{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1286",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1286,
    "subject": "WWI tactics",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-11-30T18:32:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-11-30T18:32:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0022-0004@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-11-30T18:32:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: WWI tactics",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "As my last ditch defense, I'll blame it all on John Crowley's (award\nwinning?) \"Great Work of Time\":\n\n\"She told how in those same years the European powers who confronted\neach other in Africa were also at work stockpiling arms and building\nmechanized armies to a size unheard of in the history of the world,\nto be finally let loose upon one another in August of 1914,\nunprepared for what was to become of them; armies officered by men\nwho still lived in the previous century, but armed with weapons more\ndreadful than they could imagine.  The machine gun: no one seemed to\nunderstand that the machine gun had changed war forever, and though\nthe junior officers and Other Ranks soon learned it, the commanders\nnever did. At the First Battle of the Somme wave after wave of\nBritish soldiers were sent against German machine guns, to be mown\ndown like grain.  There were a quarter of a million casualties in\nthat battle.  And yet the generals went on ordering massed attacks\nagainst machine guns for the four long years of the war.\n\n\"`But they knew,' Denys could not help saying. `They did know.\nMachine guns had been used against massed native armies for years,\nall over the Empire.  In Afghanistan.  In the Sudan.  Africa.  They\nknew.'\n\n\"`Yes,' Huntington said. `They knew.  And yet, in the Original\nSituation [i.e., our history], they paid no attention.  They went\nblindly on and made their dreadful mistakes.  Why?  How could they be\nso stupid, those generals and statesmen who in the\n[optimized-by-time-travelers] world you knew behaved so wisely and so\nwell?  [For example: WWI only lasted one year in the optimized\ntimeline.]  For one reason only: they lacked the help and knowledge of a\ngroup of men and women who had seen all those mistakes made [a secret\nsociety of time travelers]'\" (NOVELTY, p. 96).\n\nCrowley is using this sentiment as a key point for a time travel\nstory (after all, it is nearly impossible to get a time travel\nadventure going if you posit ala CANDIDE that this is the best of all\npossible worlds [because it is the only world] and that history\n[military history, especially] is already optimized by the best\npeople making the best decisions--all of which takes the Wind out of\n\"What if?\" scenarios from PAVANE to \"Back to the Future\"), so we\ncan't say how much he believes it himself . . . OTOH, he does list\nJohn Ellis's book THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN (1975) as one\nof the inspiring texts for the story.  FWIW.\n\nAnd no, I didn't/don't learn WWI from Crowley's fiction, but I have\nbeen re-reading this fiction and so the example and its sentiment\n(which has, alas, taken all the attention) were close at hand.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}