The First World War.docx

The First World WarP1 The First World War was a social and political cataclysm. Nine million soldiers died and millions more suffered mental and physical injuries. The warcost billions of dollars, not only in military expenses but also in damage toproperty.The war originated in a small conflict in Eastern Europe that snowballed into a much larger conflict. This happened because of disagreements between two groups of allied countries that were committed to rigid military plans. At the outset they took steps that were too aggressive, since none of the participants predicted the wars awfulness.P5 By comparison, the period from 1815 to 1914 does seem relatively tranquil. The relative absence of warfare between nations allowed for a major burst in industrialization and technological development, which resulted in disruptions, to be sure, even as the overall standard of living rose in most places.P5 Yet this era cannot honestly be described as an era of complete tranquility. In the middle of the century, major conflicts were associated with the unification of the German and Italian nations. In response to the forces of nationalism, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire fought to stave off disintegration. Meanwhile, Britain and Franceand to a lesser degree Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, and the United Statesexpanded their empires overseas. For the most part, their colonies were obtained by shedding the blood of the native inhabitants and, to a lesser extent, the blood of their own soldiers.P5 The building of nations, empires, and industries was the main feature of European, Japanese, and U.S. history in the period from 1850 to 1914. The times seemed peaceful from the perspective of the industrializing countries, but much of the rest of the world found itself dominated by force. It was hardP6 to resist the industrial countries, which enjoyed a temporary advantage in weapons, communications, and medicine. They harnessed the economies of their colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific to serve their needs, while also reaping profits from investments in parts of the world that were not formally colonized, such as China and Latin America.Technologically driven dominance fostered a sense of well-being andsuperiority in the industrializing countries, even as their dominance broughtnew hopes and miseries to much of the rest of the world. This seems to be acontradiction but many scholars have concluded that it is not. The prevailing political idea of the nineteenth-century industrial countries was liberalism. Liberals believed in the freedoms guaranteed by such documents as the U.S. Bill of Rights, like freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Liberalsalso believed in free trade and tended to support laissez-faire economic policies, in other words those policies that gave business owners a free hand toregulate their own affairs. Liberalism was associated with progressive causes,like the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves.Liberalism was also associated with revolutionary change. British liberalsreformed their parliament in 1832 to make it more representative. Liberals on the European continent were associated with movements to overthrowmonarchies and to form new nation-states like Germany and Italy. In theUnited States, liberalism was associated with the Republican Party and withthe Union side in the Civil War. In Japan, liberals were led by the EmperorMeiji as they remade their country into a unified, industrializing powerhousewith a constitutional government. Nineteenth-century liberalism is most often remembered for its positive political accomplishments, yet liberalism had its darker side. Liberal thinkers believed that free markets and unregulated businesses produced the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but many people suffered through wrenching changes in agriculture and industry. Standards of living improved overall but many people were still miserable. Many liberals turned a blind eye to industrial slums and to rural starvation, too. In the face of mass miseryin Ireland during the great famines, or in the working-class neighborhoods of industrial cities like Manchester, liberals often adhered to their faith in free-market solutions, even when the free market did not appear to be helping. Liberals were even able to make themselves comfortable with the use of force to dominate less-developed countries. To liberals it appeared to be folly for Africans and Asians to resist empire-building, because the industrial countries had superior knowledge and technology. Liberal belief in free trade and free government might seem to contradict the spread of empires around the world, but the empire builders often thought that they were doing “the P7 natives” a favor by showing them how to run things. Liberals thought that when Africans and Asians demonstrated that they had assimilated liberal ideas about good governmenta process that some liberals likened to children growing upthen they might rule themselves.P7 With hindsight, it is possible to see that liberal imperialism contained the seeds of its own destruction. In the colonies, Americans, Europeans, and Japanese developed ideas about their own racial superiority that they began to employ in their relations with their neighbors. Many Europeans even began to think of themselves as separate racesa French race, a German race,and an Anglo-Saxon or English raceeven though millennia of migrations and interactions between Western European countries made such claims historically and biologically preposterous. Familiarity with warfare against colonial “inferiors” also predisposed Americans, Europeans, and Japanese to think that their armies and navies could conquer each others territories.P8 At the start of the First World War, possibly the most interesting factabout world geography was that European empires controlled 84 percentof the planets land surface.P14 The new empire of Germany sought to find a role for itself in the era of industrialization and empire-building. Germany was industrializing rapidly and was exceeding all other nations in the quality and volume of its productivity.The First World Wars origins stem largely from the rise of Germany to the status of a great power.P19 In the minds of some prominent Germans, efficiency was a necessity for survival. A professor and popular lecturer from the University of Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke, wrote in the late 1890s that “Without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is multiplicity of States. The laws of human thought and of human nature forbid any alternative, neither is one to be wished for.” For Treitschke, war was a natural and positive state. His thoughts were echoed by the German general Friedrich von Bernhardi, who believed that war was a natural and positive part of human evolution. In his popular book, Germany and the Next War, Bernhardi wrote:This aspiration for the abolition of war is directly antagonistic to the greatuniversal laws which rule all life. War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. “War is the father of all things.” The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recognized this.The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. “To supplant or to be supplanted is the essence of life,” says Goethe, and the strong life gains the upper hand. The law of the stronger holds good everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to procure themselves the most favorable conditions of life and to assert themselves in the universal economy of Nature. The weaker succumb. . . . The man of strong will and strong intellect tries by every means to assert himself, the ambitious strive to rise, and in this effort the individual is far from being guided merely by the consciousness of right.warfare was described as natural and positive.P29 The First World War began in Bosnia, an obscure province in the southeastern corner of Austria-Hungary. On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, visited the capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo.Optimism, 19141916 P35 In the first week of August, millions of regular soldiers and reservists marched to train stations. Enthusiasm for the war appeared to be widespread, at least in public. The soldiers boarded trains and headed for the front lines. Many soldiers were optimistic, too. For the most part the soldiers were cheered by crowds of people, but many intellectuals expressed their reservations. P44 In hindsight such losses have seemed senseless to many historians and readers. It must be remembered that at the time there remained widespread popular support for the war. People in each country aided the war effort in the belief that their country was fighting on the side of righteousness. Such beliefs continued even as the war in Western Europe became bogged down in trench warfare.P45 The British lieutenant SiegfriedSassoon described the appearance of dead bodies in the Flanders mud in his poem, “Counter-Attack”:The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legsHigh-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the sapsAnd trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,P46Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.And then the rain began, the jolly old rain!9 P48 The most famous description of the new technology came from a young British officer, Wilfred Owen, serving on the Western Front later in the war. His poem about gas, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” uses vivid description and soldierly irony to condemn the war.GAS! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;P49 But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,And floundring like a man in fire or lime. . . .Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devils sick of sin;If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori11P60 Then why is it called a “world war”? Initially, the British called it the Great War and the French used a phrase that meant the same thing, la grande guerre. “World war” comes from the German Weltkrieg, which means “war of global significance” just as much as it does “war around the world.” In any event the First World War