100 Years Ago Today

On 4th August 1914 England, her Allies and her Empire went to war with Germany and her Allies known as the Central Powers starting what came be called the First World War. Of course the fact that we have had to give World Wars numbers says a lot – that the ‘war to end all wars’ was nothing of the sort and that we seem not to learn from our mistakes. It’s actually arguable that the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War where merely continuations of the initial conflict with a short pause for both sides to lick their wounds and regroup before launching at each other for a second time and a second try. Of course even after the end of the Cold War we’re still living with the legacy (or legacies) of August 1914.

I’m still waiting to be convinced that WW1 wasn’t just a huge waste of life for no reason. The few books I’ve read so far on the subject seem initially to reinforce my earlier ideas of a pointless war, fought badly, at enormous cost. But I have started to think about alternatives. What if France had fallen in 1914 or 1915 to German aggression without the bolstering of Britain? What if Germany had become a European super-power in the early 20th century and directly rivalled and threatened the British Empire. Would WW1 simply have started later – say in 1920 – when it became obvious that one side or the other needed to come out on top? Maybe, horrible though it sounds, 17 million needed to die so that 20 or 30 million didn’t have too? Then again, maybe a world war in 1920 might have finished off Germany for good (assuming they lost) which would have meant no WW2 with its (approximately) 60 million dead? Of course we’ll never know one way or the other. But maybe, just maybe, WW1 was justified after all? I will think, and read, on it.

Of course the brute fact of the war, at least on the iconic Western Front, was the machine gun, the wire and the trenches separated by no-man’s land. It is arguable that the whole of the war on that front was an attempt to answer the question: How do we advance troops and close with the enemy in order to defeat him in this kind of environment. One thing you can’t say is that no one attempted to do so, time and again, changing this method, adding this weapon, trying this and that, to win. The cost of learning to win in that environment was, as we know, monumental. Could it have been any different? Probably yes. Lessons learnt later in the war could have been learnt earlier, mistakes could not have been made (or learnt from rather than side-lined or ignored – or simply overlooked) but it’s difficult to see with others eyes especially in a war the like of which no one had seen or experienced before.

Then there’s the peace and the conference that followed. Some have accused the Treaty of Versailles for causing WW2 and, I think, there’s much mileage in that idea. Some think that the Treaty should have been easier on Germany allowing her to become more stable economically which may have helped her weather the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Others think the Treaty should have been harsher and more stringently enforced so denying Germany the opportunity to eventually rearm plunging the world into a war much worse than the first. With my, as yet, limited knowledge of the Treaty and its aftermath I can’t really say. If Germany had been reduced to a group of largely agrarian mini-states there’s no way it could have bounced back in 1939 to start WW2. On the other hand a more stable and economically viable Germany might have shrugged off the events of 1929 and not fallen to extremism. Such speculations are for professional historians and authors of Science-Fiction novels. Inevitably, as my interest in these events is more than a little piqued, I shall attempt to answer some of the many questions I have regarding this war to end all wars by reading a selection of the growing number of books being published and re-published on the subject. So far I have only really scratched the surface. It’s about time I started digging my own trench.