r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/MaximumFlow7491 6h ago edited 6h ago

yeah, 70% of all French military aged males were killed or wounded in WWI

to put things in perspective: imagine the bros you went to high school with, now imagine the vast majority of them dying or maimed in a period of 4 years

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u/Tim-oBedlam 6h ago

The other statistic that I recall about France in WW1: they had approximately 1.4 million killed in action.

That is roughly equal to ALL USA war dead in our ENTIRE history going back to colonial times, counting both sides of the American Civil War. In four years.

Most of USA war deaths were the Civil War (750,000, more or less), and WW2 (a bit over 400,000).

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u/GrumpyFalstaff 4h ago

Holy shit, that's an insane statistic. Did not know that thanks

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u/nikogrande 4h ago

If you’re any sort of history buff at all, I cannot recommend enough Blueprint for Armageddon from Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. No story of any war anywhere has gripped my soul like that one…. Note: it’s 24 hours long

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u/cairdeas 2h ago

Any recommendations on where to listen to it? 13 years old now and it doesn't look like it's on the show's feed anymore.

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u/Doikor 2h ago

You can buy his older stuff from his website

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/

There is also a bundle with all his hardcore history episodes for $100 there.

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u/cairdeas 2h ago

Thank you!

I'll also add a recommendation for "The War that Ended Peace" by Margaret MacMillan, which also takes a pretty long road to the great war.

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u/Beachsbcrazy 1h ago

There’s a channel on Spotify called This Too Shall Pass that has the full series

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u/komstock 24m ago

Blueprint for Armageddon made me hate war in a way I never thought I'd be capable of. I listened to it in my early 20s and I realized all of the men who were being blown up for...next to nothing were all men just like me with my same capacity for interiority and my same capacity to feel and my same capacity to love.

People talk all the time about all kinds of conflict. People say 'never again' about a lot of events. WWI is the top of my 'never again' list.

Never has there been such an utter waste of humanity that caused such permanent destruction. Every other atrocity in the 20th century is tied to it.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

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u/turducken69420 2h ago

Around 4.5% of the French population was killed in the war. In the US Civil War it was 2% and that was counting both sides. Plus 2/3 of deaths in the civil war were from disease. World War I was the first was where more soldiers died from combat rather than disease.

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u/YoureInHereWithMe 1h ago

This is why I can’t stand it when people make jokes about the French being cowards when discussing WW2. They either have no idea of, or no empathy for, the massive sacrifice the French made to hold Germany back the first time around.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 39m ago

Exactly. Same here. There are still parts of France that are uninhabitable because of buried ordnance, over 100 years after the guns fell silent, and it may take another century to remove all the UXO. And that's notwithstanding the countless dead.

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u/massive_cock 3h ago

In a country of much more modest size and population. The utter scale.

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u/F1shermanIvan 1h ago

France had more people killed in Verdun than the USA lost in the entire war.

Mind you, Verdun lasted longer than American troops were in theatre.

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u/MaximumFlow7491 39m ago

This is out of a pre-war population of 40 million in Metropole France btw

some of the 1.4 million were colonial troops but vast majority were born in Metropolitan France. KIA+WIA combined for France was 5+ million. Which means that around 1/8 of the -entire population- of France were casualties of war. This a society where it was the norm for you to have lost close friends/relatives in the war.

To put that into perspective, 1/8 of today's US population would be ~43 -million- people.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 37m ago

That's almost incomprehensible. And like I said in an earlier comment even if you were one of the rare French men who came through the war unscathed, you saw first-hand the horrors of war and also probably lost a huge number of your friends.

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u/MaximumFlow7491 32m ago

yeah and it did contribute to why France surrendered so quickly in WWII

it was a society which decided that that the Third Republic wasn't worth defending when so many of their fathers, brothers, sons and friends had already died defending it 20+ years ago.

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u/Gnl_Winter 5h ago

And now imagine after that : the Spanish flu epidemic happens.

The world of 1914-1920 in western Europe is simply the most horrific time to be alive. The sheer amount of grief one had to live through is simply unfathomable.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 4h ago

Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR in 1939-1944 easily tops that

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u/Gnl_Winter 3h ago

I was being hyperbolic, not literal. Otherwise we can do a contest of all the horrific times and places to be alive and Chinese history is gonna enter the chat pretty quick.

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u/SofieTerleska 2h ago

The Black Death and the Plague of Justinian would have a pretty solid case as well.

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u/laxrippe 3h ago

I was gonna comment in the same spirit as Gnl_Winter - it is not wrong to say it was a horrific time (it absolutely was and your point stands), but it's sadly not hard to find even worse points in space and time to be in.

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u/REDDITATO_ 3h ago

Io in 80,000bc being the obvious WOAT. Damn Jupes.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Excellent point.

Chinese history, which I don't know very well, is fascinating. You have long periods of stability and prosperity when you get a well-run dynasty, then these savage civil wars/periods of anarchy when the dynasty collapses.

I think most of the "bloodiest wars in history" pre-1800, save the Mongol conquests, are Chinese simply because they had the largest population.

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u/InfluenceAutomatic95 3m ago

Eastern Europe from around 1800 - 1945 was generally a terrible place to live. Mass genocide and massacres almost every decade. Double so if Jewish.

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u/Ok_Historian_1066 1h ago

The Black Death would like a word with you.

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u/KaraAliasRaidra 3h ago

That reminds me of the 1930 film version of All Quiet on the Western Front (which I was not expecting to be that graphic 🙀. That's what happens when you watch a movie made before the Hays Code!).

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u/TheBookfinder 1h ago

In some villages, it's the entire fighting age male population that got wiped out. There were kids, elderly, women, and a gaping hole in the middle, all dead, no survivors.

When WW2 started, in a large city you could still hardly come out of your house to go to work or for a stroll or whatever without coming across WW1 vétéran invalids everywhere, missing limbs or whatever.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 31m ago

The French called the generation of kids born in the 1910s the "hollow class" because there were so few of them, because all of the potential fathers were off in the war and a huge percentage of them never came back. That lasted a generation, as there were fewer kids born in the 1930s because there just weren't many men around to father children.

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u/trilobyte-dev 1h ago

Not arguing but enhancing your comment because it’s worse than that. Imagine you have a group of 10 great friends in high school, and 10 years later you are lucky enough to be one of the three still alive.

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u/bulbaquil 24m ago

Better yet, if you happen to have your high school yearbook around, put an X beside every third boy in your class. They died in the war. See how many X's there are just on the first page. See how many of them are people you personally knew.