The German front in rare color photos, 1914-1918
rarehistoricalphotos.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
I've always had decent imagination to turn black and white people into color, and the same with buildings, etc.
But somehow I always mentally kept the skies as gray... as if the death and destruction of the war warranted overcast dreary weather, for years on end.
The idea that WWI was fought on many days that were brilliantly sunny somehow makes it even more depressing in a way.
One thing I've been wondering about: Is it possible that the ML algo turns the faces into more "modern" faces because it's presumably trained on later color footage?
You can get dramatically different results depending on your training data set.
The only real issue with that is treating any of the outputs as "realistic" representations in terms of "close to the original scene". It's just a modern interpretation and the viewer needs to keep that in mind at all times.
Birkenau (Auschwitz 2), on the hand, was purpose built (Auschwitz 1 was a repurposed barracks) and that really does look like Hell, even on a nice day. Every last part of it screams "this was designed for obscene purposes".
Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent years working with the British government to digitize and colorize their old footage of World War I. They also added in sound using the actual military equipment that was used in the field during the war. They also hired lip readers to figure out what each person was saying and added in dialogue.
It's really incredible and makes the war (which was only 100 years ago) feel much more modern than old black and white footage.
The rest of that rarehistoricalphotos.com site is well worth browsing for many more amazing photos.
[1] - "Rare pictures of London in Dufaycolor, 1943-1945" - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rare-pictures-london-dufayc...
[2] - "Rare color pictures from Russian Empire, 1905-1915" - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rare-color-pictures-russian...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prokudin-Gorskii-25....
It's interesting you can see the effect this has on moving water, where it has an oil-slick rainbow sheen.
- Footage Of The First Flying Machines 1890-1910: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_G1YbItY9o
- A Trip Through New York City in 1911: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw
- Views of Tokyo, Japan, 1913-1915: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQAmZ_kR8S8
The thing that struck me, was the quality of these trenches. It’s possible the photos were propaganda, so they only took pictures of the “good” trenches, but every picture you see of allied trenches looked like ditches.
That said, a quick shufti at the casualty figures[0] shows that the absolute worst place to be, during the war, was in a German trench.
Even to the extent that the Entente occupied hostile territory (which was much rarer), they had a much greater respect for human rights. The British, French and Americans had strong liberal democratic traditions, whereas Germany was a highly autocratic and militaristic society verging on totalitarianism by the time the war started.
[1] https://www.americanheritage.com/belgians-deported-slave-lab...
It's not really propaganda, German trenches were on average much better than allied ones. The reason was that the allied side considered itself on the offensive, and saw no reason to makes the trenches more livable since they expected to leave them as soon as possible to advance in newly reconquered territory.
There is a certain irony in that, considering that almost every Allied soldier who set foot on German soil – with a few minor exceptions – did so as prisoner of war.
I am not sure how you reach that conclusion. If you add the British and French casualty numbers, you roughly get the German casualty numbers (the Germans also fought the Russians and the British and French also fought the Ottomans). According to the Wikipedia article on the western front [0], the entente had more casualties.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_I)
Consider, also, that there were numerous fronts in the war. The Russians lost almost as many as the Germans, but they were on a totally different front from the European allies, so maybe we could say the Russian trenches were the worst, but I'll bet that they had a lot of Cossack cavalry; which, I suspect, didn't do so well against machine guns.
The Ottomans had a huge civilian death toll, but that included the "Armenian Issue," which people like to fight about (My wife actually had a neighbor that was a survivor of that "Issue," and he called it "genocide").
The short of it, was that no single nation suffered as many casualties as Germany. It's notable that they suffered so few direct civilian casualties (but look what happened from secondary causes). Boy, did that change in WWII.
The only nation that came close to Germany for total deaths was Russia.
Then, of course, we had the good ol' 1918 Pandemic, and everybody took that in the shorts.
From an article about calvary use in WW1 (on the same site as had the German front color photos):
"Generally the troops can retreat faster than they can advance, so in an age when "breakthrough" machines (tanks, armored cars) either did not exist or were even slower than walking men, cavalry was given the task or harassing a retreating army in an attempt to turn their retreat into a rout and prevent them forming a defensive position further back. So cavalry was not meant to be charging into the teeth of machine guns, but rather charging into groups of men as they fell back, hoping to break whatever discipline they had left.
"Throughout the Western Front of both sides had large bodies of cavalry on "standby" when they launched big offensives, in the hope that they could break the enemy line and the cavalry could turn a little tear in the line into a huge opening. However, from 1914-early 1917 the offensive strategy used on the Western Front undermined the ability of cavalry to fulfill this role - week-long artillery barrages gave the opposition time to prepare secondary lines of defenses and bring up reserves to fill those lines. So rather than charging into a disorganized mass of retreating men they found freshly build trenches and machine guns - exactly what they were meant to prevent. Therefore the cavalry had little use. However German lancer units were more usefully employed in the war against Russia because the battle was more fluid and less encumbered with barbed wire trenches that tied up the Western Front."
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-cavalry-lances-1918/
Are the deaths justified? Of course not. But the world would be very very different.
WWI was a net boost to colonialism with European powers given nominal control of the former Ottoman empire; European colonialism was still going strong (and arguably still is) well through the middle of the 20th century.
US influence in Europe was only drastically increased after the implementation of the Marshall Plan after WWII, and obviously only in Western Europe.
Arguably it's just one 31-year war with a generation-long cessation of hostilities in the middle to mature more cannon fodder for the meat grinder.
If we look at physical infrastructure alone, the vast majority of Europe at the end of the first war was mostly intact. At the end of WWII, even this wasn't the case, whole cities and large parts of the continent's man-made landscape had been shattered into twisted ruins.
I am sincerely curious to see how you would qualify such a statement that WWI was worse for Europe than WWII.
World War I ended the legitimacy of the divine right to rule others by virtue of noble birth.
————————-
That did not end very well for virtually any of the countries involved. Only the former Ottoman Empire really escaped any kind of widespread hell.
The former Russian Empire was under a totalitarian system for 70 years. The Austro-Hungarian empire first had to deal with the holocaust and Nazi conquest and then Soviet conquest. The Chinese had to deal with the Great Leap forward and Maoism. And the Germans had Nazism, the Holocaust, and years of turmoil in between the end of the war and the end of WWII. They also had their country split in half and the eastern part made poorer.
The British and Japanese now have a token monarchy. The same applies to most countries that still have one: the monarch is not the source of power.
What exactly was gained? Monarchical power was already on the way out. The French Revolution had clearly undercut the power of monarchs and they did not hold real power by the start of WWI. And abrupt lack of monarchy rather than gradual evolution seems to have led at minimum decades of torment in most of the places you name.
You could make an argument about ending colonialsim but WWII and Japanese conquest Of European colonies did a lot more on that front. WWI expanded several empires.
And the seeds for the recent and ongoing trouble in the Middle East were sown in the division of the former Ottoman Empire immediately after the war, as described in David Fromkin's book, "A Peace to end all Peace." (best history-book title ever!)
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-peace-to-end-all-peace-creat...
It was a classic case of prisoner's dilemma: several powers solving a mini-max problem. What happens if I arm myself, what if I don't? Of course, the thorny question is what happens if I don't arm myself and my neighbor continues arming. But then, after arming and arming and arming for decades, at some point the question becomes what happens if I attack first vs what happens if my neighbor attacks first.
Unfortunately, in all these questions, when you contemplate the best outcome and the worst outcome, in 1914 history did not show any scary examples of really bad outcomes. All involved parties have been involved in various sorts of interborder conflicts where the worst outcome was not truly devastating. Russia had suffered a pretty bad naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese a few years back, France has lost some territories to Germany a few decades back, but all in all, all major European powers had experienced only success in their recent history.
Today, 100 years later, we have different answers to the same questions. Answers that will inevitably include nuclear holocaust. Does this mean we'll never see a major war again? I don't know what the future holds in store. I"m thankful that there was no major war during my lifetime, I can only hope there won't be one during my kids' lifetime.
Imagine the constant artillery bombardment above you - shrapnel and rock everywhere - and you’re wearing not much more than a baseball hat.
Truly an incredible time in history - these old armies colliding with a new type of war.
Ah, that's the "flaw" I couldn't quite point my finger at. Thanks.
https://scitechdaily.com/shocking-results-when-wwi-helmets-w...
They protect the most vulnerable part of your body. You might not immediately go tell tales of it if you get hit in your helmet by anything but a small caliber or shrapnel (a large caliber will still inflict significant head trauma), but your chances of survival are way up from pretty much zero.
Also there might be all kinds of stuff flying around on a battlefield, and even if it isn't necessarily lethal, it's nice to not get hit in the head by a rock or whatever.
And remember that injured soldiers are as much if not more of a problem than dead soldiers because now you need someone to take care of them.
Hemingway has some good writing about this and the horror of it all. Especially as previous tactics were being used with mechanized armies - just complete slaughter.
Bad nutrition stunts height and IQ.
Yeah, I knew that. But it's one thing to read about it and see the numbers and another to see in real photos. :)
I say this because I was just looking at another thread where people were arguing about whether a vegetarian diet is suitable for humans.
And I vaguely remember reading about how average height increases in a given society as meat becomes more available and less of a luxury.
Usually makes whatever's bothering me seem insignificant. Photos like these remind me that scenario has been real for many, many people.
But over time you also realize the entire industrial output of the Allies was used to defeat the Axis, and you become completely disgusted at the monumental waste.
Historians agree that the Axis never had a chance of winning in the longterm (aside from extreme luck), and WW2 was a result of US isolationism. Had the US promised to send 2 million troops to Europe as in WW1, Germany would not have bothered with most of their adventures.
We've had relative peace since 1945 thanks to US military investment, but one passive speech from the Whitehouse can undermine that deterrent, as Jimmy Carter did before.
But I'm happy that you share the disgust.
If only people could unite so much for positive creations.. I guess nature was optimized for survival first and not art or harmony.
And then I think of the number of soldiers involved - I guess if each dug a hole and nailed some boards, such trenches could be built quickly. After all, man power scales not just by power, but by number of people as well.
(And then I start thinking about the logistics to feed all these soldiers, and my head starts to spin.)
Prior to WWI, Western Europeans saw themselves as the God-ordained masters of the world. They carved up Asia(including China and Africa into zones of influence. They were typically the senior military partners in any alliance they entered into.
After the horrors of WWI, it was over. WWII was just the final chapter of WWI. Now, Instead of being the senior military partners, they would be the junior partners (see NATO and the Warsaw Pact). They would lose their colonies. They would at best, be one region of the world among many in terms of global power.
The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it.
We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism.
What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002
(Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.)
As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
Mr. Foster is doing creative ontogenic work with the intention of introducing improvements to the status quo (and Huxley takes a sideswipe at "They will outbreed Us"[2]):
> "Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. ... "But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet."
and there is other creative work to be done, are other changes to introduce:
> Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.
No problem with utilitarianism, even if they move a different lever for utility than we do (or do they? compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097162 ):
> "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
(As Huxley wrote 30 years before the Cleese + Ronnies sketch[3] his idea of social destiny may have been a bit more predetermined than our twenty-first century bien-pensant ideas on the subject.)
[1] https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html
[2] Körner notes that no matter what kind of Darwinist: Social, Economic, Academic, etc., they may be spotted by their constant undarwinist worry that the unfit will outbreed the fit.
[3] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...
It's worth noting that even J.S. Mill recognized some problem with pure utilitarianism, and tried to interject with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He recognized the problem, but could not solve it with pure philosophy that starts from the sole measure of the good as being pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill's account is thus inconsistent, but what he was getting at was incredibly important, and it's a bit of a shame to see this classification of society in terms of the number of people happy versus unhappy repeated in 2020, when Mill saw a problem with it in the early 19th century.
A 1961 take on 'freedom' being just another word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhSKk-cvblc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
> "If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for.
Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position.
* It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.
> "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them."
(Note the implicit english attitude to ireland, or compare some of our current deltas' attitudes to quarantine.)
http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html
It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror.
(Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)
Fear not; tiring of it, it appears we're going to try Orwell's dystopia next.
"[27 March] Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news.
Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who addresses me as 'you shit', among other things.
The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokyo. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and - I think - with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stands for the more reactionary policy."