Making of the A-Bomb

The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization-anachronistically speaking, a software package. "The basic lever," the writer Gil Elliot comments, "was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men available for military service. The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns." Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus Elliot demonstrates, "It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches."

What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. "The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman," Siegfried Sasson allows a fictional infantry officer to see. "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims." Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In

Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering. Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a "strategy of attrition." The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a "strategy" so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American

Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield's bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated