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World War I needs a good press agent. It suffers because, "The War to End All Wars" clearly wasn't. And all the great movies were made about World War II. Most who fought in World War I didn't even seem to want to talk about it-a fact I never understood until reading Back to the Front, which recounts horrific battles where the ignorance (arrogance?) of the few killed hundreds of thousands. This beautifully written book would be interesting enough if it only contained tales of the war. But writer Stephen O'Shea also puts the old story in a powerful context and produces a lesson that is surprisingly applicable to business today. He shows that, while many generals understood what they could do with the new technologies of war (chemical weapons, long-range artillery, and especially the machine gun), no one really grasped what their opponents could do in return. The situation reminds me of the modern business world, where many executives assume the worst they'll do is stay even in the face of competition, and where they view technology merely as a tool to provide advantages over rivals. In fact, competitors can use technology to gain ground as well, and technology can even create new battlefields. At times, the book reads like a delightful travelogue. Mr. O'Shea is master of casual writing that makes so many travel books more pleasurable than visits to the destinations being described. He speaks of cosmic exchanges with French (on some level, all exchanges with the French are cosmic), and then recounts the weather, the smell of the trees, the view of the plains. In Flanders, he notes how, during the next few hours of his walk, "every step I take cost 35 lives in October 1917." At Passchendaele, he tells of soldiers plodding through mud into the face of machine guns. He recalls the senior officer who, upon visiting "the oozing landscape of blood and mud," burst into tears and exclaimed: "Good God, did we really send Men to fight in that?" As Mr. O'Shea puts it, "Passchendaele was a prolonged, futile massacre conceived by an inept military mind." It is not simply that the generals were "unmoved by suffering," as Mr. O'Shea puts it, but that they were trying to wage war in a world transformed by technology. It seems inconceivable today, but in battle after battle the officers simply couldn't think of a new approach to fighting. They kept ordering their men over the trenches even after hundreds of thousands of deaths by machine gun fire, with little progress. Mr. O'Shea describes Chemin de Dames, where men were commanded to climb a hill facing machine gun fire in the expectation that somehow the mass of men would defeat the machine. He says that, in 1814, Napoleon won a victory that proved Pyrrhic because 7,000 of his men were killed. In 1917, Mr. O'Shea writes, "Nivelle lost 275,000. Napoleon would have been dumbfounded by Nivelle's mulish wastefulness and by the result& . The soldiers heading up the line bleated like sheep, derisively, in an open admission of loss of faith in their leaders." Leaders, slow to understand that technology had changed the rules of battle, saw their armies devastated. The lasting effect was a profound distrust of authority, a sense of insecurity, and a world forever transformed. As Mr. O'Shea shows in his melodic, somewhat melancholy book, we are left with a place on earth so filled with pain that its stories rise to the surface, like so many war artifacts on old battlefields in the spring.
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