When the Guns Fell Silent
On this day in 1918, World War One came to an end, and an exhausted continent breathed a questioning sigh of relief.
On this day in 1918, World War One came to an end, the guns fell silent, and an exhausted continent breathed a questioning sigh of relief.
No one had wanted, or expected, the devastating war they'd gotten. Back in 1914, everyone had expected a short war, to last maybe a few months. That's what the last major European war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, had been like - field operations were over in around two months, plus an additional four-month siege of Paris. The previous wars of Italian and German unification were similarly short. But, thanks to new larger armies and new technology and tactics, World War One lasted over four years. Around nine million soldiers died, plus five million civilians, plus perhaps 23 million soldiers wounded. No one had expected anything like this.
It defined the generation. C. S. Lewis, in his much later autobiography, could even talk of "the tunnel outside Rouen" on the main rail line from England to the front, in assurance that "all my generation remember it."
Next to nobody fighting the war even really knew what they wanted from it. The war started when a Serbian agent assassinated an Austrian archduke; Austria demanded to make Serbia a puppet, they refused, and Austria invaded. Then Russia declared war to protect its ally Serbia. This was now a war between two Great Powers, which hadn't happened since 1870. Then, the Franco-Prussian War had stayed a war just between France and Germany. But now, all the Great Powers (save the Ottoman Empire) had formed into two allied camps. So, Germany came in on Austria's side; then France and Britain came in on Russia's. The Ottomans would join later that year to help Austria and Germany (thanks to previous German friendship, and Britain seizing some Ottoman ships it admittedly did need for the war); Italy would join a few years later on the side of France and England and Russia (thanks to diplomatic promises).
So, nobody except Austria and Italy had a positive reason for getting into the war. Really, no positive reason could make all the death and devastation of the war worth it. All the victors faced national crises after the war because it wasn't worth it. They all wanted to prevent something from happening - which may have started as "prevent Serbia from being annihilated" but quickly became "keep our enemies from growing too strong." This would eventually prove the central factor in the peace.
During the war, all countries brainstormed maps of war goals. Both sides divided up their enemies' colonies, annexed border regions of their enemies, and redrew the maps of Eastern Europe. But all of these were essentially dreaming on paper. None of this was the reason they went to war; none of it was the reason they stayed in it; none of it had any dream of being implemented when it was drafted.
People on both sides did realize the war needed to end. In 1917, Emperor Karl of Austria, especially, tried desperately to negotiate a separate peace. But the Allies insisted that Austria cede all the territory Italy wanted, and Karl refused - and then their negotiations leaked, which devastated Karl's political standing. Around the same time, the French army mutinied after years of hopeless war, and refused to attack at all. The French government finally ended the mutiny by, basically, giving in: there would be no more attacks until a new American army was in place to join in.
So, everyone kept doubling down at a war that was destroying everyone, because they weren't willing to give up on any acceptable terms.
Doubling down like that was an even worse decision than it normally would've been. At the time, the war was called "The Great War," because that was what it was.
The problem was technology. Artillery and supplies had gotten too good. Marching or charging into the teeth of enough machine guns would simply kill everyone; simply existing around heavier artillery would kill you in large craters unless you were in deep cover. So, both sides made cover - trenches - and only came out after heavy bombardment to keep the other side away from their guns. And then, it was a race to see if the attacker would get through "no man's land" before enough defenders got back to their machine guns. Sometimes it worked for a moment - but only at the cost of the bombardment making the ground more difficult to move over, meaning the attacker couldn't bring up enough men and supplies to hold the little he'd gained.
What we remember as World War I is the Western Front, the epitome of this trend. That was the most militarily significant front to Britain and France and Germany, and the only front where America fought. Both sides threw men into this short front, until there were nonstop lines of trenches from Switzerland to the sea. One attack after another was mostly unavailing, merely moving to a slightly different line of trenches.
(The Italian front had similar trenches; the Eastern Front and Arabian Front were more wide-open.)
There was no answer in the technology of the time. What eventually broke it was attrition of men and supplies. The Allied blockade was strangling German industry, driving them to greater and greater measures to send smaller and smaller amounts of shells and food to their army. But worse, all Europe was simply running out of manpower. In other words, enough people had died that the war just couldn't keep on going as it had been. Both sides' numbers were declining on the Western Front. It was the fresh American army arriving in mid-1918 that made the difference.
So it was no wonder the war stretched on for so long, no wonder so many thousands of people died, and no wonder the Allies won in the end.
But they had conquered a devastated Europe.
Historian G. J. Meyer says in his A World Undone: The Story of the Great War that if someone said the war was guided by a higher power who hated pre-war Europe, he couldn't refute it. Millions of people died; countries were ripped apart and devastated. Veterans who'd somehow survived the devastation, and men and women from the home front who’d had their lives rearranged to support the war, were left wondering what was the meaning of life and society. Writers Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway aptly called them "the lost generation."
This "lost generation" - seeing the devastated regimes around them - was fertile ground for all sorts of radical politics, from communism to fascism. Meanwhile, the colonial empires started to rumble with discontent since the heart had gone out of their rulers... and in many cases, those rulers had started recruiting their subjects to the army from desperation.
In a real sense, no one won World War I. No European country in the war came out ahead at the end of it. The Allies were just the last men standing, thanks to the fresh American army by their side. The only real "victor" was the United States, and that wasn't because of the fighting - it was because America had escaped any fighting on its soil, and had been selling arms and food to all the Allies. I'm with Meyer: the war seems as if it'd been designed to destroy pre-war Europe.
After the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, the statesmen had to piece together a new world order from the contradictory dreams they'd sketched during the war, and the Lost Generation had to find itself.
It was an impossible task. As the French Marshal Foch said about the eventual Treaty of Versailles, "This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years." Twenty years later, another war would cause "The Great War" to be renamed "World War I."
Nobody had expected what World War I turned into, nobody knew what they wanted from it, and nobody knew what would happen after it. But on 11 November 1918, one hope at least became true. The war was over.
I remembered 11/11 this year on the eleventh hour, having recently relistened to the Dan Carlin series "Blueprint for Armageddon". War sucks.