I’m not
going to write out any sources for this since this is mostly just my own
thoughts and should be taken as such. Many, if not all of the issues discussed
here have been simplified for argument’s sake. While I do want to write about
everything here in detail, this would be more than I’m willing to do with this
article.
This is a
very special day. As you might know, the first world war, or the great war,
ended exactly a hundred years ago today at 11:00. This is a war that to my mind
changed the world more than any other war in history. Much of the world we live
in today is shaped by this war by one way or another. But so what?
Many of us
who are fascinated by history get asked this question. So what if some
“important” war ended a hundred years ago? What do events from over a hundred
years ago have to do with today? Why should I care about events from a time
hardly any of us have lived through? This is not an article berating people to
care about history more though. I don’t want to do that. Rather, I want to
share some of my thoughts on what we can learn from it. Because I see this war
as a sort of birth of our modern world as we know it.
First off,
let’s get some basics out of the way. The war began the 28th of July
1914, a month after and as a consequence of the assassination of Austrian arch
duke Franz Ferdinand in the city of Sarajevo in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It
was fought between two sides, one called the Entente, or the Allies, the other
being the Central Powers. It ended, as stated previously, at 11:00 the 11th
of November 1918 with different armistices signed from late September, the last
one between Germany and the Entente. There, some facts and dates are out of our
way now.
So it’s
four years of bloody conflict. How has that changed the world? Although this
war was particularly bloody, we’ve had plenty of other conflicts both longer
and bloodies than this. What’s so special about the Great War?
Let’s start simple with borders, governments
and such. Well,
they changed. Before the war we had three emperors, a sultan, plenty of kings, and
as far I can tell only four republics among the warring countries. Emperors,
kings and a sultan, doesn’t that sound a bit archaic for the 20th
century? After the war and as a direct result of it we had no emperors, no
sultan, still plenty of kings and plenty of republics. This shift has a deeper
meaning than just changing who runs stuff. It has to do with a word you might
have heard in the news these last few years: nationalism.
Franz
Ferdinand’s murder was planned by and executed by nationalists. Nationalist
movements and fervor were widespread before the war but absolutely exploded
because of it, especially if we look to the 20th century as a whole.
If we define nationalism as a people wanting to govern themselves, which I
would say is fairly correct, that can get pretty strange in a place like Sweden
that’s already governed by swedes and mostly inhabited by them as well. But
instead imagine yourself in a country where your leader and the ruling class
doesn’t speak your language or even seem to care about the prosperity of your
region, your home. Wanting your people to govern themselves seems pretty
tempting now, doesn’t it? Empires fell during the 20th century, four
of them between 1917 and 1923 as a direct effect of the war. Nations around the
world ruled by foreigners saw that and took note.
Nationalism
wasn’t the only idea used to oppose the ruling elite. For some it wasn’t just national
independence which should be opposed, but also the idea of a ruling class
itself. 1917 saw two major revolutions in Russia, one to bring down the
emperor, and one to put the Bolsheviks into power to create the world’s first communist
country: the Soviet Union. If you didn’t know, communism was to play a big part
in the world politics of the 20th century.
How about the mere art of war? This goes back to the French
Revolution, because Napoleon is famous for a reason. The nobility of Europe got
somewhat of a scare when the revolution came and it seemed like nothing could
stop it. Since ancient times most of the world was ruled by one kind of ruling
class or another. Military officers were people generally from this class who
commanded soldiers. France now had a people’s army and their job wasn’t to keep
the lower classes in check. This made the lower classes wanting for the army to
succeed, and were welcome to join in the hundreds of thousands. This wasn’t how
armies were supposed to operate. It was too dangerous for the nobility. This is
a big part of why Napoleon was as successful as he was. European politicians
wanted little to do with war after Napoleon, at least regarding war on equal
terms.
Another
thing happening before the Great War was the Industrial Revolution. I won’t go
into it much here, but technology, economy and industrial production
skyrocketed during the 19th century, which led to an enormous amount
of innovations and a population boom that keeps on going to this day. These
innovations included many weapons that were effectively used by empires to keep
subjected peoples in check all over the world. You could travel all over the
world quicker with said weapons with iron horses (trains) and new, fancy ships
not powered by sail or oars.
Now let’s
combine the two. Let’s have a war between royal families, not rarely related to
one another, after a global population boom where the governments are the
richest in the world leaving many able young men free to be sent towards the
enemy with the newest and deadliest weapons the world has to offer! Cannons
were bigger, rifles were more accurate, planes, machineguns and radios existed
and the agricultural tool barbed wire proved good at managing both cattle and
enemy soldiers.
Many were
woefully unprepared for this. The UK only managed to send almost 250 000
troops to protect Belgium against a German force many times that size and
Austria-Hungary found themselves in a logistical nightmare trying to suddenly
invade Serbia and defend against Russia at the same time. French soldiers march
into modern war with red pants and blue jackets, not something you see much of
today. Hardly anyone had proper winter uniforms, since the war would be over by
Christmas, leading to hundreds of thousands freezing to death. No one knew how
to attack anything without thousands dying when both sides had these new
weapons.
With time
we learned what came to be called Combined Arms Warfare, where a military
operation is carried out by using many combat arms simultaneously. Doesn’t that
sentence sound quite modern? Could those words come out of the mouth of an
emperor or sultan in your imagination? After a while we had large scale
chemical warfare, air wings, tanks, ideas about the military we still use
today, and many, many corpses. This is the war that shaped modern warfare. It’s
not noble or adventurous. It’s simply something to be avoided if you can.
I’ve often heard people describe the Great War
as “actually more of a European war.” This is sadly not the case. To put things
into perspective, more people died in the East African Campaign during the
Great War than in today’s Syrian Civil War so far. It wasn’t just East Africa though.
Other places the war was fought in include Cameroon, Togoland, South-West and
North Africa, Sinai, Palestine, Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Arabia and on the high
seas and many islands over the world. These are the non-European places. In
Europe we didn’t just have the Western Front either. The Balkans, Eastern and
Italian Fronts and the Gallipoli Campaign were not small theatres of war. This
was a world war.
Thinking it
was a European war because it was fought mainly between European powers (forgetting
the Ottoman Empire) I would say is equally as erroneous as it focuses on just
who made the big decisions. The war was fought by people from every continent
except for Antarctica. Indians, Australians, Arabs, Japanese, Congolese, Azeri,
Algerians, Canadians and Tanzanians fought and died during the war to name a
few. This really was a world war.
The effects
of the war can be felt and seen to this day. It didn’t mark an end to colonial
rule, but it did start a decline of the colonial powers’ grip over the world. Many
nationalist movements over the world did not lose steam or die down. One region
this could be felt was the Middle East. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
the many different peoples previously ruled by them hoped for a future of
independence. But this was sadly not to be for everyone. Much of the Middle
East was divided between the British and French, who did not to an excellent job
ruling there. Promises of independence made during the war to Arabs and
Zionists were simply discarded and explained away. This goes as far as one of
the goals of the terror kind-of-state ISIL was to reverse the changes the
British and French did to the region. While I certainly do not support ISIL, they
do have a point there to say the least. Much needs to be done to repair the
damages the war brought to the world.
Let’s talk feminism! Now, the Great War certainly didn’t
create or lead to first-wave feminism, since it had already been around for a
good while. But the war saw a big change in women’s role in society. The waring
nations sent many of their men to war. After a while women had to be allowed to
work in factories and such for both the economy and front line to hold. Not
surprisingly this was met by protests, but no catastrophe happened because a
woman did a “mans” job. This left women advocating for more rights in a
powerful position and if you look at when women’s suffrage was introduced in
Europe and North America you’ll see that many countries that was between 1917
and 1925. A continuation of this can be seen from 1944 onwards for the rest of
the world with World War Two going towards its final phases and later coincides
with second-wave feminism. So do you like to have women in the workforce? This
first happened large scale in modern times during the Great War, contributing
to the fight for equality.
And last, but not least in my incomplete list
of important changes the Great War brought to the world: facial hair. Before the war, facial hair was
rather popular. After the war you’d see many more men with clean shaven chins.
This has a surprisingly simple reason to it. As stated previously, the war saw
the introduction of large scale chemical warfare. This made gasmasks a
necessity on many fronts. Most facial hair caused gasmasks to not be able to
seal around your face, making them useless. So despite orders, many soldiers
shaved to, well, not die a horrible death. After a while the standing orders to
have facial hair were removed and after the war most soldiers returned home without
magnificent beards and mustaches. Fashion often looks to the military for
inspiration, so facial hair had to be left behind as a relic of the 19th
century.
This has
been a quick and far from complete overview of how the Great War affected our
world. I hope you learned something. One of the subjects I wanted to but didn’t cover
here was medicine. You’ll just have to read up on that on your own, if you’re
not too squeamish about shell shock, grievous wounds and facial disfigurement
(which would be quite understandable). And try this thought: what did you do late
summer/early autumn of 2014? If we go back a hundred years, one of the worst
wars in history has been raging since then. Much suffering was brought to the world. Millions have died, millions more were wounded. But now the
guns are quiet. Civil wars are still going on and not quite everyone across the
world stopped shooting at each other, but the Great War is over.
