To my 19-year-old son, the First World War — which ended 100 years ago
today — is as remote an event as the Congress of Berlin was to me when I
was 19, Lloyd George as distant a figure as Disraeli. To my generation,
the First World War was not quite history. My father’s father, John
Ferguson, had joined up at the age of 17 and fought on the western front
as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was one of more than 6m men
from the United Kingdom who served. Of that number, 722,785 did not come
back alive. Just under half of all those who lost their lives were aged
between 16 and 24 — a fact that never fails to startle.
John Ferguson was one of the lucky ones who survived and returned. But,
like more than 1.6m other servicemen, he did not come back unscarred. He
was shot through the shoulder by a German sniper. He survived a gas
attack, though his lungs suffered permanent damage.
My grandfather’s most vivid recollection of the war was of a German
attack. As the enemy advanced, he and his comrades fixed bayonets and
prepared for the order to go over the top. At the last moment, however,
the command was given to another regiment. So heavy were the casualties in
the ensuing engagement that my grandfather felt sure he would have died if
it had been the Seaforths’ turn.
As a schoolboy, reading the poetry of Wilfred Owen, learning to shoot an
antiquated rifle in our school’s Combined Cadet Force, I could readily
imagine the raw fear of awaiting that order. I wonder if my son knows that
sensation.
His generation is not only more distant from the war than mine. It has
also been exposed to a great deal of nonsense on the subject. Here are
just a few examples I have encountered in recent weeks.
1) Despite the enormous sacrifices of life and treasure, the war was worth
fighting. (No, as I argued in my book The Pity of War, an unprepared
Britain would probably have been better off staying out, or at least
delaying its intervention.)
2) The peace of 1919 failed and was followed just 20 years later by
another world war because there wasn’t enough European integration in the
1920s. We learnt our lesson after 1945 and that’s why we haven’t had a
third world war. (No, we haven’t had a third world war mainly because of
Nato.)
3) The peace failed because of American isolationism. (No, it failed
because Woodrow Wilson’s belief that Europe’s borders could be redrawn on
the basis of national “self-determination” was naive.)
4) Today, 100 years later, politics in both Europe and the United States
is afflicted by the same pathologies that destabilised Europe after the
First World War. (No, populism isn’t fascism.)
Let me counter with 10 points that I would like all my children to
understand about what happened to their great-grandfather’s generation.
1) The war was not “for civilisation”, as claimed on John Ferguson’s
Victory Medal. It was a war for predominance between the six great
European empires — the British, the French and the Russian against the
German, the Austrian and the Ottoman — that broke out because all their
leaders miscalculated that the costs of inaction would exceed the costs of
war.
2) It was not fought mainly by infantrymen going over the top. It was
fought mainly with artillery. Shellfire caused 75% of casualties. The
war-winning weapons were not poison gas or tanks so much as improvements
in artillery tactics (the creeping barrage, aerial reconnaissance).
3) The Germans were not doomed to lose. If the French had collapsed in the
first six months of the war — when 528,000 French soldiers were
permanently incapacitated — it could have been 1870 or 1940. French
resilience was one of the surprises of the war. Even so, by mid-1917 the
French were finished as an attacking force. German submarines were sinking
frightening numbers of the ships supplying Britain. With Russia consumed
by the revolution, American investors saw a German victory as possible as
late as the spring of 1918.
4) True, the Germans were handicapped in many ways. Their allies were
weak: Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria. Their generals used methods —
submarine warfare, in particular — that made American intervention likely,
if not inevitable.
5) Economically, too, the German side was at a massive disadvantage.
Britain and her allies had bigger empires (the population ratio was 5.3 to
1), bigger economies (3.6 to 1) and bigger budgets (2.4 to 1). Moreover,
even before the US entered the war, Britain had access to Wall Street.
6) However, the Germans were formidably superior at killing (or capturing)
the other side. Overall, the Central Powers killed 35% more men than they
lost, and their average cost of killing an enemy soldier was roughly a
third of the other side’s. The German soldiers were effective enough to
win their war against Russia in 1917.
7) The Germans ultimately lost because the British Army proved more
resilient than theirs. Men such as John Ferguson simply would not give up,
despite all the hardships they had to endure. Was it patriotism? Did they
simply believe in the official war aims? Or was it because British
propaganda was so effective — and British military justice so harsh?
Perhaps all of these played a part. But it also mattered that British
officers were generally competent; that the average Tommy’s lot was made
bearable by plentiful “plonk” and fags; that, despite high casualties, the
bonds between “pals” and “mates” endured.
8) The German army finally fell apart in the summer and autumn of 1918,
after it became clear that British tenacity and American intervention made
a German victory impossible, and after Bolshevik ideas began to spread
westwards from the eastern front. Beginning with the Battle of Amiens
(August 8-11, 1918), the Germans lost the will to fight and began to
surrender in droves.
9) The war was followed not by peace but by pandemonium. The dynasties
toppled: Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Ottomans — all gone. Their
great multi-ethnic empires also disintegrated. The Saxe-Coburgs survived
by renaming themselves “Windsor”, but still lost the lion’s share of
Ireland. Not only in Russia but all over the world, red revolution seemed
unstoppable. To cap it all, an influenza pandemic struck, killing roughly
four times as many people as the war had.
10) Not until the advent of a new generation of nationalist strongmen —
starting with Jozef Pilsudski, Kemal Ataturk and Benito Mussolini — was it
clear that belligerent nationalism was the best antidote to Leninism. Some
called it fascism. However, few of the interwar dictators regarded the
peace treaties drawn up by the wars’ victors as legitimate. Most of the
treaties were dead letters long before war resumed in 1939.
Today, please do observe the two-minute silence, at least, in memory of
all those whose lives the Great War ended prematurely. But don’t just zone
out, as it’s easy enough to do. If only for 120 seconds, just think of
your grandfather or great-grandfather as a boy, in a trench, mortally
afraid. And ponder how he got there.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford
Les collabos d'aujourd'hui font des grands coups de com en célébrant la résistance et le patriotisme d'hier ... et en même temps ... soutiennent toutes les invasions récentes ou actuelles (soutien aux musulmans en Bosnie, aux musulmans albanais au Kosovo et en République de Macédoine, aux musulmans en France!).