THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914 ~ 1918)
Acts of war had and will break out when the ingredients are ready and stirred. Such an atrocity is inflicted by mankind upon each other as we have yet to rule our own hearts. In effect, as Chesterton puts it, the problem in the world is “me”. For many of us in this generation, September 11 (2001) will be our closest experience of the devastating effect of a war; a war against terrorism, in this case. In the last century alone, the world was inflicted with two world wars; not counting the many other wars on a relatively smaller scale.
Consider World War I, which was a large scale conflict fought over four terrible years involving soldiers from five continents. It all started in the late 19th and early 20th century when the most powerful nations in Europe formed two opposing alliances. On the one hand was Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, which was known collectively as the Triple Alliance and also known as the Central Powers. Germany was the most powerful member, and Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined to turn the German Empire into a world power. On the opposite side was Britain, France and Russia, which formed the Triple Entente (Understanding) and commonly known as the “Allies”. France had just lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany after its defeat by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 ~1871) while Britain was keen to preserve its own power in northern Europe. As for the Russians, they had no desire for war, but were ready to support the Serbs, their fellow Slavs, against Austria-Hungary. Amidst this backdrop, all the major European powers signed the Treaty of London in 1839 wherein Belgium was to remain permanently neutral in any future conflict.
The ingredients were there. Then came the trigger and stirring from what would otherwise have been a perfunctory event. On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, made an official visit to the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been an official part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1908. The people in Bosnia were Slavs, many of whom were Serbs from the neighbouring Serbia. As the Archduke and his wife came alongside in their car, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand (a Serb secret society) shot them dead. Austria-Hungary believed that this act of terrorism was supported by Serbia and proceeded to declare war against the Serbs at 11.10am on 28 July 1914.
By now Germany had already given their support Austria-Hungary while Italy remained neutral. Russia backed Serbia and received the support of France. Then, on 3 August, Germany invaded neutral Belgium to reach France. This prompted Britain, which has a separate treaty to assist Belgium, to join its French and Russian allies the next day. The war was fought at the same time on two fronts. On the Western Front, France and Britain opposed Germany while on the Eastern Front Russia clashed with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Many battles were fought as the war waged on. Italy joined the Allies in 1915 and fought hard against Austria-Hungary. In the same year, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand were unsuccessful in their fray over the Gallipoli Peninsula of Turkey, an ally of the Central Powers. Battles were also fought at sea and in the air.
On 31 January 1917, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. All shipping in the Atlantic war zone, neutral as well as Allied, was to be sunk in the hope of starving Britain. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, was appalled by the German move and immediately broke off diplomatic ties. He subsequently declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917 upon learning from an intercepted telegraph to Mexico which stated that Germany will help her regain its former territories of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona should Woodrow Wilson declare war against Germany.
On 3 December 1917 Russia, under its new leader, Vladimir Lenin, ended its participation in the war. As Russia was leaving the war, the Allies activity in the Middle East, notably Palestine and Mesopotamia increased because the Allies feared that Turkish troops who had been fighting the Russians would turn to the Middle East.
By 1918 the situation on the Western Front did not look good for the Allies as they were inflicted with heavy losses against the German’s Hindenburg Line – a complex system of barbed wire, machine-gun emplacements and dug-outs stretching for many kilometers. Worse still, about a million German reinforcements were making their way from the Eastern Front after Russia’s withdrawal. German commander Erich Ludendorff decided to risk an all-out land attack in the hope of ending the war swiftly. But the speed of the advance and the war of attrition had exhausted his troops. Food supplies could not keep up with the men. Much of the artillery had been left behind, so German bombardment grew lighter. Allied air attacks also began to bite. Finally, there was no replacements for the thousands who had died in the fighting.
At the same time in 1918 there was crisis on the German home front as hunger, disillusion with the war and social inequalities led to a growing discontent with the imperial government. Finally, on 30 September, Kaiser Wilhelm II signed a decree that brought democratic parliamentary government to Germany. Prince Max van Baden was made the new Chancellor (chief minister) and was en-tasked to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. However, the Germans wanted to embark on a new campaign at sea but, in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, their sailors mutinied.
Soon the whole country was in uproar and demands for the Kaiser’s removal grew. On 8 November, he fled from Berlin and the following day abdicated. Germany became a republic, led by Friedrich Ebert, and two days later the armistice was signed. At 11.00am on 11 November 1918, after more than four years of bloody conflict, the ceasefire began.
In the classic “All Quiet On The Western Front” written by Erich Maria Remarque, a German who served in the First World War, the lead character, Paul Baumer, records his feelings in mid-1918 thus:
This summer of 1918 is the bloodiest and the hardest. The days are like angels in blue and gold, rising up untouchable above the circle of destruction. Everyone knows that we are losing the war. Nobody talks about it much. We are retreating. We won’t be able to attack again after this massive offensive. We have no more men and no more ammunition. But the campaign goes on – the dying continues …Summer 1918, never has life at the front been more bitter and more full of horror than when we are under fire, when the pallid faces are pressed into the mud and the fists are clenched and your whole being is saying, No! No! No, not now! Not now at the very last minute!
On 18 January 1919 members of 27 countries attended a conference to thrash out a peace settlement. Five treaties were eventually prepared. The most important was the treaty signed at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919 between the Allies and Germany, which inter alia included some of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of Program For the Peace of the World and the establishment of the League of Nations (later know as United Nations). The other treaties shared out the land of the Ottoman (Turkish) and Austria-Hungarian empires, and forced Bulgaria to give up some territory.
However, the treatment of Germany was far more severe than President Wilson had envisaged. Germany was declared responsible for the war, and forced to pay massive reparations for the damage caused by the conflict. In addition, the size of its armed forces was strictly limited and its colonies, as well as parts of Germany itself, were taken away. Although this settlement was never accepted by the US Congress, the Germans had no choice but to bow to the treaty’s demands.
World War I has become known as the Great War because of its profound and lasting impact on the world that emerged from it. A generation of young men, about 5.4 million from the Allies and about 3.6 million from the Central Powers, had been lost. The civilian population was plunged into mourning. Four empires had fallen and the map of the world was redrawn. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. A corner of northeast Germany became part of Poland, which had freed itself from Russian rule, as had the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Rhineland area between France and Germany was occupied by the Allies and the Saarland handed over to the League of Nations control for a period of 15 years. Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Further afield, France and Britain divided the former German colonies in Africa and the former Turkish territories in the Middle East between themselves. Much of Turkey was given to Greece, but the Turks seized it back and proclaimed an independent republic in 1923. The legacy of all this change was serious instability. Just as before the war, people of one nationality, for example the Germans in Poland, found themselves ruled by people of another. The League of Nations proved unable to prevent growing tension. The Germans began to re-assert themselves and, in 1939, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler came to power leading to the outbreak of the Second World War.
It is unthinkable that an act of assassination could have triggered the First World War. The big question remains: What will the act of terrorism on September 11, 2001 leads to?
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Adapted (in response to September 11) from “History In Writing: The First World War 1914 – 18” by Christine Hatt