Charlie Stross gets a mit annoyed with David Cameron wanting to turn the Great War into another feel good British kneesup like the Diamond Jubilee and tells him what the war was really like:
If you’d been 16 in 1914, then of your class at Eton probably 4-6 would have died (Eton boys ended up as officers: the death rate among junior officers was double that among the non-commissioned ranks). Another 6-8 would have been wounded—faces burned off, arms and legs and spines shattered, lungs scarred by gas until they coughed themselves to death in middle years—these are not pretty injuries, duelling scars or badges of honour: these are vile blows that turn strong young men into lifelong cripples (the sort of people who these days fail their ATOS work assessments and are denied disability payments two weeks before they die of their condition: but I digress).
Cameron is of course the modern equivalent of the people who started and profited from World War I and it’s somewhat fitting that he would think so lightly of it, considering how callous his early 20th century counterparts were about the war.
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