Author: Randy Rydberg

A fairly mellow fellow who likes to read history books.

They were real people…

This is some amazing restoration of film that is a hundred and ten years old. It better puts into perspective how these were real people, all of which had no idea how horrible the war was going to be. The original black-and-white footage, which was usually shown at too fast a rate of speed, lost the impact that these were actual human beings and not just some old, beat-up footage of random, long-since dead people.

This kind of footage also helps to make real in my mind the reality of what was going on, the little human interactions in the film cements to me that these are actual people. It would have been wonderful if motion cameras had been around for the Civil or Crimean wars, or even farther back to the Napoleonic or Revoutionary wars, because the paintings and drawings of those times gives them a more cartoonish and unrealistic feel as opposed to footage like this.

Saving Private Ryan had the same effect on me, except it had authentic sounds and battle recreation, all of which gave the black-and-white World War II footage that I saw after the film far more of an impact as my brain automatically filled in the lack of color and sound with a new understanding of what was actually happening in front of those black-and-white cameras.

It is a tragedy that people are more interested in overrated celebrities and bad cinema than they are about truly fascinating things like this.

History of the World War

It seems these days, that most people don’t have the concept of a library; they just see someone who has “too many books”. I have been asked on more than one occasion: “You’re never going to be able to read that many books!” While it would be nice to have the ability to read all of my books, (I actually know a guy who can do this, but alas, I am a slow reader) one of the many benefits of having an actual library is the ability to wander and select something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I’m a custodian of this custom library, full of volumes that people have put an immense amount of work into creating. It definitely isn’t just a “collection” of books.

A few weeks ago, I found two small, old volumes at the thrift store, and they were part of a set of five. Upon checking “The Registry”, also known as my spreadsheet, it turned out that I had the compilation of all five, a complete and singular volume in my library already. I had a tough time finding it though, because all of my World War I books are supposed to be in the same place, but I had to search and discover this was mistakenly among my older World War II books. But, it couldn’t hide, as The Registry doesn’t lie, it had to be here somewhere!

World War I was known as “The Great War”, or as in the case of this book, which was published in the same year as the war ended, 1918, “The World War”. There was no “World War II” yet, so nobody knew to call it “World War I”.

I found a piece of newspaper from what has to be a newspaper more than a hundred years old, and an invitation card from 1919, both used as bookmarks.

It is really neat to read books like this, written so soon after the war, and totally ignorant of the even worse war to come in just twenty years time from the publication of this one. There is a great amount of bias by the author, who was eventually a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army, but a lot of that comes from the perspective of the author and is very interesting to read. Francis A. March was active in that second war, so he saw a lot of violent history in his time.