Of War and Cars

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. My Father's older cousin died in that conflict, along with another 9.5 million soldiers and 10 million civilians. The "war to end all wars" did not of course end all wars, and sadly, this horrendous show of man's callous inhumanity is quickly fading into the past.

If you look at the scratchy, grainy movies and photographs of that conflict you may be struck by the fact that there are horses and carriages used to transport man and materials, and most men appear to be on foot. It was the conflict that saw the invention of the tank and armoured car (the latter supplied, for the British by none other than Rolls Royce! The British have always had class). Toward the end of the war, trucks and motorized ambulances were used.

The problem with motorized vehicles of course, was the terrain. Muddy fields and rough terrain are not really suited to heavy, underpowered, wheeled vehicles. The early tanks themselves had difficulty in the ubiquitous mud and steep bomb craters.

After the War, people widely believed that the automobile was here to stay. Henry Ford had been cranking out the Model T since 1909, but in Europe, it was still regarded as a rich man's oddity until thousands if not millions had had the chance to actually ride in one. It is hard to imagine the astonishment of a young French farmhand recruit, accustomed at most to a horse-drawn cart, first riding in a vehicle that had springs and required nothing more than a few cranks of a handle to get going at a speed much faster than he or any of his ancestors had been in their lifetime.

In less than a century, the automobile has given billions of people a mobility and independence that their grandparents could not imagine. Today, suburbia would be an impossibility with out the internal combustion engine (or as Churchill famously called it, "The infernal combustion engine").

If ever there was a silver lining to the most terrible of obscene tragedies, perhaps the development and acceptance of the automobile and its liberating effect on humanity, might qualify.