JF Ptak Science Books Post 2501
In nearly the very middle of WWI, on August 24, 1916, there appeared this remarkable ad in the pages of the decidedly this-is-what-left-wing-magazines-look-like NYC-published magazine, The Nation:
It is interesting to think of the "middle" of this war with the "middle" of other wars, because, well, this doesn't look like the middle of anything except for the post facto chronometer of fighting. In the U.S. Civil War, the almost-perfect middle turns out to be Gettsyburg, and that looked considerably past the middle so far as the Confederacy was concerned. (And as a matter of fact, the section on Gettysburg in Shelby Foote's great classic (The Civil War, a Narrative) comes in the near-exact middle of the middle volume of the three-volume work...the "capstone" of the book, as he referred to the battle.) With WWII, the chronological middle, which is right around New Year's 1943, doesn't look like anywhere in the middle if you were there, though with the involvement of the U.S. and its enormous industrial/production capacity spelled the eventual end of the Axis; in January 1943, it still looked like a very hard road ahead.
It is highly probable that teh nature of being in the middle of anything is apparent only in hindsight.
Anyway, the ad shown above was an appeal for financial support, to help fight a war that was enormously expensive, and soliciting from overseas sources one one approach.
The U.K. had been consumed by the war since August, 1914, and would wind up with enormous losses totaling more than 10% of the entire soldiers-in-unfirom for the war, with more than 800,000 soldiers killed (and more than 1.6 million wounded)--the fatalities being roughly twice the number of people buried in Arlington Cemetery.
As a matter of fact, the U.K lost more soldiers in WWI than the U.S. lost in the Revolutionary War (25,000), War of 1812 (15,000), Mexican American War (13,000), Spanish American/Philippine American Wars (6,000), WWI (116,000), World War II (405,000), Korea (36,000), Vietnam (58,000), Iraq (3,600) and Afghanistan (1,800) combined, and then some. The U.S. Civil War, though, is another thing entirely, so far as these numbers go. (That said, and speaking of "another thing entirely, there was the Taipei Rebellion of 1850-1864, ending just before the U.S. war, claimed the lives of an unbelievable 20 million.)
Other nations fared even worse: Austria-Hungary suffered 1.2 million soldiers dead, France 1.4 million, and Russia and Germany each with about 2 million dead.
I'm not sure how I got here in this short post--all of the above generated by this advertisement for financial help to fight the war and to keep a country solvent. Now that I've had a quick look through the full years for 1916 and 1917 this seems to be the only appearance of the ad, and it is also I think the only full-page ad in The Nation for that time. I have no idea what happened to the U.S. appeal--perhaps they were reaching out to the wrong audience, because in spite of the time and the spirit of the magazine, prior to U.S. involvement in the war for 1916 and 1917 there wasn't much war coverage beyond the first page or two of general war news. Interesting.
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