End of an Era

Earlier this week, a man named Claude Choles died at the age of 110 in Australia.

He was the last remaining World War 1 combatant in the entire world, the last soldier of the millions who went to war from 1914 to 1918.  America's last WW1 veteran, Frank Buckles, passed away in February of this year.

I was discussing the war with a guy I work with a few weeks ago, and he said something that I had never considered before:  WW1 was a conflict that combined 20th century weaponry (like the machine gun) with 19th century tactics (like horse cavalry).  For example, there were British generals who were career cavalrymen who were insistent, even in the face of unquestionable evidence, that men on horseback could overrun machine gun positions.  Millions of British soldiers paid the price for this kind of stupidity and narrow-mindedness.

World War 1, probably more than any other conflict of the 20th century, shaped the world as we know it today.  It was in no small part responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ushered in an era of communism, and it caused the creation of the Middle East as we know it.  The Ottoman Empire, which even at the beginning of the 20th century still held a vast amount of territory, cast its lot with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) in the First World War.  After the conflict ended, the Ottoman Empire was no more, and its territories were divided up amongst the victors.  The British and French, rightly or wrongly, became rulers of large parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and administered these territories as they saw fit--which didn't always sit well with the locals.  Indeed, many of the lines we see on maps today for the borders of countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia were drawn by the British for their own purposes.  They created monarchies where none had existed before and put men on the throne who were to rule countries that they weren't even from.  These are just a few examples.

Today, at least in this country, I feel as if WW1 is the forgotten war.  There is no national monument in Washington DC to commemorate the fallen.  On Amazon, there are 5 time as many World War 2 titles as there are World War 1 titles (not to detract from WW2, which in scope was a much wider conflict--truly a World War).  Next time you are in a Borders bookstore, go to the history section and look at the number of shelves occupied by WW1 books, compared to how many are occupied by WW2 books (in our local Borders, the WW1 books thinly cover the upper three shelves of one "book case", whereas the WW2 books are contained in 4 entire book cases).

We didn't get involved until 1917, and the war ended in 1918, but we still sent over a million men to Europe, and over a hundred thousand of them didn't come home.  I feel that we owe it to them to at least have a basic understanding of what they served and died for.  The story of how the war started is tragic, and it seems almost as if the whole affair could have been avoided but for a few key decisions on the parts of a handful of men.  But it is also a fascinating (if morbidly so) look at the world's leaders of the age, and the weaknesses and hubris that led to a conflagration that killed entire generations of the countries involved.

There is a good website, www.firstworldwar.com, which is a pretty user-friendly way to find out the 5 W's (who, what, when, where, and why) of WW1.  Or, I would recommend you read A World Undone:  the Story of the Great War, 1914-1918, by G.J. Meyer.  I am in the last hundred pages of this book myself, and I must say it is one of the most well-written history books I've ever read (and I've read a LOT of history books); he takes what could be a fairly dry topic and makes it very engaging and interesting.

It was called the Great War, the War to End All Wars.  On this side of things we know that it would not be humanity's last great conflict, but would merely set the stage for more to come.  In this light, the battles of WW1 are arguably some of the most important of the 20th century.