A catastrophe that shaped a century
One hundred and one years on, how should we remember the First World War?
Photograph: Australian servicemen parade in London, 1916. Credit: Museums Victoria.
In the late summer of 1914, a British Major General called Alfred Knox found himself serving as a military attaché with the Russians in Poland. He was attached to the Second Army of Alexander Samsonov, a fifty-four-year-old general who had previously commanded the Tsar’s cavalry in Manchuria. As the great nations of Europe went to war, the mood on all sides was often of tenacity and jubilation. ‘You soldiers ought to be very pleased that we have arranged such a nice war for you’, an official at the Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg told Knox as Samsonov’s forces marched into German East Prussia. ‘We must wait and see whether it will be such a nice war after all’, he replied.
Within weeks, the Second Army of Russia was annihilated at what would later become known as the Battle of Tannenberg. Knox was sent away when the situation had become too desperate. As for Samsonov, the asthmatic general had to be carried by his staff as the group, lost in the dark woods, lit matches as they stumbled back towards the Polish frontier. For the general, the sheer humiliation was too great to bear. ‘The Emperor trusted me. How can I face him after such a disaster?’ Samsonov then pulled out a revolver and shot himself. It would take others much longer to grasp the grim realities of the Great European War.
That war, which we now call the First World War, came to an end one hundred and one years ago. Today, many chose to view the conflict in rather tragic terms. As its very name implies, the so-called ‘war to end all wars’ turned out to be a mere prologue to an infinitely bloodier sequel, and an industrial slaughterhouse of previously unimaginable proportions that many now find difficult to justify.
Who, after all, came to benefit? The brave Tommies who bled for king and country in the apocalyptic wastes of Flanders did not come home to a Britain fit for heroes, but a country rife with strikes and unemployment, her power shaken and her empire bankrupt. Many of these men would soon find themselves deployed on their own streets as the government struggled with social unrest. Others, unable to find work, accepted ten shillings and were sent to Ireland, where nationalists, many of whom had fought alongside them, now revolted against British rule.
Worse was the fate of the Kaiser’s men, who returned to a nation humiliated and ravaged by starvation. And the bloodshed, terror and famine was hardly over for the Russians, millions more of whom would die before Lenin and his Bolsheviks consolidated power. Only America, with its relatively few casualties and a territory completely untouched by the war, managed to emerge as a new and rising world power.
Yet we should not forget how, in that fateful summer of 1914, few viewed their predicament with dread and resignation. Instead, a wave of euphoria completely inconceivable today swept from London to Vladivostok. Millions of Brits signed up without as much as a hint. French recruiters even had to turn away some eager volunteers, so great were their numbers. Less than ten years since hundreds of peaceful protesters were gunned down in front of the Winter Palace, a quarter of a million Russians took to the streets of St Petersburg chanting ‘Long live the Tsar!’ Two and a half years later, they would gather again, this time to depose the failing autocrat.
For Europe’s leaders, the war was met with either cheer, relief, or simple fatalism. In Britain, the formerly pacifist Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, urged men to enlist while the Irish Nationalist, John Redmond, called on Catholics and Protestants to unite in the face of German aggression. German socialists, meanwhile, declared that class struggle was merely secondary to the upcoming clash of nations. Similar was the experience of Tsar Nicholas, as his opponents in the Duma, headed by Alexander Kerensky, gave him their full support.
Of course, we would be wise to avoid crass generalizations. There were plenty who resented the drive to war, yet they were the exception which proved the rule. Everywhere in Europe, citizens, intellectuals and politicians of all creeds rallied around the flag and cheered those on their way to the front, whether they marched for the King, the Tsar, the Kaiser or the Third Republic. Hindsight is indeed a powerful thing, and it might be tempting to judge the rush to war in 1914 as a jingoistic farce. However, we ought to recognize that people then had little understanding of the horrors of modern warfare, even though their illusions would be so violently shattered in the years to come. Ultimately, the cataclysm which subsequently unfolded was far more tragic when we consider the innocent exaltation which preceded it.
So how then, with all the wisdom and hindsight available to us today, should we remember the First World War? A necessary step would be to recognise its sheer scale and complexity. Naturally, most Britons still view the conflict through their own ancestors. They think of the flooded battlefields of Passchendaele, the Zeppelin raids on London and the cannon fodder of the Somme. Yet people from dozens of nationalities fought and perished in the war, on battlefields most today don’t even know existed.
Many of these soldiers: Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Bosnians and Croats, devoid of a nation to call their own, fought under foreign armies. In many cases, they didn’t have a choice. In others, they viewed their struggle as a path toward statehood and independence. Czech volunteers fought alongside the French, the Russians and even the Italians. After the war came to an end, many such nations sprung up in the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, only to be crushed by the Nazis, or the Soviets, or both.
Similarly, while we often remember the white Canadian and Anzac troops who fought for Britain, others are typically forgotten. One million Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani soldiers fought on three different fronts. The Anzacs at Gallipoli were joined by African troops, who constituted approximately one-third of the French contingent. Thousands of these Senegalese Tirailleurs died on that Turkish beach fighting fellow Muslims and were highly renowned for their courage in the battle. Why don’t we hear about these men anywhere near as much as we do about the Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders? Part of the explanation surely has to do with the uncomfortable fact that, for every major European power, the First World War was also a colonial war, something which we might not like to be reminded of.
Furthermore, relatively few civilians died on British shores, which may have skewed our interpretation of the conflict as a war whose primary victims were soldiers. That may be true, were one to judge purely based on numbers, however, over seven million of those who perished never held a rifle. Among them were well over a million Armenians, the victims of a systematic state-sponsored genocide which the contemporary Turkish government continues to deny. Millions more all over the continent found themselves displaced, and many would never return home again.
Even though a large number now view the conflict as a futile tragedy, our annual remembrance ceremonies rarely reflect the fact. The Great War is famous for its poets, perhaps the best known of whom is Wilfred Owen. A good soldier who nevertheless deplored the slaughter, Owen died in France days before the armistice. His poems, which so beautifully described the horror of war, are unlikely to be recited in church on Remembrance Sunday. Their place will probably be taken by John McCrae or Rupert Brooke – ‘If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.’
While we recognize that the moral dividing lines of the First World War are far murkier than those of its sequel, we still can’t help but view ourselves as the good guys – ignoring the reality that all major European powers fought for practically the same reasons. Not for their own freedom, but to preserve and expand their ability to exploit and subjugate others all over the globe.
Despite the ignorant euphoria which took hold at the start of the conflict, the major European powers did not stumble into the First World War by accident. The Great European War came about not as a consequence of misguided jingoism but a series of conscious political decisions, taken chiefly in Vienna and Berlin. The Austrians actively pursued a Balkan war while their German allies, fully aware of what that entailed, would much rather fight a European war in 1914 than a few years later when they expected Russia to be stronger. The French and Russians, both with scores to settle, did nothing to prevent an all-out conflict, whilst Britain had to maintain the continental balance of power.
A question worth asking is what, if anything, we have actually learned from the First World War? Or the Second World War for that matter. A certain popular theory suggests that the sheer carnage of the first half of the twentieth century taught us that war is terrible, which is demonstrably untrue. What Europeans really learned is that European wars are no longer profitable, and the second half of the century taught us that neither are colonial wars.
Even today, with all our cynicism towards foreign adventures and the military-industrial complex, we choose to pretend that sixteen million corpses in the First World War, and over fifty million in the Second, have finally made us peaceful. That, learning from the bloodshed of the twentieth century, Europeans stopped fighting each other and instead opted for political and economic integration.
The historian Timothy Snyder has a term for this – ‘The Fable of the Wise Nation’. And practically nothing about it is true. Horrific wars and millions of dead did not make us peaceful, as Russia and Israel would have to be among the most peace-loving countries on Earth. Neither did they lead a group of sovereign nation-states to seek closer cooperation, as all of them were empires and none were nation-states. However, as these empires declined and lost their ability to profitably exploit and subjugate, they retreated into Europe. Continental unity provided a soft landing spot for former empires and, after the collapse of the USSR, the former subjects of empires too.
The First World War should not be recalled as a great victory for democracy, sovereignty or freedom, or as a conflict which finally taught a bunch of warmongers the errors of their ways. It should be remembered simply as an immense human catastrophe, and one in whose shadow we still live.
After all, the entire history of Europe and much of the world post-1918 can be traced back to the forces unleashed by this conflict. Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine what kind of world we would otherwise inhabit.
There might have been no Lenin on the train, no revolution in Petrograd, no Eastern Bloc and no tanks in Tiananmen Square. The Cold War might not have broken out. There might have been no man on the moon, no internet, no nuclear bombs. A young Austrian called Adolf Hitler might have successfully pursued a mediocre art career. The British and French Empires may have survived to live another century. Edward VIII might have died as King of England and a Romanov might still rule in Russia. There might have been no Watergate, no GIs in Vietnam and no European Union.
Ultimately, there is no telling what such an alternate reality might look like. One thing is certain, however. Whether in Manchester or Moscow, young or old, liberal or conservative, we are all children of the First World War.
