It was known as the "Great War", but the only thing "great" about it was the level of shock and horror that it brought about. One silver lining, perhaps, was that it also had some lessons to teach us.
But, many people have forgotten it over time. And we all know that saying, about people who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it, right?
Yes, it has been fully one hundred years since the war that was supposed to "end all wars" shocked western civilization to it's core. The warring European nations (and all of western civilization, really), having largely benefited from a fairly peaceful and progressive nineteenth century that ushered in many changes on many fronts that, by and large, proved demonstrably beneficial to humankind, had believed themselves to have reached a level of civility where war was almost unnecessary, although everyone saw this huge conflict coming.
This was supposed to be the final conflict that would, once and for all, decide the fate of the world, and who would be the dominant power in that world, and particularly Europe.
It goes without saying that each side very much expected not only to win the war, but to do so decisively, quickly, and relatively easily. This was an era, remember, when men could still dream of performing heroic acts that helped their country tremendously towards winning glory on the battlefield and, ultimately, helping it to win the war.
So confident was each side that there were spontaneous celebrations that broke out in major cities in each country. There is an infamous picture of the one in Germany in which none other than Adolf Hitler is pictured smiling, who viewed this as a chance to finally be provided with his opportunity to do something for his country that really would stand out.
Nor was he alone in this thinking. The Germans expected clear cut victory, and expected it to happen quite quickly, as well. So did the French, British, and Russians, who were fighting against them. This was a conflict that, again, everyone knew was coming. There had reached a point of tensions where it would take relatively little to push the powers finally into war. No matter what side they were on, everyone expected the war to be fought, and won, well before Christmas of 1914.
There had been signs that maybe this war would not be so quick, glorious, and relatively painless, as it universally, and unrealistically, was expected to be. The war between the states on the other side of the ocean is considered by some to have been the first modern war, if you will. It was the first time that modern weaponry truly had been used, and it had been a very bloody conflict, with heavy casualties, and with more of a stalemate feel to it than many had expected. It was this gridlock that many of the European generals and leaders dismissed as the product of poor generals and an incompetent approach to war. It goes without saying that the European general and leaders all expected themselves to be far more competent and decisive in bringing ultimate victory to their side.
Of course, we all know that this did not happen.
Events happened quickly after the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and Germany gave the nod to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to go ahead and avenge their loss. It did not take long for the war to begin.
Before long, however, both sides had dug deep trenches on eastern France, on the war front. And that meant that each side dug themselves in deep, mostly in defensive positions. The land separating the warring sides was known as "no man's land". Each side shelled the other relentlessly, and occasionally, each side mounted campaigns to break the deadlock, and to try and gain better positioning. Many of these campaigns were pointless, to try and win a small patch of land often not much bigger than several football fields. Yet, thousands of men were sacrificed for many of these campaigns.
Despite jubilant hopes and dreams of quick, efficient, and decisive victory that each side expected, the war became very much a stalemate. Far from a quick war, the war just dragged on and on and on. Worse yet, it did not take too long for the level of brutality and barbarity to escalate. In fact, while each country had expected the war to be quick, and for themselves to be victorious and to reap the spoils of victory, the only thing about this war that actually was quick and decisive was the level of brutality.
Of course, we all know about chemical warfare being used, and not just by the Germans. Indeed, this was a very different kind of war.
And remember, technology had improved, and it would play a factor in this war. But even this served to further erode any notions of humanity having reached some grandiose dreams of great civility. Medicine had advanced to such a point that medics were able to save the lives of many of the soldiers that had sustained very serious injuries during this war - injuries and conditions that would have proved fatal not long before.
But here's the thing: the means were still quite crude, and soldiers that were saved often had very visible scars from the war. Men were sent home with artificial arms, artificial legs, artificial jaws. These artificial body parts were not as subtle as they often are today, where you might never actually know that these body parts are fake. There was no disguising the ugly metal parts that were used to artificially reconstruct limbs or other body parts, including if part of a soldier's face was blown off. With injuries the likes of which had never been seen on so many living men before, the modern perceptions of the inevitability of the advance of civilization being automatically employed for the benefit of mankind began to seriously waver. With the conflict already dragging on far longer than almost anyone would have predicted before the war had broken out, seeing many of the returning soldiers coming back home in such a state, broken shells of the men that they had been beforehand, had an obvious impact on the home front. So much so, that we know of it, and know the impact that it had, to this day.
Keep in mind that both sides were aware of this, and both sides continued to try and inflict as much damage as possible on men from the other side. Why? Because a living soldier with serious wounds literally cost far more than a dead soldier, and inflicting such injuries would be very taxing to the other side. In other words, it was thought that the costs, monetarily and psychologically, would ultimately help drag the other side to defeat, and would help, in other words, to win the war. So, men continued to suffer injuries with shelling, with landmines, and with other modern weaponry.
Also, many of the men who fought in the trenches had to deal with the very serious psychological scars from relentless shelling and fighting. The trenches, which themselves were like physical scars on the landscape, had been places where life was far from flourishing. Men spent much of their lives in this barren landscape devoid of any signs of life, often in cold and gray weather, and with gas masks at the ready, that they would have to scramble to put on whenever there were chemical attacks from the other side.
Not surprisingly, this was the war that first saw what we now know as post traumatic stress disorder. It was known then as "shell shock". Broken men came home no longer capable of really anything, and with involuntary memories of the war. For that matter, people who saw this back home could hardly "forget" the war themselves. As these injuries escalated, and more and more men came home in such a broken and helpless state, the toll continued to mount.
Still, the war raged on. Each side was exhausted. Everyone wanted the war to end.
But no one wanted to lose the war, either. Everyone kind of understood the steep price that it would cost them. Everyone knew that the other side would make the losers pay through the nose.
So, the war continued, despite all of the warring nations being exhausted. The war just went on and on and on.
There were some strange, almost inexplicable stories of strange occurrences, as well, such as the famous "Christmas Truce" of 1914. It was an unofficial truce, to be sure. But it was a very real pause in the conflict, with each side singing Christmas songs, and the other side enjoying, and sometimes joining in. In some cases, soldiers from one side would walk over to the other side, bearing gifts in true Christmas spirit. Such humanity, in the face of excessive aggression and barbarity, were so striking, and left such an impression, that we remember these to this day!
Unfortunately, these were the exceptions, and not the norm. World War I was a brutal war of epic proportions, and it jolted Europe, and Western civilization more generally, from it's preconceived, grandiose dreams of being very civilized, to the point of basically being above the base excesses of war. With the bloodiest and ugliest war in history (soon to be replaced both in terms of brutality and numbers by the war that followed it, which is some ways was merely a rematch), few held any illusions of some greater humanity, or that this was truly "the war to end all wars".
Obviously, we know better now. At least that one lesson was learned: that the so-called "Great War" was most certainly not "the war to end all wars". Far from it, in fact.
There was a break in the war when a revolution (helped along by the Germans, in fact) broke out in Russia. Lenin took over, and the first thing that he did was pull Russia out of the war. Russia lost a lot of territory, but at least it could concentrate on other matters, and was no longer losing men and money in the war.
It seemed that this could help tilt the war in favor of the Germans. But not long after this, the United States entered the war, and the deadlock continued.
That was until revolution broke out in Germany itself. Exhausted and unable to continue on with the draining conflict, Germany was forced to surrender. The war ended officially at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
A war like no other had ended. The bloodiest conflict that humanity had ever seen had exacted a toll unlike any other event in human history, and this was all man-made! Again, it bears repeating that this shook humanity out of it's belief that it was simply progressing and getting better, and that the excesses and inhumanity of the past were indeed relegated to the past.
Unfortunately, it also seems to have inadvertently given the green light to war pigs since, who have had little qualms in using whatever methods hey deemed necessary to bring the other side to it's knees. Whether we are talking about "blitzkrieg" that devastated much of Europe and earned most of Europe for Germany, or the Holocaust that followed on the heels of Germany's military successes, or the brutal Eastern War between the Soviets and the Germans that would prove to claim the dubious distinction as the bloodiest war in all of history, to the firebombings by the Allied powers that would literally destroy whole cities (and most of the people living in them) overnight, to the final explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that would force Japan to surrender, war was far from over. Since then, we have had the Korean War, the war in Indochina, and the Vietnam War that followed (not the same conflict, or fought for the same reasons), the Algerian War for independence from France, the Six Day War, the Falklands War, the Iran-Iraq War, two wars in the Gulf, several wars in Afghanistan, all involving big powers of western civilization. For that matter, weapons from western powers have been used in almost every war seen outside of those conflicts that they were directly involved in. When we see one conflict after another breaking out in one African country after another, with continuous stories of savagery that can hardly be imagined, of women being raped and having their breasts cut off, of villagers being killed, and of young boys being recruited and made into soldiers for the war effort, we know all too well that it is with weapons from western civilization that these things are made possible.
If World War I did anything, it is that it stripped us of the illusion, an illusion that apparently quite a few subscribed to, that we had reached a level of greatness within our societies that we were finally above the excesses and inhumanity of war. Many had believed that we had progressed so far, with advances politically, technologically, medically, and in almost every other facet suggesting to people back then that the improvements would just keep on coming, almost uninterrupted. Remember, people's lives were changing radically, and the industrial revolution, which itself was not governed by any actual government, was seemingly improving the living conditions of people throughout Western Civilization. So, the belief was real that things were very much improving, and that they would continue to do so. That even the "Great War" would be quick and decisive, and then humanity would continue onward and upwards, ever improving.
World War I stripped us of this illusion. It figuratively brought us crashing back down to reality. It brought us face to face with the harsh reality that the greater the invention, and the greater the technological advances that were seen in our western civilization, the greater the chances that someone, somewhere, is going to employ that wonderful technology in order to do as much harm as humanly possible to others, whatever their motivation might be for so doing.
And that is a lesson that, unfortunately, we have never stopped learning since. That is a lesson that, apparently, our civilizations keeps seeing more and more lessons of ever since the "Great War".
This is the lasting legacy of World War I, the war that was supposed to "end all wars", but obviously did not. And it has been a century of lessons since, beginning with the outbreak of the "Great War", one hundred years ago.
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