The Imperial War Museum and the First World War
I have visited the Imperial War Museum in London many times but, on 19 July 2014, the museum reopened with new First World War Galleries to mark the centenary of the outbreak of what used to be called the Great War. So today I revisited the museum with my Sloval friend Ivan to see the new galleries and we spent three hours studying the fascinating texts and exhibits.
I always learn so much from these exhibitions. For instance, I had not fully appreciated the nature of the German atrocities in Belgium in the first days of the war (whole civilian communities were massacred) or the use of gas by the Allies as well as the Germans (neither side found it effective) or the extent of the hostility towards British men who remained on the Home Front (employers had to issue those needed for war work in manufacturing with special badges).
At the end of the galleries is a wall with various statistics on the casualties of the war, such as:
- Taking the four years of the war, on average over 6,000 soldiers were killed every day.
- One in every six British families suffered a direct bereavement.
- Some 750,000 British solders were killed.
- Almost 250,000 soldiers from other nations in the British Empire were killed.
- Almost 1.4 million French soldiers were killed.
- Over 2 million German soldiers were killed.
- Some 1.8 million Russian soldiers were killed.
- Over 16% of Serbs died – proportionately the greatest loss of any nation.
August 16th, 2014 at 2:51 am
This brought to mind a chapter in the autobiography of author Ruth Park (“A Fence around the Cuckoo”). As a young woman in New Zealand, she loses her sweetheart in the Second World War:
“The air was full of refracted grief. In mourning for one we did not withdraw from the dispersed, inconsolable grief of almost the entire world”.