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The peace on the eastern front allowed a renewed offensive by the Germans on the western front, but Germany’s decision to use unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic proved as harmful to their cause as sending Lenin to Russia had proved helpful. President Wilson gave this, together with Germany’s attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as reasons for bringing America, with all its troops and resources, into the war on 6th April 1917. Unable to carry the fight on any longer, Germany surrendered and peace finally came on 11th November 1918.
Of the 65 million men who had taken part in the war, over eight million were killed, up to 20 million were wounded – including hundreds of thousands of victims blinded and crippled by chemical warfare – and several million others were captured and kept as prisoners of war. Worse still, in the final stages of the war, an influenza epidemic preyed on the general exhaustion and swept the world, killing an estimated 20 million people100 – at least twice the number that had died in the War.101 Named the ‘Spanish Influenza’ because the Spaniards had been one of the few nations not to censor information on it, the flu predominantly affected young healthy people and proved to be virtually untreatable.
Following the war, the great powers met in Versailles, near Paris, to deal with the aftermath and to ensure that Europe never saw such devastation again. The Germans and the Russians were not invited to take part. The Treaty that was signed in June 1919 is most memorable for the way in which Germany was treated. While all the parties wanted Germany punished for the damage it had caused, France specifically wanted to ensure that the country would never be able to wage war on her again and rushed through draconian and ruinous terms. Germany was ultimately deprived of some 13 percent of its 1914 territory, including the lands Germany had seized from France in 1871. Germany lost some six million Germans, and its overseas possessions were shared among the victorious powers. Additionally, its army was limited to a 100,000-strong defensive force and the country was denied the right to possess aircraft, heavy weapons and submarines. On top of this, the French also forced Germany to pay huge war reparations of billions of gold marks. This humiliation and economic devastation created the instability in Germany that allowed Hitler and his Fascist minions to rise to prominence and eventual control of Germany.
The Treaty of Versailles included a clause that called for the creation of a multinational body, the League of Nations, designed to ensure peace in the future and resolve any international disputes before they escalated into war. The Arab states created an equivalent organisation, the Arab League, to look after their own interests. One of the League’s objectives was to help territories liberated from German and Turkish rule to achieve self-determination. As a result, the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were divided into smaller states, a split based roughly on languages spoken. Out of Austria-Hungary came Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and a new Austrian Republic.102
In addition to being forced to grant independence to the Baltic states, the Soviet government had also been required to return to Poland the territory Russia had taken from it under the tsar. Between 1772 and 1795 the old Poland had been divided up between tsarist Russia, Habsburg Austria and an emergent Prussia, and had effectively disappeared from the map. At the end of the war, a new independent Polish Republic was recognised by the League of Nations and a weakened Russia and Germany were forced to return much of the land they had taken in the previous century. However, within twenty years Poland would suffer both a brutal German invasion and a Soviet occupation under which the country was once again divided and under which millions of Poles would lose their lives.
The Ottoman Empire, only previously tolerated because a power vacuum in the region would have been considerably worse, was finally dismembered. Ignoring complaints by the Arabs, who had supported Britain against the Turks on the condition that they would be given their independence, Iraq and Palestine were given to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France. To soften the blow they were referred to as ‘mandates’ rather than colonies. Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Atatürk or Father of the Turks) abolished the Caliphate and proclaimed the Turkish Republic in 1921. Wishing to turn Turkey into a modern secular republic, Atatürk embarked on a rapid modernisation programme, including the replacement of Sharia law by Western law, and of the Arabic alphabet by the Latin one.