Stalemate

What a great word!

Stalemate:  (a) The situation in chess when the game ends because neither player can make a legal move or win the game and/or (b) The situation in which progress is impossible because the people or groups cannot agree.

Both definitions apply but when did the master planners - the great and not so great generals, politicians, civil servant, journalists arrive at the conclusion that the war had reached a condition of  stalemate. With chess the stalemate is reached when movement from one position on the board to an adjacent position cannot bring the game to an end and the players call a stalemate.

The pawns of war once it becomes a stalemate are then involved in attrition because nothing else will work. The daily grind is bombardment, keeping your head down below the parapet of the trench, waiting and waiting for orders to get up over the top of the trench and then running like madmen across no-mans land towards the enemy trench with the fear of god in you but never showing it because the fear of your fellow man's unkindness towards such weakness is worse. Better to die a hero with nobody to know just how afraid you really felt before being cut down by machine gun fire or worse being blown apart, to little smithereens of tissue, bone, blood, gore. The bits of men interlinked, intertwined forever on the bloody fields of France. The honour of being buried beside your fallen  comrades and former enemies as even these become your friends in death - one important aspect of friendship being the sharing of experiences even one such as death. Imagine consummation of  friendship being the killing of an enemy and then forever lying together in hallowed ground where your story is told endlessly in books, films, memoirs, regimental diaries  as if this is an achievement that was wanted by those men.

The whole concept of stalemate to me generates feelings of dismay something which I am sure that many of the participants felt when standing in the cold wet trenches of France. Where action was mostly inaction, where action was a sudden adrenaline fueled rush towards death of the young men of the world leaving so many behind to mourn the loss and then having the problem of keeping their memory alive within ourselves. Clearly when the stalemate set in there was an opportunity for the politicians and diplomats on all sides to confer and resolve the problem without the massive loss of life that invariably was to accompany continued military action.  A state of siege  on both sides existed. This was different from the typical siege pattern where one party is enclosed, trapped, cut off from supplies, cut off from reinforcements. In fact both parties had excellent supply lines, great number of skilled and unskilled workers, access to production machinery, rail transport and of course a vast number of pawns to ensure that stalemate could continue.  Heavy artillery pumping large explosive shells with range accurately calculated to land in the killing zone only to ensure that the stalemate continued at great loss to the stability of minds, the creation of new disorders such as post-traumatic stress considered to be a reason to being shot at dawn for display of cowardice (illness or what). More and more attrition as even your own officers considered you a coward for being mentally affected. Better to execute a few to keep the rest "sane". Ensure the men continued to fight the horrible war of attrition where the enemy was largely out of sight. Hey what are we shooting at but we do not dare  show our face as we will surely die from the bullets of the unseen enemy.  

What must the war of attrition have felt like? The days must have been unending in the cold and wet trenches with nothing but men and rats to keep you company. Letter writing to loved ones, getting letters from loved ones, smoking cigarettes and eating rations such as bully beef, suffering from trench foot etc.

Stalemate a simple word to understand but shame on those planners, political and military, who on both sides failed to recognize that stalemate means the end of the game as in chess and that where real pawns are involved with death on a large scale being the foreseeable outcome while the futile attempts to force a breakthrough were continued. It must have been obvious to all intelligent strategists that stalemate brought about by the clashing of equal forces can only be ended by negotiation but as nobody wanted to lose or be seen to give way to any degree such a path would be a lonely furrow to travel. Better to clash heads for four years with massive loss of our young life so filled with promise, the complete change in the worlds balance of power, become indebted to the new world the effects of which are still felt today 100 years on  and finally becoming close friends with the German who despite the many atrocities committed by this nation in the Second World War have now become the staunch supporter and implementer of a safe world order. Good luck to them although I still feel the loss of life was not worth it when strategic negotiation at stalemate stage should have been the order of the day. Aggression denigrating to Stalemate and onto Attrition with no end in sight!!!

Men in each grave lying stilled

Would have given so much

to have had their lives fulfilled 

to live the natural order

the mothers, wives and children

all lost beyond reason

 because of stalemate and attrition

during the great war of 1914

Each say a prayer of benediction

and rightly so at the close of worship 

to these lost men who died for so many

never forgotten soldiers known onto our god.  

 Stephen Mooney 2015