The War That Made the 20th and 21st Centuries

Growing up I knew a number of World War I veterans; in fact, my maternal grandfather was one. He had chased Pancho Villa in Mexico with the US Cavalry prior to being in the Great War. I would sit and listen to men who told the stories of being gassed and the inhumane life in the trenches. Sadly, that war is largely ignored by history teachers and students in most public schools today and its lessons are fading into oblivion. Such lack of awareness is not only sad but also dangerous. 

World War I was not foreseen and came upon white, European nations in a cataclysm of still misunderstood proportions. In 1914, most European states were ruled by old monarchies that had kept the “Peace of Europe” since 1815, and the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo. Great Britain was the world’s dominant power at sea and Imperial Germany (der Kaiserreich) on land. France was struggling to recover from her defeat by Germany in the France-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and longed for revenge. All the nations were armed with modern material; magazine fed rifles, submarines, poison gas, machineguns, heavy artillery, and primitive aircraft. However, up to 1914, the old monarchies kept the peace. 

Austria-Hungary was, on paper, the most powerful empire in central and southern Europe, but it was in reality a paper tiger. Rocked with ethnic, nationalistic, and religious dissent, the tottering old power was kept intact by an aged emperor (Franz Josef) who really belonged in the 19th century. The best hope for peace in this region was in the heir presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In his castle hung a map of what he proposed as the United Confederacy of Greater Austria. His plan would have answered almost all the complaints of competing groups and would have given governing authority over the many ethnic peoples who were threatening revolt. It was not to be. 

On June 28, 1914, the Archduke and his wife, Sophie, were visiting the sleepy provincial capital of Bosnia, known as Sarajevo. Three Serbian terrorists were awaiting their arrival. On that fateful day one of the murderers, Gavrilo Princip, stepped onto the running board of the Archduke’s car, and killed the Archduke and his wife, Sophie. This should not have provoked an international conflict. This tragic event should have been settled between Austria and Serbia. 

One after the other the great powers of Europe entered into the conflict; Russia and Germany led the way, followed by Britain and France. Italy came in and so did the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). Each side expected a short and glorious war that would be over by Christmas of 1914. They were all living in a dream world. The butchery would last from July of 1914 till November 11, 1918. This war would expose the thin veneer of civility and progressive hopes of the white, “Christian” West. 

The death toll was so high, that by 1917, the Germans, the French, and the British had no more adult male replacements to send to the Western Front and they were drafting boys fifteen years old. The Vatican offered to negotiate a fair peace and the Germans agreed to accept this offer, but the French and the British refused as they knew that the USA was coming into the conflict. Under grand slogans such as “The War to End All Wars” or “Make the World Safe for Democracy”, President Woodrow Wilson dragged a somewhat reluctant US into the Great War. 

WWI would witness the first government sponsored genocide as the Christian Armenian population of Turkey was massacred. Submarine warfare was born. All told over twenty-six million persons would die. Out of its aftermath would come the worst peace treaty ever written and its failure would produce Soviet Communism, the rise of the Fascist Socialist party in Italy, the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany, and the establishment of militaristic Imperial Japan. All of these events foretold a new and more disastrous world war, and it arrived just twenty-one years later in September of 1939, when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland. 

Let us remember. The modern generation has forgotten that war. It has long been relegated to the dustbin of history, and that is both sad and dangerous. The voices from that era are gone. The last WWI veteran died about three or more years ago. Yet their voices remain in diaries, documentaries, and in quiet chapels and churchyards, and massive cemeteries in France and Belgium. Those young men of all sides went to war with high patriotic and moral belief but the realities of politics and war would negate them all. Will we remember them, as is stated in Robert Binyon’s poem: They shall not grow old as we grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Lest we forget,