Armistice Day

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 28^th 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 11^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.