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The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

A century ago this week, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. Officially, it was called an Armistice, but in reality the Central Powers led by Germany were defeated and submitted to an ignominious surrender.

In some sense, there was really only one World War, with a pause between its first and second phases. Germany was a young country in 1914, having existed only since 1848, and had arrived late to the table after other European powers had already sccoped up the best colonies. The resentment over this ran deep in prewar German society, and later would underlie the German public’s support for Hitler’s expansionist policies.  The humiliations of the Versailles Treaty radicalized German voters, facilitating the rise of a demagogue who promised to make Germany great again, based on a racist ideology and modernized military power.

“The First World War was a cruel and unnecessary war,” the late British military writer John Keegan began his history of that war, reflecting the view of many historians that Europe in 1914 stumbled into an avoidable war through inept diplomacy. However, the accumulation of nationalistic and ethnic tensions over many decades cannot be discounted. Barbara Tuchmann and other historians described prewar Europe as a powder keg waiting for a spark. Still, the war may not have been inevitable.

That it was a cruel war is undeniable, although it has passed from living memory (the last veteran of the trenches died in 2009), and its horrors are now known to us only through literature, poetry, writings, old films and photographs — which can never truly convey the actual experience of the trenches — and the battered landscapes (still yielding unexploded shells) of the old Western Front, and of course the cemeteries. Lots and lots of cemeteries.

This first phase of the Twentieth Century’s great war drastically changed history. It marked the end of monarchy as a form of government. Four empires collapsed, followed by the end of colonialism. It bankrupted Europe and hollowed out a European generation, who came to be known as the “Lost Generation.” The revolution in Russia, brought on by the war, launched the era of Soviet communism that cast a dark shadow over the world for three quarters of a century.

The war also introduced many technological changes to the world’s battlefields: Airplanes, tanks, submarines, machine guns, barbed wire, flamethrowers and poison gas, and motorized transport (although in this war the armies still depended heavily on horses), and saw the development of new tactics based on those technologies.

What began as a war of movement quickly bogged down into a trench stalemate. Millions of lives were expended in vain attempts to breach the trench barriers. Toward the end of the war, the invention of the tank, and development of massed tank assault tactics (which Germany would use with devastating effect in 1939, 1940, and 1941) through trial and error, solved that problem but too late to be decisive. Ultimately, the war was not won in ground battles, but by the British sea blockade that broke German resistance with starvation.

Today, we have the cemeteries and monuments and pockmarked terrain the Lost Generation left behind them to remind us of the folly of human belligerence, which is now augmented with intercontinental missiles and stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Many serious thinkers are pessimistic about humanity’s future, because we seem to have learned little or nothing from the bloody lessons of the past. The next time, there may be no one left to bury us or build monuments to our bravery and devotion to duty.

 


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