<story><title>Listen to the moment the guns fell silent ending World War I</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/listen-moment-guns-fell-silent-ending-world-war-i-180970772/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DubiousPusher</author><text>I will post this at the risk of being downvoted because I am all but a pacifist and it is not a popular position. This is not surprising at all for two reasons.&lt;p&gt;Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not generally begrudgingly respect each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. The grudging respect you see discussed in documentaries comes decades later. After the continual trauma and memories of dead friends have time to fade.&lt;p&gt;War beaurocracies transform people into rational psychopaths. They create an order in which a letter of the law is utmost and that letter is laid by your betters. If your betters find some purpose in ordering you to kill pointlessly, you will. We all like to think we could find the courage or clarity to disobey an unethical order. But history is much more full of compliant atrocities than righteous mutinies. Soldiers kept firing because that is the perogative that came out of the leadership black box.</text></item><item><author>m-i-l</author><text>My first thought was that perhaps some of these last minute explosions were like celebratory gunfire[0]. But no, it seems that people were still desperately trying to kill each other knowing full well they only had hours, minutes or even seconds left to do so: &amp;quot;the cease-fire would not come into effect for a further six hours - at 11am ... the final day of WWI would produce nearly 11,000 casualties, more than those killed, wounded or missing on D-Day ... Just minutes before 11am, to the north around Mons, the 25-year-old Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was on the trail of retreating German soldiers ... But Pte Price&amp;#x27;s death at 10.58 was not the last. Further south in the Argonne region of France, US soldier Henry Gunther was involved in a final charge against astonished German troops who knew the Armistice was about to occur. What could they do? He too was shot ... It was 10.59.&amp;quot;[0] Madness.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Celebratory_gunfire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Celebratory_gunfire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;hi&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;7696021.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;hi&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;7696021.stm&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t find the audio on that page, but a link to it here: 
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;codatocoda.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;iwm-ww1-armistice-interpretation-sound-installation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;codatocoda.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;iwm-ww1-armistice-inte...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if the birds were actually recorded at the end, or if it was added for dramatic presentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;They hate each other in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That really isn&amp;#x27;t true, which is largely why the First World War was characterised by immobile trench warfare. A group of experienced and highly motivated soldiers were perfectly capable of breaking the lines and holding territory, as demonstrated by Stoßtruppen and Arditi, but most soldiers weren&amp;#x27;t experienced and highly motivated - they were barely-trained civilians who just wanted to go home in one piece. They might have occasionally fired a few shots over the barricades to show willing, they might have chosen to risk death in a charge over the lines rather than face certain death by firing squad, but they really didn&amp;#x27;t want to be fighting and certainly didn&amp;#x27;t want to risk death or live with the consequences of having killed.&lt;p&gt;Snipers can achieve remarkable combat effectiveness, partly because of their marksmanship and fieldcraft skills but mainly because they&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;actually shooting to kill&lt;/i&gt;, due to an innate or acquired psychological difference from ordinary infantrymen. Most infantrymen weren&amp;#x27;t really trying to kill anyone, which is why the overwhelming majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery - it is psychologically far easier to fire an artillery piece at a grid coordinate than to fire a rifle at a human being.&lt;p&gt;The burden of sustained combat or psychologically-informed training can increase the propensity of people to kill, but it&amp;#x27;s not a natural psychological state. Ordinary men under prolonged stress sometimes become hardened killers, but they&amp;#x27;re more likely to become disaffected and depressed.&lt;p&gt;Modern military strategy is based on this reality - a small proportion of elite infantrymen at the tip of the spear, supported by vast numbers of men in support and indirect combat roles. Tanks, aircraft and drones provide firepower, but just as crucially they provide psychological distance from the act of killing. The significance of psychological distance is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the Milgram experiments.</text></comment>
<story><title>Listen to the moment the guns fell silent ending World War I</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/listen-moment-guns-fell-silent-ending-world-war-i-180970772/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DubiousPusher</author><text>I will post this at the risk of being downvoted because I am all but a pacifist and it is not a popular position. This is not surprising at all for two reasons.&lt;p&gt;Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not generally begrudgingly respect each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. The grudging respect you see discussed in documentaries comes decades later. After the continual trauma and memories of dead friends have time to fade.&lt;p&gt;War beaurocracies transform people into rational psychopaths. They create an order in which a letter of the law is utmost and that letter is laid by your betters. If your betters find some purpose in ordering you to kill pointlessly, you will. We all like to think we could find the courage or clarity to disobey an unethical order. But history is much more full of compliant atrocities than righteous mutinies. Soldiers kept firing because that is the perogative that came out of the leadership black box.</text></item><item><author>m-i-l</author><text>My first thought was that perhaps some of these last minute explosions were like celebratory gunfire[0]. But no, it seems that people were still desperately trying to kill each other knowing full well they only had hours, minutes or even seconds left to do so: &amp;quot;the cease-fire would not come into effect for a further six hours - at 11am ... the final day of WWI would produce nearly 11,000 casualties, more than those killed, wounded or missing on D-Day ... Just minutes before 11am, to the north around Mons, the 25-year-old Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was on the trail of retreating German soldiers ... But Pte Price&amp;#x27;s death at 10.58 was not the last. Further south in the Argonne region of France, US soldier Henry Gunther was involved in a final charge against astonished German troops who knew the Armistice was about to occur. What could they do? He too was shot ... It was 10.59.&amp;quot;[0] Madness.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Celebratory_gunfire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Celebratory_gunfire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;hi&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;7696021.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;hi&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;7696021.stm&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t find the audio on that page, but a link to it here: 
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;codatocoda.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;iwm-ww1-armistice-interpretation-sound-installation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;codatocoda.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;iwm-ww1-armistice-inte...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if the birds were actually recorded at the end, or if it was added for dramatic presentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>I’m not sure that’s true. Apparently very few shots are on target. People seem reluctant to just kill someone else.&lt;p&gt;This “problem” has been ameliorated In recent times via increasingly distant and abstract warfare.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Killology#The_problem_of_non-_or_mis-firing_soldiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Killology#The_problem_of_non-_...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>