GELFAND ON … HOW WE GOT HERE-Friday is the 50th anniversary of the event that shocked my generation. Meanwhile, the New York Times has been chronicling the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War in a remarkable series called Disunion. But the most important anniversary is 9 months away. Let me offer up a few hints.
In 1928, Eric Von Stroheim made a film called The Wedding March. Since it was made in the silent era, it does not open with the somber oration that some modern films might make use of. Instead, Stroheim opens tersely, with a single title card that announces "Vienna -- Anno Domini -- 1914.
For the audience of that era, this was enough to signify impending doom.
A few years earlier, a young actor named Rudolph Valentino had his breakout role in a film called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The film builds from a fairly light opening to the destruction of two families, symbolizing the destruction of millions.
August 2014 will be the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, known to the people of the time as The Great War, and to the more hopeful at the time as the War to End War. It may have been the single most horrible event to befall mankind. It left the world substantially changed, a large fraction of the earth's people damaged, and the most enduring problems unsettled. So unlike the Second World War, which settled the futures of western Europe and East Asia, the Great War left rubble, political upheaval, and economic uncertainty in its wake.
In a way, the war's outcomes (and there were many) remind me of the old joke about a man "who contracted a disease so horrible that paralytic polio, terminal cancer, and lockjaw were just three of its symptoms." The aftermath of the Great War extends to the present. Its wake left millions of wounded people, both soldiers and civilians, and other millions dead. It changed the maps of Europe and western Asia, and upended forms of government that had endured for a thousand years. We can mention a few consequences:
● The destruction of aristocracy in Europe, and some of the class system.
● The development of international communism.
● The destruction of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the current structure of the middle east.
The deaths of millions, many unidentified.
● A survivor's Hell for those who suffered chlorine gas injury.
● A future that fated Germany to hyperinflation, semi-starvation, and Naziism.
● The weakening of France to a severe extent, and how that affected its conduct in 1940.
● World War II.
● The German occupation of western Europe until 1945.
● The Soviet occupation of eastern Europe until a few years ago.
And these are just some of the results seen in broader perspective. At the more direct level, we have the trench battles of the western front that have been written about so well and so extensively. I'll just mention one battle because the historic record is so remarkable. In 1916, the British and French forces prepared a massive advance that is known to us as the Battle of the Somme. In their optimism, the Brits sent movie cameramen to make a record, out of which came the film which we now know as The Battle of the Somme.
It was so well made (and, we might add, so realistic) that pieces of the film were reprinted and included in other war films for decades to come. The film includes both the violence of war and the everyday life that you might see if you visited a low level medical facility during a quiet day or watched soldiers passing time.
What then of the glorious battle? Even now, historians recognize July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle, as one of the worst calamities ever to befall England, and the worst day for the British military in its history. The British Fourth Army had 57,400 casualties including 19,240 dead. By the end of the four and a half month process, the total casualty figures were more than a million, with the allies taking about 600,000 of the total. The result for the British and French was to advance a bare few miles.
At another place, the Battle of Verdun was making its own grisly name, ultimately amounting to just under a million casualties.
And yet further east, in a place far from the western front, a series of skirmishes between Italy and Austria cost the lives of 600,000 on the Italian side alone. In the aftermath of the northeastern battles and the end of the war, Italian Fascism found a place to root.
If you look at some of the standard sources repeated on the internet, you will find the fact that six out of ten French males between the ages of 18 and 28 were killed or permanently maimed during the war (see Henry Copeland's discussion in Blogads) amounting to 6.1 million casualties out of a prewar population of 40 million. It's not surprising that the survivors were loathe to restart the same butchery 22 years later.
Among the western powers including the US, France, Britain, Russia and others, there were an estimated 22 million casualties. On the other side, the total was in excess of 15 million.
It's hard to comprehend these figures, totaling more than 37 million people, of whom at least eight and a half million were killed.
It is also hard to comprehend the misery. Everyone learns the term "trench warfare" in school, but I doubt that most of us can really understand the hardships. Suffice to mention one fact that our modern era largely forgets. In an era lacking penicillin and other effective antibiotics, any penetrating wound could be a death sentence. Erich Remarque, in his All Quiet on the Western Front, refers to the misery and high mortality of combat wounds in a matter of fact way. The killing machines on both sides were set loose in an environment in which men were sent marching against machine guns, without effective ways either to protect them against bullets or to treat their wounds.
The ultimate results of the Great War are still with us. The dividing up of the old Turkish empire into several countries has obviously been the source of strife and will presumably continue to do so. The inept and incomplete finish to the war led to the next great world war, the occupation of eastern Europe by the Russians, the development of nuclear weapons, and the advent of the USA as a superpower.
In a few months, we will begin to consider the WW I Centennial. My guess is that by then, the American people will be sesquecentennialed and 50th anniversaried to exhaustion, and the commemoration of the Great War will be treated with modest ceremony by our news media. But this will be a mistake, since the driving force of the turmoil of the 20th century has roots in this conflict.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 93
Pub: Nov 19, 2013
