In January 1914, the most prosperous and progressive European states — Great Britain, naval hegemon of the world and leader of a world-wide Commonwealth; the German nation, newly united and prosperous, thanks to her growing industrial power; France, elegant, sophisticated, beyond her 19th century mis-adventures; Italy, also newly united and struggling to catch up with the other major powers; Austria-Hungary, central Europe’s surviving monarchy from the Renaissance; and many other smaller states as well — would choose sides and go to war. Collectively, they made a series of colossal diplomatic miscalculations and unintentionally fell into a cataclysmic and world-changing conflict that neither side could either prevent or, in fact, win. No one expected such a war to have a chance of beginning in Europe! It was literally a mind-numbing event.
Americans called it "The World War" through the first part of the 20th century, reflecting the vast scope of the action: naval engagements in both great oceans and battles in Europe, Asia and Africa, with dozens of nations involved, including even the Empire of Japan. Later, Americans would refer to it as "World War I," since it led to a second great conflict to determine the hegemony of the European continent.
The special irony of the two 20th century world wars in Europe was the result: After 1945, Europe was no longer the center of world power and influence. In 1914, no leaders in Europe could see this outcome; if they could have, they would have solved the initiating event in Serbia very readily. But, by 1946, the hegemonies of Europe were not European. Rather, an entirely new order to world affairs resulted. Initially, power was divided between the eastern Euro-Asian superpower of the USSR and the great hegemony of the West, the United States. And then, by playing our hand skillfully through the Cold War, the U.S. emerged as the world’s single super-power, literally bankrupting the Communist regime in Russia in the 1980s.
But Great Britain and her Commonwealth partners still call it ‘The Great War.’ It has left an indelible mark on other Europeans as well. The British-Commonwealth death toll reached 1.2 million men, the greatest death-toll of any of her many wars; most of them were lost in the muddy morass of the Western Front where the great armies of France and Great Britain faced the Central Powers of Germany and Austria. German casualties were in the millions; France literally lost 10 percent of her total population; it was a "great war!"
The armies fought to a vicious military draw in the West, behind massive trench fortifications, bristling artillery batteries and machine-gun emplacements. This was truly industrialized war; these fortifications defied the offensive efforts such as the British attack launched on the Somme River sector in July 1916, when the Commonwealth forces lost an estimated 60,000 men on the very first day of that battle. The Germans had an equal disaster at Verdun, where French and German combined casualties exceeded 2 million men. The blatant idiocy of infantry on foot sent charging into massed machine guns across the "no man’s land" between the lines was apparent to anyone, one might think.
But the Allied generals, both French and British, would launch many more equally idiotic attacks in the two years that followed, and they were joined by the German generals sending their troops charging in the other direction into Allied defenses. Eventually, the British tried to use mechanized tanks to break the German lines but were stymied by their poor mechanical performance; the Germans would develop poison gas tactics and then storm trooper tactics that used stealthy night attacks to bypass strong points and hit supply and support troops behind the front; all these efforts had only limited success.
Ultimately, neither side could break the strategic impasse. This reality was finally admitted by both sides, having fought to an agonizing impasse, all the original nations being bankrupt and close to political collapse, even starvation – and an armistice was signed in November 1918.
The two sides had fired 1.4 billion artillery shells at each other, literally churning the landscape into a impossible and impassable mish-mash of earth, barbwire, great holes and fractured body parts of the soldiers that died by the millions through the four-year stand-off. Tens of thousands died on a daily basis when attacking, yet barely gained any territory at all, much less a telling military advantage. Never was war more futile than the Western Front from 1915 to 1918.
The battles in the East – between the Central Powers of Austria and Germany and the Russian monarchy – were more fluid, yet equally indecisive. Finally the Bolsheviks seized power within Russia, ending the thousand-year monarchy; the Communists sued for peace independently of Russia’s Allies in order to consolidate their political gains and build a Communist state.
This Great War serves as the marker event between the progressive and optimistic 19th century, a period of growth of economic prosperity and liberalizing governments in Europe, when people believed that humanism could bring a wonderful New Era to the world. But human effort had failed spectacularly! A grim deterministic materialism took over peoples’ expectations. After the Great War, people no longer expected things to get better automatically.
Rather, they desperately hoped they would get no worse. But things did get much worse: The disastrous diplomatic settlement of the war, which attempted to end German ability to wage a future war instead created an environment that spawned the twisted, evil regime of Adolph Hitler and his Nazis in Germany. Hitler’s action brought an even more disastrous war, taking upward of 60 million military and civilian casualties between 1939 and 1945, including production-line murder of minorities in German-controlled territories.
The Economist magazine recently marked this "Great War," which began a century ago, with these words: “The events scheduled ... may perhaps end a 100-year haunting ... (of European sensibilities). Until recently, old men still lived, whose eyes, milky with cataracts, had seen the battlefields of the Great War and whose quavering voices could still describe them ... The Great War came to signify lives wasted to no purpose; in that, it has no rival. This was the war after which there were meant to be no more wars; each subsequent war, therefore, was a betrayal of those who had died in it, a sign that the world had not, after all, honored their sacrifice. After 2014, when the world fulsomely tries to make it up to them, the uniformed ghosts may begin to be gently shaken off.
“One hundred years may ... be long enough to mourn.”
I certainly hope so ... but the lesson to be learned is this: Wars can be so easily started; wars will exact terrible tolls as they grind on; wars are difficult to end, and there is even greater difficulty in their lasting resolution; and that history is full of cycles of warfare, where one follows another. If the world could only learn such lessons, then in one small way, the immense sacrifices of The Great War might be justified.
