World History

Unit 6: World War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 24: World War I and the Russian Revolution

Mon, Mar 10, 2014

50. Tue, Mar 11, 2014

The current chapter deals in fairly orderly fashion with the factors leading up to and away from World War I, and also with the sources and consequences of the Russian Revolution. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of either of these events for the century that followed. 1917, in particular, was one of those pivotal years like 1848 and 1968, that defined an epoch.

What the chapter manages to miss entirely is the human dimension behind these two events. Both of them resulted in the loss of life to a degree almost unprecedented in the history of the world; both of them also wound up reconfiguring the geopolitical world in ways that are affecting us here and now almost daily. It's worth remembering, in light of our own recent history, that the nation of Iraq was created by Lord Allenby after World War I drawing a line on a map somewhere, as part of the process of carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire.

Nobody really had any idea when it started. When World War I began, the English soldiers were certain that they were going to go off to "teach Jerry a lesson" and be home by Christmas. It didn't work out that way.

World War I was the first war in which massive mechanization was unleashed against human targets, but the mechanization was too imperfect to be decisive: it was merely enough to mire the belligerents in an almost interminable bloodbath. When the original push of the German offensive was stopped along the Marne in September of 1914, both sides dug deep trenches about eight to ten feet deep, and the bulk of the remainder of the war (at least on the Western front) was conducted along the lines established at that point. Between those trenches was a short space — often as little as a few hundred feet — of ground. Over the next four years, that little space — called "no man's land" was garnished with vast coils of barbed wire. Nothing grew there. It was subjected during the winter and spring to repeated rains, and shaken to a kind of jellied mud, sometimes several feet deep, by ceaseless artillery bombardment. Periodically the troops on one side or the other would mass at one or another point of the line and go "over the top" — leaving the protection of their trenches to storm the opposing side's positions — wading through several feet of sucking mud and fighting their way through the barbed wire. Meanwhile, the opposing forces would defend themselves by raking the ground with machine-gun fire. The chance of reaching the opposing trenches alive at all was slight; the likelihood that one could then hold the position for more than a few hours was virtually nil. This completely fruitless activity was repeated not once or twice, or ten or fifteen times, but endlessly throughout the course of almost three years of war. When things didn't seem to be moving fast enough, both sides used poison gas as a way to stir things up — which as often as not came back to visit the attackers when the wind changed. The casualties — both fatalities and lifelong debilitating injuries — were unprecedented, and the impact on the consciousness of Europe was long-lasting.

It's worth reading some of the poetry written from the First World War: it's visceral, powerful material. Among the great English poets of the period were Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. Brooke never saw action, but died en route to Gallipoli. Owen was killed in the last days of the war, and Sassoon survived and remained a strong antiwar activist until his death in the 1960s.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring 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.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

— Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918

• Look at the maps, which are relatively informative. What transformations were made in the process?
• What gave rise to the war? The idea of "trip-wire" treaties has been regarded with some suspicion since 1914, but is that all? What else really led to this?
• What, if anything, did the First World War settle? The terms of the Versailles/Paris treaty were such that the main belligerents were back at it a short generation later. In most long-view interpretations of the twentieth century, the two World Wars were really one, separated by a few years of respite. But without the First, the Second would almost certainly never have come about. Meanwhile, such people as Ezra Pound (American poet) pronounced it the "wreck of a civilization". In many respects it was.

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