It is an unwelcome reflection that history tends to be a thin list of names and dates for most people, its sweated and bloody realities and their meanings lost among labels. Take the label ‘the First World War’. Even as it happened people called it ‘the Great War’, because not since the seventeenth century had conflict been so general across Europe, though this time with the benefit of industrial means of slaughter in the form of new military technologies. But the appropriation of a label is the first step to limiting the perception of those who were not there, and therefore only grasp at third hand the true significances of the event.
Consider what these are in relation to the First World War, which occasioned a shocking change to history of such deep seriousness that we are trying to deal with it still.
Everyone knows about the massacre of the trenches – the result of a hideous encounter between modern weaponry and outdated tactics, which saw men walking line abreast into hailstorms of machine-gun and artillery fire. But it is a surprise to remember that it was a short war, only four years in duration against the Second World War’s six years and the ten years and counting of the conflict in Afghanistan.
But we need to remember too the collapse of Russia into revolution, and the Soviet era that followed; and of the Spartacist uprising in Germany at the war’s end, along with the redrawing of Europe’s boundaries and the reshuffling of colonial holdings in Africa and elsewhere.
We need to remember that in the shock and depletion of the war’s immediate aftermath, a global influenza pandemic killed more people than died in the war: the war’s four years of military and civilian deaths totalled 37 million, the one year of the pandemic killed over 50 million.
We need to remember that women moved in large numbers from the home to the munitions factories and farmlands, inducing a major change in social attitudes and women’s status. In Britain women replaced 2 million men in the workforce, producing 80 per cent of the munitions. Their ‘reward’ in 1918 was to be given the vote for the first time – though only for those of thirty years of age and over; it took another ten years for the voting age to be equalised for both sexes. Millions of women experienced widowhood and spinsterhood as a result of the war, or found themselves caring for disabled and traumatised husbands and male relatives for the rest of their lives.
We need to remember that in the decade following the war, the ‘Roaring Twenties’, there was a subliminal note of hysteria reflected variously in the paintings of George Grosz, the crime epidemic of America’s ‘Prohibition’ madness, the jazz scene, the economic collapse of 1929 and subsequent Depression, the rise of Fascism, and much besides. This frenetic time is captured in The Long Weekend by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, depicting an era of vivid abandon and trauma.
But above all we need to recognise that 1914 saw not just the beginning of the First World War, but the beginning of an epoch of hot and cold conflicts in various guises that still continue today. There is no disagreement that the mistakes and unfinished business of the First World War’s ‘ending’ led to the Second World War, which itself ‘ended’ only with the impasse of the Cold War, which in turn sparked many hot proxy wars around the globe from South America to Vietnam and beyond.
We certainly need reminding of the First World War’s responsibility for what is currently happening in the Middle East. The British Empire had more than a million soldiers in that region by 1918, fighting Germany’s Ottoman allies in order to protect the land and sea routes to India and to control the Persian oilfields. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had in 1911 ordered the Royal Navy (then the world’s largest by far, and the Empire’s – indeed the world’s – police force) to switch from coal-fired to oil-fired engines to prevent it being held hostage by striking coal miners in Wales and Yorkshire. That meant Britain had to take on a new responsibility: controlling the Persian oilfields.
Then, as Colonial Secretary in the years after the war, Churchill presided over the division of the Ottoman Empire, creating Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria out of nothing and giving the latter to France. Before the 1921 Cairo Conference at which this happened, John Maynard Keynes said to Churchill, ‘If you cut up the map of the Middle East with a pair of scissors you will still be fighting wars there in a hundred years’ time.’ He has been proved right.
In many ways, therefore, the First World War is still with us. My paternal grandfather fought and was wounded in that struggle, and then until 1920 worked for the War Graves Commission in Flanders, laying out the cemeteries where the bones of huge armies of boys and young men lie buried. Many of us from around the world have relatives memorialised on those serried ranks of gravestones and on the Menin Gate at Ypres – from Britain, France, Canada, India, South Africa, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, while in Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany equal and often greater losses are recorded in the rolls of what must surely be one of the least pointful and most humanly destructive conflicts ever to occur in history.
Even though we have too much justification for thinking that the memory of past wars will not make us wise enough to avoid wars in future, it is still right to recall the experience of them, if only to keep alive the hope that wisdom will one day come; and to remember the vast fields of young promise that were so wantonly mown flat – in the hope, the vain hope, that the ‘sacrifice’ would bring peace. By one of those dreadful ironies that the label version of history obscures, it was not the living who found peace, but only the dead who died for them.