Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. Begun four years earlier with patriotic zeal, it ended in bleak exhaustion, having turned Europe into a charnel house.
As Ezra Pound wrote in the aftermath,
They “walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits…”
The conflict now stands as one of history’s great cautionary tales. Out of dynastic bickering, economic competition, hubris, vanity, miscalculation, cluelessness and pigheadedness came 20 million dead and 20 million more wounded, not to mention another 50 million dead due to the 1918 influenza pandemic that the conditions in the tenches and the movement of millions of troops helped spread.
People of my generation are just old enough to have known a few veterans of that war or people with a memory of it. My grandfather’s brother Leo died in France of disease, probably the flu. My wife had a relative who was a victim of mustard gas and had respiratory ills for the rest of his life. A friend of my grandmother’s served and gave me, forty years after the war, a set of unreadable books about the war in decorative bindings.
After the war, it was as if some giant hand had swept all the pieces from a chessboard. Nothing was ever the same again. Dynasty’s fell and empires vanished, in the Russian Revolution and the fragmenting of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The colonies of Europe began to resist their systematic subjugation.
A whole generation of young men were dead or maimed. Probably for the last time in history, the sons of the upper classes led the charge into battle and were wiped out. A British debutante who was sixteen at the start of the war said afterward that every boy she had ever danced with was dead a few years later.
Immense pressure from the working classes, who had been treated cavalierly as cannon fodder, was exerted to insist on a more equitable society. Yet instead of this popular anger and demand for change producing a more democratic and just society, the result was the rise of more virulent tyrannies — Communism, Fascism, Nazism — and soon the stage was set for an even worse bloodbath, beginning a scant twenty years later.
The Great War was innovative not just in the scale of its killing, but in its means. Death by high explosives lobbed from miles away, death in trenches by sniper and machine gun, death by tank warfare and from the air, chemical warfare. Industrial, mechanized, motorized war that enlisted entire economies and cared little for civilian carnage. About half of all the dead were non-combatants, ten million women, children, shopkeepers, farmers, innocent bystanders.
The fighting was also accompanied by, enabled by, elaborate state propaganda efforts to misrepresent one side’s success and the other side’s evil. At the beginning, Germans invading neutral Belgium were depicted as bayoneting babies. The war produced a legacy of blame, aided by this miasma of falsehood.
At the end, when the German military saw the war was lost and signed the armistice, propagandists concocted the myth that the victorious, undefeated troops were stabbed in the back by weak-willed civilians, which Hitler weaponized by scapegoating greedy traitorous, Jewish bankers. In Russia, the villains were the Romanovs, the ruling class and the capitalists. In Britain, the first Labour government came to power in the 1920s.
We still live with the fallout geopolitically, but also in these techniques of propaganda and fear mongering to gain power, to keep it, and to illegitimate one’s opponents. We still see the careless use of military power, the playing of zero sum games, the lack of foresight that supposes saber rattling can be employed without risking death and destruction, or that escalating carnage through the use of military superiority has no downside and can solve all problems. Yet Korea, Vietnam and our most recent quagmire (now longer than four World Wars combined) say otherwise.
Luckily, nuclear weapons have only been used twice, but if World War I teaches anything, it is that arrogance and folly are likely to trump caution and rationality at any time, with consequences too horrible to contemplate and impossible to undo.
Analysts suggest that one Hiroshima—size atom bomb delivered on Mumbai would kill 870,000 people in the first weeks. A full thermonuclear exchange between Russia and the United States could kill 100 million in minutes, the equivalent of ten simultaneous World Wars, and poison the planet irredeemably.
Do we believe Putin, Trump, Xi, Kim, Netanyahu and whoever in Pakistan has his finger on the trigger today are more trustworthy than the Kaiser, the Czar, and the rest of the crowned heads of 1914? They played with fire and it destroyed their society. Something far worse is only a temper tantrum and a push button away today.
Visit any small town in England, France or Germany and the World War I monuments on the town square list the names of the locals who marched away and never came back, column after column of the fallen. After a nuclear war, the ground would be too toxic for monuments. None large enough to contain so many names could be constructed, and the survivors would envy the dead.
In the past one hundred bloody years have we learned enough to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1914? I doubt if Wilfred Owen, who died in France at 25 during one of the last actions of the war, a week before the Armistice, would think so. Here is one of his snapshots from the war to end all wars, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Notes:
Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”