Unintended consequences

When I was writing my quick-and-dirty précis about the Sarajevo assassination that set off what we now call the First World War, I should perhaps have slapped on a caveat: there was a whole lot of simplification involved in that.

Well, I had to take liberties, didn’t I—historians are destroying rain forest resources at a rate of knots churning out monographs on the subject. So I was kind of doing you a favor by synthesizing it down to a couple of paragraphs. Okay—25. If you want all the details and nuances, you’re going to have to man up and read some seriously heavy (literally and metaphorically) tomes.

It got me thinking though, about how the major powers and Serbia were each thinking that what they were embarking on was a short, localized war that would result in territorial gain at little or no cost. There wasn’t a one of them that wasn’t planning on how they’d rule over new acquisitions, made either by conquest or post-war negotiation from a position of strength. (Well, okay—maybe the Ottomans weren’t. They really were just trying to hold on to that leprous, tottering conglomeration they already had.)

So it’s both a mitigation and an accusation to say that these bozos could not do the math and realize that Germany plus Russia plus Britain plus Austria-Hungary plus Serbia plus Turkey plus France could not possibly mean a small, localized war that could turn a quick profit. I mean—what kind of blinkers do you have to be wearing to not see that?

Well, I guess you have to be wearing single-focus nationalist doesn’t-matter-what-anyone-else-does blinkers. Serbs didn’t care what the Germans might be doing to their allies France and Russia; all they saw was the opportunity to grab up lands under the rule of the Dual Monarchy to build a “Greater Serbia”, as they thought had existed some centuries before.

(Two things about that—once they had Bosnia, Kosovo, Herzegovina and Croatia, they were planning to turn around and grab parts of Macedonia and Bulgaria, also for this mythical empire. And they were going to kill or drive out of these lands anyone not an ethnic Serb—so, Bosnians, Turks, Bulgarians, Jews, Albanians, Greeks, Kosovars, Muslims, Germans, Croatians, Hungarians, Slovenes…you get the picture. They’d already been doing this with conquests from the two Balkan Wars earlier in the century; this barbaric policy of “Greater Serbia” was not mythical.)

(Oh—third thing: that’s what the Serbs have been doing ever since Yugoslavia broke up in the early 90s. Come on—when was the first time you heard the term “ethnic cleansing”?)

Russians only cared about their allies as far as expecting Serbia to occupy the Austrians’ attention to the south and France to do the same with the Germans in the west so they’d have a shot at defeating them both in the east. The Germans actually had what they thought was a sure-fire cast-iron strategy for defeating France first and then mowing down Russia. The French were hoping that fighting a two-front war would mean that the Germans would not hit them full-force and that they’d be able to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which they’d had to fork over at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The Austro-Hungarians were just pretty much delusional in general, and the Ottomans were focused on preventing the Russians from moving in on the Turkish Straits, which were indeed one of those tsarist grab-and-go objectives.

And the British were hoping to God that they wouldn’t have to do very much at all on the Continent, because they were a sea power. But they also were hoping that any continental war would halt the German naval expansion; preferably before the two fleets engaged.

So—every single one focused on the best-case scenario for their own national interests, and no one envisioned, let alone planned for, the worst one. Much less one in which everyone loses, and continues losing for decades.

(Well, except for the UK’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. He predicted that the war would last at least three years, require armies in their millions and result in ruinous casualties. His fellow cabinet members blinked a couple of times at his lunacy and went on with their own plans.)

Actually, now that I think of it, pretty much like most corporate senior management today. And national governments.

But here’s what I’ve been playing with: if, by some miraculous gift of prescience, the military and/or political leaders of the seven starting players in this death-game had been able to foresee what road they were marching down with chests puffed out and sabers clanking (yes, sabers—this is not metaphor)…would they have halted? Would they have looked for other solutions to the perceived problems? Some sort of negotiation or diplomatic discussion between Austria and Serbia, perhaps brokered by Russia, Germany and France? Would the other powers have sacrificed their hopes of scooping up Turkish assets as well as putting everyone else in their (inferior) place for the sake of saving 16 million lives?

How about if you add on the 50 million or so killed by the 1918-1920 global influenza pandemic—would that have tipped the scales away from declarations of war?

In short—would they have found a way out that didn’t involve the wholesale destruction of their economies, their citizens, their resources and their futures?

Yeah...no; I got nothin’. Sorry.

After studying the personalities of those leaders for a lot of years, I still do not know whether they could have subordinated their chauvinistic and imperial mindsets for the better angels of their nature. In truth, I’m not exactly convinced that many of them had better angels.

(Stormtruppe geht unter Gas, Otto Dix)

But I’m hoping that if their citizens could also see that future—maybe just even a fly-over view of the German, French, Belgian, British (and, later, American) military cemeteries that follow a line from Alsace to Amiens—they would have revived the guillotine and selectively removed some of those leaders from the gene pool.

Pour encourager les autres, as they say.