On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated along with his wife Sophie by a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip. Princip shot both the Archduke and his wife at close range as they drove through Sarajevo en route to the residence of the provincial governor. Sophie died instantly, her husband ten minutes later. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a key factor that led to WWI. The Archduke was a Hapsburg, a family that held one of the principal sovereign dynasties of the world.
Author John Keegan writes on the first page of his national bestselling book titled, “The First World War”, that “the first world war was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms had prudence or goodwill found a voice”.
Keegan speaks to the ugliness of WWI saying that, “The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The graveyards remain. Many of those who died in battle could never be laid to rest. Their bodies had been blown to pieces by shellfire and the fragments scattered beyond recognition. Many other bodies could not be recovered during the fighting and were then lost to view, entombed in crumbled shell holes, or collapsed trenches, or decomposing into the broken battle soil left behind.” WWI saw ten million people killed.
These soldiers fought in trenches battling their enemies that also included rats and lice that shared these trenches and consistently tormented them. The lice caused ‘trench fever’ that contributed to muscle pain, fever and consistent headaches, while rats, fat on human waste from both armies spread disease and death among the troops. The dampness of the trenches led to trench foot, that often led to gangrene and then amputation of the foot. According to the Canadian War Museum website, “trench life involved long periods of boredom mixed with brief periods of terror. The threat of death kept soldiers constantly on edge, while poor living conditions and a lack of sleep wore away at their health and stamina. Life in the trenches was horrendous and if that wasn’t enough, there was death by gas, the most common being mustard, that would drift over the battle fields into these man-made ditches.
Robert Graves, an English man who wrote poetry like his father, sat in one of these trenches fighting to stay alive and would eventually write a book published in 1948 called “The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth”. Graves would survive this bloody war, his wounded body would eventually recover, but his soul maimed for life by what he had seen and endured. He would experience the terror of chemical warfare not seen to this degree before, demoralizing weaponized chemicals that cause 90,000 deaths and 1.3 million casualties.
Captain Graves would admit, “Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face or running for cover.” He would fight on the front lines of France until wounded, and then spend the rest of the war in England continuing to write poems about his experience of front-line combat. His first book of poetry “Over the Brazier” was published in 1916, and for many years he carried the moniker of war poet.
Some men find God in war, I believe Graves found the Goddess and actively pursued her and came to believe, as I, that she had been usurped of her sacred role through what he called ‘iconotropic redaction of original myth’ and that the male dominated religions eventually exterminated the worship of the Goddess. Iconotropic redaction refers to the process of changing the interpretation of icons and myths of earlier religions in such a way to confirm the ideas of people wanting their new religions and new gods to be worshipped. Graves believed this was consistently done and led to the destruction of the Goddess religions, and in that destruction, has caused the majority of the problems seen in our world today.
Suggested Reading:
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Patrice Chaplin
📖 City of Secrets (2021)
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Robert Graves
📖 The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948)
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John Keegan
📖 The First World War (2000)
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