainty in the cause.
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