Remembering...the Great War

At this writing we’re in that twilight period between 28 June and 1 July that weighs down on me as a few of the most cataclysmic days in history. That’s because the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was shot by Bosnian nationalists (badly equipped but thoroughly propagandized by the early-20^th Century Serbian equivalent of the CIA) on 28 June 1914. And 1 July marks the 92^nd anniversary of the opening of the Battle of the Somme—when the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties on that first day (of a battle that would run through November) in a completely futile attack ordered by generals who never got close to the actual front lines.

World War I is an interesting phenomenon in American cultural memory: it pretty much doesn’t exist. It’s been overwritten on our data bases by World War II, by Vietnam and by the Middle East adventures of the Bush family in the past two decades.

For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off this particular war. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the 20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal obligations) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to storm the camps of the veterans of that war.

This historical amnesia was brought home to me by a friend a few years ago: an educated man, BS, double masters’ degrees in education and computer science, and a dissertation short of a Ph.D. all from William & Mary. But when I mentioned that conflict as the 1914-1918 war, he got this puzzled look on his face, like I’d got my facts wrong. Then his face cleared and he reassured himself, “Oh, that’s right—the war started before we got into it.”

Well, duh…

What interests me is that we’ve collectively obscured the fact that we’re still suffering the aftershocks of what was known at the time as the Great War. (People came to understand the magnitude of it; they didn’t realize they would have to start numbering them.) The war was one of those turning points in history—civilization was marching in one direction, empires clashed and humankind took a 90-degree turn.

World War I reverberated throughout the 20^th Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the presumptive ruling youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued from 1939-1945 (again, the Euros were involved for two years before we entered; actually, if you want to count the Japanese aggression in mainland Asia, which was also made easier by the obvious reluctance of the major powers to draw a line in the sand of any quadrant, then that war dates from 1932).

But we’re even now feeling the effects of that catastrophe. It was an imperial war, fought for gains of empire. Russian, Turkish, British, German; even the French republic was concerned with flexing imperial muscles. The nearly farcical assassination (only succeeding after a series of Keystone Kops-like attempts by the Bosnian-Serbian team) of the Austrian archduke led directly to the collapse of the Russian government and the Communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and 70+ years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous reparations from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that victory.

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade.

The treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire, with Britain and France slavering to pick up pieces of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those policies are still reverberating. Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

The British empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war. And France—well, a steady retreat as well.

For the United States it marked our emergence as a major player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there was no turning back.

Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society, however; although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months. That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded that all your people step up to the plate for a total war, it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and  send them back to the kitchen or the rear of the bus forevermore.

The 19^th Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in 1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward came in 1948 when Harry S. Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.

Truman had been an artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.

The Washington Post ran two stories on Memorial Day about the last known US veteran of the AEF, Frank Buckles, 107, of Charlestown, West Virginia. One, written by a professor at UVA, opened with Buckles being wheeled around the derelict World War I memorial in DC.

It’s an apt metaphor for our national denial of that war. But, really, we neglect it and its lessons at our own peril. In the words of Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Witness our current mire in the Mid-East, and consider how things might have been different had our leaders remembered the First World War and learnt from it.