World War I: Difference between revisions

** A cartoon from the time of the Versailles treaty shows Lloyd-George saying to his fellow leaders: "Listen. Do you hear a child crying?" Said child is unseen in a corner weeping over a torn copy of the treaty. Virtually any boy born in England or France in 1918-1919 would have been conscripted in 1939.

* [[Gambit Pileup]]: The entire war was a textbook example of this; in some cases the gears had been turning since the ''seventeenth century''.

* [[Gray and Gray Morality]]: Unlike [[World War Two|the sequel]], the good-versus-evil battle was far less obvious; as almost all the countries initially involved were motivated by a combination of greed, racism and nationalistic fervor. While the Central Powers did things like [[Fascists Bed Time|impose extremely nasty measures in the areas they occupied]] and [[Obligatory War Crime Scene|violated several agreements regarding the rules of war that they were party to]], as well as [[What Could Possibly Go Wrong?|giving the Bolsheviks the leg up they needed to seize power]], and the use of genocide to "Germanify" or "Turkify" several regions under their control, [[Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat|all of which ironically probably led to their defeat.]] The Allies were better, but they still were willing to launch air attacks against civilian targets (though not on the scale of the sequel), blockade Germany and its allies even AFTER the war on the justification that the war was not over until Berlin signed the peace treaty and recalled its holdouts in some of the still-occupied regions, used poison gas, smuggled war materials in neutrally-flagged ships, and (in the case of the Russian government) indulged in anti-semetic paranoia. Nobody descended to QUITE the level [[Those Wacky Nazis]] did, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|but the failure to prosecute war criminals after the war doubtless didn't discourage them.]]

* [[Harsher in Hindsight]]: Immediately after the war ended, many people were so disgusted by the scale of death and destruction that they declared that they had finally seen the worst humanity was capable of. [[World War Two|They]] [[Adolf Hitler|were]] [[Nazi Germany|wrong.]]

** [[Woodrow Wilson]], the President of the US and overseer of the Treaty of Versailles, was a fairly good-hearted man who genuinely tried to avert another such conflict and seriously attempted to make things better for countries... [[Values Dissonance|provided their populations were white]]. His racism and his purposeful creation of an imperfect schooling system (intended to create primarily staff for factories) are generally glossed over.

** Sir Douglas Haig, in one of his wiser moments, realised that the only way it could end well was if the same [[Imperial Germany]] which had started the war signed the armistice to end it; this proved not to be the case, and the job (and the blame) fell on the civilians.

* [[Historical Villain Upgrade]]: German Emperor Wilhelm II, in most portrayals from Allied countries.

** By extension, Germany as a whole, and to a lesser extent Austria and Russia, seem to get this treatment. For example referring to Germany's policy of creating dependent nations from the peoples of what had been the Russian empire as [[Those Wacky Nazis|"Lebensraum"]].

*** Problem with Russia is how do you figure 'Russian' death tolls as it was a multinational empire at the war's start and a different multinational dictatorship at the end. Do you count Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. deaths as Russian or not? It impacts the overall numbers.

** Less debatable is the Russian military equipment being pretty sub-par. Malnourished and ill equiped troops were the norm in that empire.

* [[Shell-Shocked Veteran]]: Practically ''every common footsoldier'' (though not only them). [[Trope Namer|The war itself was the actual originator of the term "shell shock"]].

* [[Shotguns Are Just Better]]: So much so that the Germans decided that anybody captured with one would be executed on the spot.

* The French film ''[[A Very Long Engagement]]'' is about Audrey Tatou's character's search for her fiancé who was lost and presumed dead in no man's land during the Battle of the Somme. We see [[WW 1]] told through some pretty graphic flashbacks of the other men he was stationed with.

* ''Zeppelin !'' 1970 Michael York film about a German plot to steal the British crown jewels using the eponymous zeppelin and featuring flying sequences using accurate reproductions of actual WWI aircraft.

* ''The Eagle and the Hawk'' - depressingly realistic B&W movie in which the hero becomes increasingly and profoundly disillusioned by the number of young pilots dying under his command, finally snapping when the enemy ace he kills turns out to be no more than a fuzzy-cheeked youth. Driven beyond the brink, he {{spoiler|kills himself. His best friend takes his body up in a two-seater and, using the rear gun, peppers the wings and the hero's head with bullets to make it appear as though he died in combat and thereby save his reputation.}}

* ''[[Paths of Glory]]'' with Kirk Douglas. Directed in the late 50s by a then young [[Stanley Kubrick]]. An example of [[Shot At Dawn]]. And possibly one of the best war dramas ever filmed...

* An episode of ''[[Fantasy Island]]'' featured [[Don Adams]] (in complete Maxwell Smart mode) as a bumbling school teacher who wants to visit WWI and ends up fighting the [[Red Barron]].

* A large portion of the immediate [[Backstory]] to ''[[Carnivale]]'' is set in the trenches, and it's [[Aborted Arc|heavily implied]] that the [[Balance Between Good and Evil|machinations]] of the [[Family Feud|two Avatara]] were major factors in causing this and other conflicts.

* The ''[[Torchwood (TV)|Torchwood]]'' episode "To the Last Man" has a World War I veteran snatched away by Torchwood in order to fix two timelines colliding with one another. At the end of the episode after returning to the war, [[Downer Ending|he gets shot for cowardice and shell-shock in the war]].

* Colonel Potter on ''[[M*A*S*H (TV)|Mash]]'' fought in World War One after lying about his age at 16 in order to get in the Army.

* ''[[Victoria an Empire Under The Sun]]'' features World War One technology in its later stages and the possibility to spark the war, [[Alternate History|create an alternate version of it... or avert it altogether]].

* Many pan-historical [[RTS]] games, like ''[[Rise of Nations]]'' or the ''[[Empire Earth]]'' series, have a historical era based on WWI, complete with typical military units of the period.

* The chapter "The War to End All Wars..." in ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' is set in Amiens, France during this conflict.

* ''[[Clive Barkers Undying]]'' is set immediately after the war. The protagonist, Patrick Galloway, is a veteran from one of the Irish regiments on the western front.

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[[Category:World War One]]