Thought you’d like to know.

WWI really had the most scarring effect on Britain. Last time I visited there it was November and we were in London on 11/11. Walking through the gardens around Westminster and seeing the thousands of red poppies and crosses with names of the dead was a profoundly moving experience.

I’ve also been someone disappointed by Season 3 (loved the Shakespeare episode though). I had kind of a love-hate
reaction to Human Nature/Family of Blood. But the parts I loved, I loved quite a bit.

And I’m almost too old to have David Tennant’s baby. ;-> Besides, Jim might object.

Oh - if you get BBC America, the Graham Norton Show tonight (10pm EDT) is with David Tennant! It was quite hysterical; it was filmed back in about March and it’s been cut up on and YouTube for months. Absolutely worth watching.

– true, although this is to a large degree because of the distribution of the casualties, rather than their numbers.

(My grandfather was gassed on the Western Front, btw.)

Loss of life and limb was directly proportional to class and educational standing.

The richer your family and the more education you had, the worse your chance of escaping alive — because the likelier you were to volunteer, to pass the qualifying physical, and to end up in the most dangerous combat job, which was junior infantry officer — my grandfather was a subaltern. But even being a general was risky; 75 were killed in the course of the war.

The absolutely worst thing you could be was the young son of a Duke attending Oxford in 1914, statistically speaking. That young man was toast.

Conversely, the very poor had the best chance of not getting killed — they were more likely to flunk even the most lax physicals, due to malnutrition and poor health — with the working classes in between. Children of landowners were twice as likely to get killed as children of coal miners.

Hence the most articulate and influential families took the most gruesome losses, and were most psychologically affected.

And they, of course, were disproportionately influential in the general culture; they were the ones who wrote and bought books and plays and so forth.

Actually I’m too old to have his baby, and, in the interest of full disclousure, I never wanted babies, but I still think Tennant’s hot and adorable which is not an easy combination to pull off.

My half-Cherokee grandfather was in WWI too, but being an American he didn’t face the horror of the trenches for very long. I have some of the souveniers he brought back from Paris for my grandmother, and a picture of him in his uniform.

Graham Norton’s show is on erratically, but you might be able to catch this episode again.

[[TMI, but, I keep getting promised menopause, and it just isn’t coming fast enough!!]]

Steve, I hadn’t really thought of the English upper class being disproportionally killed off in WWI, but what you say makes sense. I read “Tolkien and the Great War” a few years back, which implies some of what you said.

– yeah, he was a classic example. I read a good study on it recently, “The Great War and the British People”, by J.M. Winter, which had very interesting stats.

If you were from Tolkien’s social background and of his age group, something like 1/3 to 1/2 of your contemporariers would have been killed or badly wounded, often horribly mutilated or suffering from “shell shock” (we call it PTSD) for the rest of their lives.

Also, of course, the hellish conditions in the trenches were more of a shock to someone from the Edwardian middle/upper classes than they were (for example), for a kid from Gorbals (Glasgow’s notorious slum district).

One of them later became a writer, and commented that he was used to lice, had lived with his parents and 8 siblings in one basement room that flooded with backed-up sewage regularly, and that all in all he found a trench dugout to be rather homelike.

And that he hadn’t understood why everyone complaind about the Army food — it was better and more abundant than what he’d gotten in peacetime.

He did say that there were more bodies lying around in the Ypres salient than he was used to, and that even a Gorbals Protestant-Catholic Saturday-night shindy or a gang fight didn’t involve heavy artillery, though it was sort of like a trench raid — the weapons of choice among Gorbals dwellers before 1914 were the straight-razor and the lead-shot-filled cosh.