![]() Hard-nosed coaches egged their players to keep crashing into each other until someone could come out ahead. For years the game was even defined by “three yards and a cloud of dust” offensive strategies in which gains and progress were hard to discern from a distance. Each team gets an equal number of players that they tend to concentrate at the line of scrimmage. We replay the madness with low stakes in American football. The modern western world died in the mud and trenches in France and was replaced by a more cynical and skeptical post-modern society. The consequence of these forces of history all coming to bear was over 10 million dead soldiers, another 21 million injured, and nearly eight million dead civilians. The generals were working out how to solve the dilemmas of trench warfare in live time during the biggest and most encompassing war in history. One stirring scene includes the hero trying to ascertain the location of the commanding officer from a captain in the attacking unit, who’s unable to get anything productive out as he sobs uncontrollably while sending his men “over the top.”Ĭonditions were miserable and casualties were worse. The horror of it all was amazingly well captured in the recent movie “1917” which features a British soldier desperately trying to stop an open field assault. Massing hundreds of thousands of men couldn’t make a difference against opposing rifles and artillery and the conflict alternated between periods of men gunning each other down in droves in the open field or else digging down and holing up across from each other. When the ability to muster and field massive armies was combined with the rapidly increasing developments in firepower that were out-pacing evolution in tactics you had the main ingredients for the catastrophe of trench warfare. It was a relatively recent phenomenon for the full power of the French state to be harnessed on a battlefield and something that hadn’t been seen consistently in Europe since Rome. The ability to mass enormous armies of ten and hundreds of thousands of men was a product of the creation of the modern state and nationalism. Years of advancements in firearms and weapons technology had resulted in modern militaries developing the ability to mass both firepower and man power in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous engagements, save for some foreshadowing in the American Civil War. WWI was dominated by trench warfare, with millions of men deployed in lines across from each other. World War I, or the “Great War,” was one of the most cataclysmic events in human history and a precursor to World War II which built upon that foundation of disaster. One of the more bizarre and interesting dimensions to the game of football is the way that it recreates the challenges of one of the worst wars in human history.
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