Veteran’s Day was Armistice Day and we commemorate it on November 11 because that was the date World War I ended. We mostly forget World War I these days. It was an ambiguous effort that was mostly just a horror show of pointless death. There was not the good versus evil frame we got out of World War II. It is to us as far in the past as the Napoleonic Wars were to the people of that day.
Dan Carlin has a good Hardcore History episode this month that discusses the War. I’m only about half way through it, but he suggests that the war likely could have been averted if the individuals running the machinery of diplomacy were mediocre or better. A statesman like Otto Von Bismarck could successfully run the machinery which he, in large part created; but his like was not in power in 1914.
The spark that lit the powder keg was when a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife. This prompted the Austria-Hungary Empire to deliver an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Serbia turned to Russia, which styled itself as Protector of the Slavs, for protection. Austria Hungary was allied with Germany. The Germans’ war strategy (the Schlieffen Plan) for fighting Russia required that Germany assume France would get drawn into the conflict. Germany made demands upon France
to assure it’s neutrality while it fought Russia. The demands were unacceptable to France.
Russia would be slow to mobilize, so the Germans’ plan required rapid action, taking out France and neutralizing it as a threat before Russia could get mobilized. The border between Germany and France was heavily fortified; so, to defeat France quickly, the German plan required that it go through Belgium.
Belgium was neutral and had allied with Great Britain to assure that neutrality. Great Britain did not like the idea of the ports of Belgium being controlled by a great party. When Germany violated Belgian neutrality, Great Britain was drawn into the war. Germany pushed into France but did not get the quick victory it sought. Fairly quickly, battle lines were formed and a long, grueling trench warfare commenced. The industrialization that had developed since the last big war favored defensive positions. Frontal assaults were typically costly and ineffective.
Eventually, the War drew in the Americans and caused the collapse of the Russian Empire and beginnings of the USSR. It was a war of attrition and the end was not caused so much by a spectacular victory or collapse among combatants but when one side became too exhausted to fight any more. The pointlessness of the lives lost continues to be remarkable.
World War I started, not because it had to; but rather because the combatants were insufficiently aware of the costs and did not do what was necessary to avoid it. On Veteran’s Day we should commemorate not just the heroism of the dead or the service of the living; but also the danger of invoking that heroism and service to pointless ends.
Nice consice summary of the war’s beginning Doug, thank you.
I concur with Mr. Costner. Next year marks the centennial of the beginning of it, and I’m sure that there will be new books and discussions on it. I hope that attracts some attention in this country before 2017, the year we entered.
Er, 2017 would be the centennial of the year we entered.
No worries…It was the war to end all wars.
Well done, Dog. I am always reminded of the words of the World War I poets, especially Wilfred Own who was killed a week before the war ended.
Wilfred Owen
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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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.
Many years, I have commemorated the day on this blog with WWI poetry. One of my other favorites:
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Dog, I had not read this poem before. It is very powerful. Who wrote it?
Dog, I see that Wilfred Owen also wrote this poem.
“…we should commemorate not just the heroism of the dead or the service of the living; but also the danger of invoking that heroism and service to pointless ends.”
Amen, a thousand times. This applies well to our foreign policy in the past 20 or so years, in my estimation. The only worthwhile action we’ve waged in that time was the hunt for bin Laden.
Full agreement here. There is great risk to waiving the bloody shirt for uneccessary conflicts.
Refreshing to see that there are sensible people in this state who don’t go raving jingoistic ideological nonsense. If I said some of this aloud, the great patriots I know would start looking for a rope to hang me in the name of their heroes, Stutzman, Bucshon, Rokita and Pence.
I think you forgot one…or more.
Yeah. I figured they were “representatives” in the true sense of the term rather than how they are serving or have served. They sure don’t represent me.