Tag: Eleventh hour

The immediate cause of the Great War was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo but the remote causes could be traced back more than fifty years with the rise and rise of a unified German state in the middle of Europe. This unification which brought all ethnic Germans, except those in Austria and Switzerland together, under the leadership of the militaristic Prussian state was painstakingly put together under the uncompromising hand of Otto von Bismarck, also known to the world as the Iron Chancellor. Even before this unification was complete, the military fettle of the new nation was tested against France, the only country which had the military clout to stand against the new German Empire. They had been contemptuously swatted aside in a short sharp war which put the French in their place. The war, short as it was, struck such a blow at French morale and national integrity that it was the subject of a bitter novel, The debacle, by the eminent French writer Emile Zola. To make matters worse, the seeds of another round of fighting were sown by the annexation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Had this annexation not been reversed at the end of the Great war, the former Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger would have been born a German and not French as we have come to know him to be.

The Germans did not go through the pain of unification for sentimental reasons but for the purpose of building a thrusting productive country in the heart of Europe; a new country with the capacity to compete with Britain and her empire for global markets and diplomatic influence. Up until that time, the British under the protection of the Royal Navy extended their influence all over the world making it difficult for other nations to threaten the monopoly which Britain exercised over global trade and diplomacy at that time. It has to be said that Britain had been dominant at sea for close to a century and was determined to hold on to her pre-eminent status at all cost if necessary. To this end, the British Parliament passed the Naval Defence Act, which formally adopted the ‘two-power standard’. This stipulated that the Royal Navy should maintain a number of battleships at least equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies in the world. The first sign that the Germans were determined to challenge British hegemony was that she started a spate of warship building which threatened to produce enough ships to close the gap in naval power with Britain. The British were not amused and had to build up their naval capacity to such an extent that the Royal Navy remained the most powerful navy at the beginning of WW I. But, this came at great cost.

The Germans arrived late, very late at the European table where the rest of the world, especially Africa was on the menu. It was in an attempt to gather something for themselves that Germany was at the front of efforts to partition Africa. They were determined to ‘have their own place in the sun’ and this is why it fell to Bismarck to invite the statesmen of Europe to Berlin, there to carve up Africa like a turkey to the satisfaction of European interests. At the end of the conference however, Germany came away with small portions of African real estate which could not have satisfied her ‘legitimate’ yearning for a place in the sun. What she could not win at the Conference table, Germany confidently expected to win in battle and so, the squabble over Africa which Bismarck wanted to prevent was only postponed.

The period before WW I was one of a great industrial leap forward and in each country in Europe, it was full steam ahead as they produced a broad spectrum of industrial goods at the rate of knots. The factories were not only producing domestic appliances and bicycles but were turning their attention to the production of arms, ammunition and powerful explosives with which to force their influence over their neighbours, some of them like Germany and Italy which had just been forged and therefore ready to defend their new status with blood if necessary.

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The situation in Europe was such that their kings, statesmen, generals and the general populace which had no idea what a straggly little machine gun could do to human flesh clamoured for war. When war was declared, the news was welcomed with jubilation and uncontrolled excitement. The young men were fairly giddy with expectation as they went off or were carried to the war front by speedy railways which criss-crossed the continent like blood vessels through muscles. Even the ladies prepared for a desirable phase in their lives, the thought of losing their loved ones in the war very far from their minds. It was as if the whole of Europe was preparing for a grand picnic by the sea side.

When the guns began to bellow and machine guns began to stutter, it was clear that in the words of General Sherman during the American civil war, war was hell as all those caught up in it began to howl in the manner of demented wolves. Millions of men were thrown into the conflict and they were led into it by insensate generals who saw their men as nothing more than cannon fodder to be slaughtered at will for the achievement of minor military objectives. The armies stood toe to toe and let loose barrage after barrage of deadly munitions at the practically unprotected positions of the enemy. At the battle of the Somme in a five month period, the British army sustained more than 400,000 casualties with sixty thousand young men mown down like grass in the first morning of the battle; the largest single casualty figure for a day’s fighting in the history of the British army. Their commander, Douglas Haig was unperturbed by this scale of slaughter for which he was christened ‘Butcher’ by his men who bore the brunt of his strategy of fighting a war of attrition. So many men were lost that some working class men in Britain began to wonder if their officers were deliberately using the war as a means of decimating the working class. The only argument against this was that the officers drawn from the middle and ruling classes were losing their members in similar proportion. The men continued to bleed out into the mud of Flanders without any perceptible shift in territorial control. At the end of the battle of the Somme for example, the British had gained six miles of a muddy patch of ground for the loss of 420,000 men whilst their allies, the French lost 200,000 men. German casualty figures showed that they lost 450,000 men and their failure to replace such a large number of experienced fighting men in this and subsequent battles eventually led to their defeat in 1918. Thus, the Butcher won the war but at what cost.

In the end, the whole of Europe lost the war and I for one am awed by the severally demonstrated European capacity for the slaughter of men and the wanton destruction of material. It is a capacity totally unmatched and unmatchable by Africans, with the exception of those that had been trained in European war schools. The first field of technological development was in the development and production of weapons of mass destruction. It was during the Great war that tanks and aircraft were first used in battle and by the Second World War both had been converted into excellent killing machines but at least aircraft flying all over the world today have revolutionised human movement and is set to do even more. It appears that war, total war is a spur to the development of technology. Can it be that our lack of appetite for the large scale slaughter of human beings is at least partly responsible for our inability with coming to terms with the handling of cutting edge technology at this point in time?

A truly astounding post-script to the Great war is that three months short of the 31st anniversary of the Armistice, armed with infinitely more murderous weapons, the antagonists were back at their old game; slaughtering men, women and children with apparent joyful abandon, this time all over the world. The condition for growing poppies did not arise this time around and the highlight of this war were the mushroom clouds which covered Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the Japanese were fed a diet of atomic bombs to finally bring them to their collective knees.

There seems to be something strange about dates which have a symmetry to them. Many people attach some significance to them even though nothing of historical interest has been associated with for example, 2/2/22 or 5/5/55 unless an event has been engineered to fall on any of those days. One of such events was the Armistice which commanded hostilities to be halted thus bringing the First World War to its weary end. That hostilities were resumed only thirty-one years later with roughly the same antagonists shows that the end of what the Europeans call the Great War was simply a cooling off period. The story of that Armistice of 1918 is that the guns which had been blasting away for four torrid years fell silent all across the battle fields mainly in Northern France and Belgium on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918. So insistent were the silly generals who signed the papers bringing the war to an end on rounding things off neatly that they continued to fire their infernal guns for six hours after they agreed that the war was over. This made it possible for that neat end to be engineered but it led to 13,000 needless deaths which occurred between the time the Armistice was signed and the time fighting stopped all across the war front.

That 13,000 men were sacrificed on the altar of ego in the six hours leading to the officially sanctioned end of that war epitomises the mind set of the murderous men who led the armies which were engaged in that war. As far as those men were concerned, millions of young men had been wasted up to the point of signing the Armistice and so, what could be the significance of only a few thousands more?

The Great war as it was known to all the Europeans of that period was the first large scale war to be fought in Europe since the  new age which was brought about by the Industrial Revolution was established. The time before then when wars raged through Europe was some hundred years earlier when Napoleon was trying to establish what he called the European System designed to control the combined economy of Europe under French leadership. War at that time consisted of a few thousand men ranged against each other across a conveniently flat field and exchanging desultory fire from a few artillery pieces whilst waiting for the opportunity to unleash their respective gentlemen soldiers mounted on large horses in thunderous Calvary charges in which rather more horses than riders were killed. In effect they were indulged in extensive war games, the most skilful of the generals being Napoleon who for almost fifteen years brought the ancient European regimes to their collective knees until he went one battle too far and the combined armies of Europe halted his progress in the small Belgian village of Waterloo in 1815. From that time until 1914, there was no major battle not to talk of a war in Europe except for the Franco-Prussian War which led to the establishment of the German Empire in the heart of Europe. This brought a new power to the concert of European powers and the disruption which this caused led to the First World War and the immense slaughter of the innocents on the Western front.

The starting pistol for this conflict was fired in June 1914, at the height of what has gone down in history as a glorious summer all over Europe. The shots which were fired by a Bosnian nationalist killed Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on the streets of Sarajevo and set in motion a series of what at the time were an inevitable series of events which culminated in the frenzied mobilisation of armies all over Europe and the commencement of the Great war which was ostensibly fought to end all wars in Europe.

Archduke Ferdinand was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time of his murder. At that time, Serbia had just been annexed against the wishes of the Serbs by the Austro-Hungarian empire at a time when powerful winds of nationalism were sweeping through Europe especially in the Balkans. All throughout that region, the various sub-nationalities which inhabited the region wanted to be free of control by any of the big nations including the Ottoman Empire and sharply resented the control which the Austro-Hungarians had on them. At the same time, the various Slavic peoples placed themselves under the protection of Russia, the largest and most powerful Slavic country and so when the Archduke was assassinated and the mighty Austro- Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, that declaration applied to Russia as well and straightaway, Russia was also at war with Austro-Hungary which in turn had an alliance with Germany which in turn declared war on Russia as a member of the Triple Alliance. To thicken the stew further, both France and  Britain were in the Entente cordiale with Russia and were bound by that treaty to declare war on Germany and her allies. However Britain did not invoke the titles of their alliance until the Germans, in order to attack Paris and knock the French out of the war violated the neutrality of Belgium in order to get to grips with the French defenders. In no time at all, virtually all European countries had mobilised their armies and were at war on one side or the other.

What should have frightened all the belligerents at the beginning of the war was how easy it was to mobilise all their armies and get them to the war fronts which were separated by thousands of miles. The point was that unlike when Napoleon was rampaging through Europe on horseback a hundred years before, they had the benefit of railways which made army movements very easy. That was the first sign that technology was going to play a major part in that war and that was very bad news for the poor soldiers who had been called up to die and how they died; blown up by very high explosives, blasted to hell by machine gun fire, poisoned with highly toxic gasses, afflicted with a plethora of awful diseases and exposed to the brutal stupidity of their befuddled generals. The recruits who sang lustily as they went off to war were soon acquainted with the horrors of a war they were sure would be over by Christmas. Those who survived had the rest of their lives to regret their ill-advised youthful enthusiasm.

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Very early in the war, it was soon appreciated that human beings were simply not designed to stand up to high velocity bullets and a constant barrage of artillery shells fired by guns manufactured with unyielding steel. Their response was to dig mazes of trenches in which they took shelter from the deadly projectiles slung at their positions from their enemies from whom they were separated by what they called no man’s land. Many of those poor young men did not live to feel the freedom of getting out of those trenches as they were mown down by machine gun fire whenever they were ordered to go over the top to get to grips with the enemy. There certainly was very little hiding place from extreme danger in those awful trenches.

Members of my generation would be familiar with the poppy days of our childhood when we bought and displayed on our persons red paper poppies with a black centre. This was in remembrance of those that had died in British wars fought in the twentieth century at a time when we were part of the now defunct British Empire. Monies collected from the sale of the poppies were supposedly used for the welfare of the veterans of those wars who needed financial support. For further information, the poppy was chosen as an emblem of that endeavour because that blood red flower bloomed with uncommon vigour on the battle fields as it did on other disturbed pastures and with all the disturbances caused by the millions of shells detonated all over the battlefields, there was no wonder that those fields were fairly overlaid with a carpet of poppies which suggested that all the blood spilt on that area which has come down to us as the Western front germinated and grew into blood-red flowers in memory of those that perished fighting a war they did not really understand.

To be continued.