The Great War

The blood stained uniform of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tomorrow marks the centennial of the terrorist act that caused the crisis that started the First World War, until 1939 known simply as the Great War or the World War.  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary, together with his wife Sofie, was gunned down in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist Gavril Princip with the connivance of the Serbian government.  Decades worth of tangled alliances, imperial competition, secret military planning, rising nationalist passions, arms races, provocations, and blundered diplomacy collapsed like a house of cards within weeks of the assassination.  By August 1914, most of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa were at war.

The First World War is barely remembered in the USA, probably because we entered the war so late and were in it very briefly, hardly a year in 1918.  And yet, within that brief span of time, the USA lost over 50,000 soldiers in combat, an alarmingly high number for so short a time.  Now, war memorials across the USA which stood decaying for decades are being refurbished and restored for the First World War centennial.

The World War I memorial in Saint Louis, Missouri

The First World War a century later is still a fresh open wound and a source of fierce contention in Europe and the Middle East.  We Yanks tend to forget that most of the crises that we face today in the Middle East and in Europe are direct consequences of the First World War; its lingering aftermath is like radioactive fallout.  The countries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Palestine (and ultimately Israel) are all creations out of the First World War.  The victorious Allies in 1919 drew arbitrary borders through the remains of the defunct Ottoman Empire setting the stage for all the crises that have happened there since, including the Sunni versus Shiite war that we are witnessing now in Syria and Iraq that threatens to undo both of those countries.  The Islamist extremists' dream of a reborn universal Caliphate would make no sense outside the legacy of the First World War.
Likewise, the map of central and eastern Europe is a creation of the First World War, out of the remains of the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the Balkan states are legacies of the Great War.
Vladimir Putin's ambitions, and the anxiety that they are causing throughout eastern Europe are consequences of the First World War.  It was the First World War and the map of Europe that it created that set the stage for the even bigger and more consequential Second World War and its long legacy.

It is hard for us now to recall what the War was like for the people who lived through it a century ago, what a shock it was to them.  Its length, destructiveness, and death toll were a horrible surprise for just about everyone.  It's hard for us to imagine that sense of the world transformed-- an old world destroyed and an unknown new one rising out of the ashes -- that people lived through back then.  The First World War was our first experience of mass industrialized warfare, of total war in which entire economies, societies, and populations were mobilized for the war effort.  For the first time ever, the majority of deaths in war were from combat and not from disease or accident.  For the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, death tolls were in the millions, and in the First World War casualties were in the tens of millions for the first time ever.  An entire generation of young men was decimated in the war.  These new and unprecedented experiences shocked and horrified people.  That horror and revulsion brought down empires that everyone assumed would always last:  the 500 year old Russian Empire and its 300 year long Romanov dynasty; the 500 year old Hapsburg dynasty that ruled Austria-Hungary; the 700 year old Ottoman Empire whose sultan was the last ruler of almost all of the Middle East to claim the title of Caliph of All the Faithful.  Those ancient empires are now gone forever.

Australian recruitment poster

German recruitment poster

People on all sides across the board greeted the outbreak of the War with almost joyous enthusiasm.   Thinkers as different as Filippo Marinetti and Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the coming of the War as a necessary redemption by fire of a Western world grown soft and decadent from too much peace.   Roosevelt saw the War as an opportunity to recover a somehow threatened sense of "manhood" and historical purpose.  By the end of the War in 1918, Theodore Roosevelt was inconsolable over the death of his youngest son Quentin in combat in France.  He died the following year.

The recruitment posters during the War were aggressive with appeals to duty and patriotism and featured lots of fingers pointing right at us.

James Montgomery Flagg's famous recruitment poster for the US military in World War I

British recruitment poster

Italian recruitment poster

In the opening days of the War, people responded enthusiastically on all sides, almost joyfully.  People saw the War as a great big football match that no one expected to last beyond Christmas of 1914.  All expected their countries to emerge victorious, and young men dreamed of glory and adventure and returning home sporting a glamorous saber scar across the cheek.

French reservists reporting for duty, Paris, 1914

French soldiers in Avignon marching off to the front in September, 1914, from a postcard sent by Picasso to Gertrude Stein

A German recruitment rally, Berlin, 1914

German recruits reporting for duty, Berlin 1914

German soldiers off to the front in 1914; graffiti on the train reads "Express to Paris" and "See you again on the Boulevard!"



And what did soldiers find once they reached the front lines?  All sides had strategies for lightning attack and aggressive offense to decide the war quickly.  Despite those plans (or maybe because of them) the War quickly bogged down in stalemate and a long grinding war of attrition.  Soldiers arrived to find not glorious attack, but the horrors of trench warfare.

British soldiers, Arras, 1915

Wounded British soldiers with German prisoners of war, Bernafay Wood, 1916

A British tank coming over a German trench

The First World War was the first to see tanks used in combat.  They were introduced in an attempt to break the stalemate of trench warfare.  Tanks didn't appear until late in the War and broke down too frequently to be decisive.  But they would decide many a battle in the Second World War and in many later wars in the Middle East.

Austrian Uhlans, 1915

The First World War was the last major war to see extensive use of horses.  In earlier wars, few things were more feared than the cavalry charge.  Those charges meant little against the large artillery used in the First World War, and especially against machine gun fire.  See the photograph below for the damage those weapons could do to the surrounding landscape.

American soldiers in the Argonne Forest, 1918

World War I was the first to see the brand new technology of airplanes used in warfare.  Planes were mostly used for reconnaissance and battlefield surveillance.  Occasionally, they would strafe a battlefield with machine gun fire.  They were too small and flimsy to be effective for any kind of large scale aerial bombardment.  That was mostly left to large, slow-moving, and very vulnerable dirigibles that usually attacked at night.

British planes over France

British air ace Major Edward Mannock

Ironically, it was this brand new modern-as-tomorrow technology of air war which brought to the First World War a small and rare manifestation of very old fashioned man-to-man combat.  The battles of the air aces meant little to the outcome of the War or to particular battles, but the courage and daring of these battles thrilled the public on all sides of the War.  However, this new and little tested technology was full of hazards that took their toll on pilots.  Above is the dashingly handsome young Irishman Edward Mannock, the most decorated and highest scoring British air ace.  The strain of these battles took their toll on young Mannock who by 1918 was frequently physically ill from anxiety before assignments.  He suffered from shaking hands and occasional outbursts of tearful panic.  He was terrified of burning to death in a falling plane, and that's exactly what happened to him in 1918 when he was shot down by ground fire over France.

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The First World War saw the first use of chemical weapons in battle, usually tear gas and mustard gas, but also deadly ammonia gas.  Men were sprayed with deadly chemicals and killed en masse like cockroaches.

British soldiers blinded in a gas attack in Belgium

Canadian soldier suffering from injuries in a mustard gas attack in 1917

Whether from gas or gunfire, the death toll in the First World War was unprecedented.  Millions of soldiers died on all sides.  There was not a single family in France that did not suffer at least one war casualty.  By 1916, inflicting the maximum casualties possible became a battle aim.  At the Battle of Verdun, German generals wanted to weaken the French by inflicting as many casualties as possible.  The whole aim of the attack was to kill French soldiers.  Over a million died in the battle of Verdun.
Since governments on all sides heavily censored battle reporting, there are comparatively few photographs of the dead from the First World War.  Soldiers' and reporters' accounts of battlefields covered in corpses remain unphotographed.

German soldiers burying British and Australian war dead.

Corpse of a German soldier

The heavy fire power of the War altered landscapes.  Miles of countryside in northern France and in Belgium were dug over by high explosives to a depth of 10 feet.

Remains of a forest outside Ypres, Belgium, 1918

The Belgian countryside outside of Ypres, Belgium, 1918

By 1917, the suffering and destruction of the war caused many soldiers to seriously reconsider what sent them to the battlefield in the first place.  Desertion rates were high among armies on all sides.  Open mutiny began to breakout among soldiers throughout the War.  An entire division of the French army threatened to march on Paris if peace talks did not begin.  The whole Russian army walked off the front in the winter of 1917 and began marching home.  Soldiers murdered the officers who tried to stop them.  This disintegration of the Russian army lead to the abdication of the Tsar.  Disillusionment with the War created a loyal constituency for the Bolsheviks among the military rank and file.  They eagerly provided the manpower for the coup which brought down the Provisional Government and took Russia out of the War.
The German Empire would be brought down by a combination of soldiers' mutiny and labor uprising in the summer of 1918, the Spartacus Uprising, leaving a shaky new Weimar Republic to sue for peace.

Russian soldiers protesting in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) in April, 1917

Disabled German veterans marching in protest in Berlin in December 1918, shortly after the conclusion of the War



The War finally ended in 1918.  General Erich Ludendorff who effectively ruled Germany from the front, saw that the war could not be won and for all intents and purposes ordered the Kaiser to abdicate. He ordered the long marginalized German Social Democrats to form a new republican government (in the hopes of good terms from the Allies and to head off growing revolt in the military rank and file and among German workers).  German delegates showed up at Compiegne expecting to negotiate peace and instead were presented with an ultimatum to surrender unconditionally by the Allies.  The fragile new German Republic was in no position to resist the terms.


The Allies decided that they won the War, and celebrated.

Americans celebrating the Armistice, New York, November, 1918

Things were very different for the designated losers.

Disabled German veteran begging in Berlin, 1918

And today:

The shell-cratered battlefield of Verdun today

The Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium today; the walls of the memorial are covered with the names of British soldiers whose remains were never recovered.

I have an old friend who is a historian who says that all the people wringing their hands over the decline of Western civilization are wasting their time.  He says that it is already over, and has been over since August 1914.  Some argue that the 20th century really began with the First World War.  Hannah Arendt said that the thread of continuity through all of Western history broke in the War.  The War began ambiguously and it ended ambiguously.  But there is no mystery about its terrible and unprecedented cost, and about the impact it continues to have on our own history today.  We are still very much living in the world created by that War.

The French military cemetery at Verdun

The Langemarck German military cemetery near Ypres

I doubt that there are many war memorials in the USA that still draw emotional crowds like the Menin Gate in Ypres where the local fire department buglers play The Last Post every evening, and have done so every day since 1918 except for the years of German occupation from 1940 to 1945.  Even now, a century later, the First World War remains an open wound in Europe.






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.

--Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (tip of the tin hat to JCF)



And in the end, I have to agree with Ernest Hemingway:

“(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”