World War I
After staging a coup that forced the Kaiser to abdicate, the newly-declared Republic of Germany signed an Armistice during the night (5:00 a.m. on Monday, November 11, 1918) that ended the First World War one hundred years ago. But the opposing sides kept fighting, bombarding one another and trying to advance through No Man’s Land right up until the last second. Literally the last second. That has always been a point of argument. Why did the generals do that, in the full knowledge that an armistice had been signed and that peace was coming - guaranteed - at 11:00 a.m.? Maybe they kept fighting because egos were at stake, because this was the first really big war in a generation, and career military officers wanted to get their fill while they could.
Come on Wall Street, don’t be slow, this is war-a-go-go
There’s plenty of good money to be made
Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade
Just hope and pray that they drop the bomb,
It’s gonna be a whole lotta fun!
Come on generals, let’s move fast, your big chance is here at last
You know that peace can only come when you’ve blown them all to kingdom come.
Maybe it was animosity: the opposing sides just hated each other so much. Maybe it was capitalist economics: the armies (especially the Allied armies) had an expensive stockpile of ammunition they wanted to use. There was still money to be made. Or, rather, the money had been spent to build and purchase the stock, so using it was justified. Production for use. Continuing to bombard each other during the six hours after the armistice was signed caused the lives of 2,500 more men and the wounding of over 7,000 others. Soldiers were dying literally right up to the last minute. That sort of thing you won’t find today. The slaughter of the Great War made the public so cynical towards the military, the politicians, and their presentation of military conflict that these leaders and their decisions are now constantly under a microscope. In a democracy military and political careers can be made or lost by poor decision-making in the workplace.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sofia, in Sarajevo, starting the falling dominoes chai of events that led to the war. Few were overly interested in the assassination itself, I think. But the murder was used as an excuse by Austria-Hungary to vengefully grab land in the Balkans, and that is what really set things off.
Young people today think of the war as ancient history. I felt differently when I was growing up, because many WWI veterans were still alive and I saw them. One hundred years ago was not ancient times but modern times. There are still people alive today who were alive then, making that time still fall within the realm of current events rather than history.
Even today the size of the conflict, the destruction and death are breathtaking. WWI - not WWII with its introduction of the atomic age - represents the start of the modern world in that it broke the Victorian order that had endured for a century, since the Napoleonic Wars ended, it destroyed the 19th century faith in progress, and it introduced industrial war and it cemented a place of cynicism in modern thought that continues today.