There is a lot of talk, events and even celebrations these
days about the Great War – World War 1.
Although why people would want to remember the beginning of a war I have
no idea. But I have been doing a lot of
reading about that war over the years including my current reading of Margaret
MacMillan’s excellent work, The War that
Ended Peace, about the origins of that war.
In some ways this book shows that some things have changed in the
intervening one hundred years.
Unfortunately, it also shows that some things tragically have not. In many countries, nationalism and its
companion militarism are alive and well.
Ethnic differences are causing many problems around the world. Arms races continue with the result that some
people seem to think that these new and improved weapons should actually be
used. And despite all of things that we
think have changed in the world, human nature stays stubbornly the same.
Mazlov’s hierarchy of needs is still relevant.
Inevitably, there are the critiques, second guessing and
what-ifs about the war. There are those
who say that Europe didn’t have to go to war, but they weren’t there. There are those that say the war should have
been fought differently, but they weren’t there. One of the most ridiculous arguments I have
seen recently was from the Canadian writer and historian, Gwyn Dyer. In an excerpt from his new book that was
printed in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, August 9th, he postulated
that it would have been much better if Germany had won the war. His argument was that Germany would have
imposed a much less harsh peace treaty on the losers than the Treaty of
Versailles imposed by Britain and France.
This would have led to peace and harmony throughout Europe and prevented
the Second World War. This assertion has
no supporting evidence whatsoever.
Germany was a militaristic power and the militarists, who by winning the
war would have enhanced their power, would have insisted on sanctions,
reparations and other punishments against at least France and probably Britain
and Russia. Germany’s biggest problem
would then have been Russia, as it has been through much of Prussian and German
history. Although the ongoing Russian
Revolution may have rendered Russia weak in the short term, it would have
eventually become strong enough to challenge Germany. France and Britain could well have joined
Russia in retribution for the treaty forced upon them at the end of the Great
War. Hence, we would have had World War
2 in Europe.
And let’s not forget about the growing enmity between Japan
and the US. Although Japan was ostensibly an ally to France and Britain in
World War 1, its growing demand for hegemony in Asia, particularly China, was
already causing problems for the US who saw themselves as a benevolent
protector of China. The strains that
eventually led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US entry into World War 2
would still have been there, and the result would, no doubt, be the same.
Mr. Dyer makes the mistake, common among some historians and
critics, of thinking like a 21st Century person rather than a later
19th Century person, which is what the decision makers of the day
were. The truth was that people in
Europe were conditioned to accept war and many were looking forward to it. There had been several crises in the years
between 1900 and 1913, and most people expected that one more spark would lead
to war. War came as no surprise in
1914. We, who have seen the effects of
20th century warfare, do not generally want more war, but that was
not the case in 1914. What did surprise the
world was the length and intensity of the Great War. All of the military planners had expected and
planned for a short, sharp war with a decisive battle deciding it all. This is, after all, what had happened in 1870
in the Franco-Prussian War, the last war of any consequence in Europe. The carnage of World War 1 came as a complete
surprise to almost everyone. It was this
unexpected level of destruction that made the war so terrible and
memorable. Nobody expected the war to
last that long. Nobody expected it to be
that destructive. If Germany had defeated
France in the two months they expected the war to last, it would have been a
war that was expected, and it would probably encouraged other wars in Europe
over the rest of the century until one of them became so destructive that it
would have become the memorable war – the War to end all Wars.
Any current analyst of the Great War inevitably must see it
through the prism of the death and destruction that was that war, just as even
the men who dictated the Versailles Treaty had to look at the war. It coloured our entire outlook of the 20th
century, and even led to conditions that are still causing world problems, the
Middle East being one good example. We
cannot escape history, but we also cannot live it from the future. In the future as in the past, old men will
declare wars; but it will be young men, and now women, who will die in them.
