Next Sunday will mark the 99th anniversary of
Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, an event that prompted, in
quick succession, Russian mobilization for war, the German invasion of Belgium,
and French and British declarations of war against Germany. Preparations for
the Great War were years in the making; nonetheless, its onset somehow seemed
improvised, spontaneous, even accidental.
The last veterans of World War I have all died--the last one
on February 4, 2012--but the weapons of that war survive in large numbers in the
fields of Belgium and western France. From time to time, they are unearthed and
claim new victims. A recent story in the Telegraph
describes the work of Dirk Vanparys, a member of the Belgian army’s Explosive Ordnance
Disposal Company. On a recent, all-too-normal day, Vanparys and his team
collected 73 unexploded shells and 57 grenades and fuses that had been found by
farmers. Many of the shells that are recovered on a regular basis contain
mustard gas, chlorine gas, or phosgene--agents that killed and disabled
hundreds of thousands of troops along the Western Front during the many spasms
of chemical warfare in World War I. Four months ago, seven people were
hospitalized after a German shell containing gas exploded as a trench was being
dug to lay cable south of Ypres.
Weapons used in World War I will continue to kill and maim
completely innocent people for years to come. In 2012, Belgian and French
authorities collected 185 tons of munitions left from World War I; the total collected
in 2011 was 274 tons. Such totals are possible because nearly one and a half billion shells were fired during the
war.
In preparation for the Battle of the Somme, an assault by
British troops on German trenches that began on July 1, 1916, British artillery
fired 1.5 million shells over five days. Tunnels dug under the German lines
were packed with explosives—as much as thirty tons of explosives in a single
mine—and set off as the assault began. The final artillery barrage—224,221
shells in a span of 65 minutes—created a rumble that, Adam Hochschild writes,
“could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London,” almost 200 miles
away. In spite of this extraordinary effort to “soften” German defenses, the
first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the British Army over 57,000
casualties, including almost 20,000 killed.
A story posted yesterday by the McClatchy News Service
describes another unending war. Forty years after the end of U.S. military
involvement in the Vietnam War (or, to the Vietnamese, the American War), there
are still cases of children being born with severe birth defects caused by Agent
Orange, a chemical defoliant used by the United States in Vietnam from 1961 to
1971. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected
3,000,000 people in Vietnam, including 150,000 children born with birth defects
since the fall of Saigon in 1975. While
the United States has, since 1991, extended disability benefits for any of
fifteen diseases linked to Agent Orange to U.S. military personnel who served
in Vietnam, it has provided little assistance to the Vietnamese and has avoided
acknowledging any responsibility for health problems caused by the use of the
chemical. There is a U.S.-funded effort underway to clean up chemical
contamination near the Da Nang International Airport, which was used by the
U.S. Air Force during the war, but this site is just one of many Agent Orange
“hot spots” in Vietnam.
There is some evidence that humankind is getting better at
calculating the costs of war and that, as a result, we have become more
successful at avoiding it than we have been in the past. What World War I is
teaching us now, and what the Vietnam War seems destined to echo, is this: the
costs of a war should be calculated out to a century (or more) beyond its
conclusion.