Broulards
There are a lot of comparisons around between the war in Iraq and Vietnam, but, at the command level, the mistakes are older.
Karen at Dark Bilious Vapors goes back to the Peninsula War of the early 19th century for Murdering Officers, an allusion to the Sharpe’s Rifles series.
The Crimean War continued the tradition with The Charge of the Light Brigade, of which French General Pierre Bosquet said: “C’est magnifique, mais il n’est pas la guerre.” [It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war.]
Ambrose Burnsides is a Civil War example of this type of officer at the The Battle of Fredericksburg, as was, uncharacteristically, Lee with Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.
But the concept reached its zenith in the Great War, which lead to many remarkable antiwar books, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque perhaps the best known.
The Battle of the Somme which was fought from July 1st until November 18th, 1916 resulted in 420,000 British casualties, 200,000 French casualties, and 500,000 German casualties and only altered the front line 12 kilometers. Approximately 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, but General Haig continued to send waves of troops to be mown down by machine guns.
This is the probable setting for Stanley Kubrik’s Paths of Glory in which the character, General Broulard says: “There are few things more fundamentally stimulating that watching another man die.”
This administration is filled with Broulards, sacrificing the children of others to justify their obsessions and unwilling to admit their failures.
