Guest column

A remembrance of the Great War

The defining moments of August 4, 1914

They are all gone now--lost to the march of time, nothing more than faded photographs in dusty family albums, black-and-white illustrations in books, their images etched in little-understood monuments and interred in countless unvisited cemeteries in the most remote areas of the world. In the second decade of the 20th Century, some 30 nations would send 65 million young men to die for their country. And die they would.

By the end of the conflagration in November of 1918, nearly 9 million men died on battlefields that stretched from the muddy trenches of Western Europe to the most inhospitable deserts of the Middle East. Many more millions would be casualties of war, often disfigured or unable to mentally function--even communicate--in a post-war world incapable of understanding what they had endured.

It was deemed humanity's first "Great War," where the technological fruits of the industrial revolution were transformed to produce killing machines that consumed the youth from warring nations in obscene numbers, so unbelievable as to cause the higher echelons of government to pause, then to quickly improvise "war information" boards to censor the exact number of war causalities.

From 1916 through 1917, often referred to as the "great years of slaughter" in Western Europe, trenches--patchworks of huge, sunken sarcophagi--extended from the English Channel to the very borders of Switzerland.

From these subterranean vaults, tens of thousands of combat soldiers poured onto "No Man's Land"--usually to claim only a few square miles of pock-marked earth protected by unrelenting machine-gun fire. Verdun, France, 1916: 700,000 men died in 10 months. Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916: The British had 58,000 casualties in one day. At the third Battle of Ypres in Belgium (often called Passchendaele Village) from July 31, 1917, through November of that year, the Germans suffered 260,000 casualties; the British had 310,000.

On the Eastern Front, where the Russians battled the Germans and Austrians with enormous waves of untrained peasant armies, the death toll was over two million when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government and withdrew that crumbling nation from the war on March 3, 1918.

By the end of 1916, when newly conscripted faces in drab military uniforms seemed to be younger than in previous years, most recruits simply could not recall what had precipitated all this madness.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sofia were assassinated in Bosnia by a young man who was a member of the Black Hand, a Serbian terrorist group fanatically dedicated to a pan-Slavic Balkans. Allied to Germany and given "full support if matters went to the length of war" even against pro-Slavic Russia, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914.

After August 4, 1914, all the great nations of Europe were in the throngs of total war: Austro-Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, and Italy (until May of 1915) composed the Central Powers. Russia, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States (in April of 1917) stood together as the Allies. As the war's duration drearily went from months to years, it became a war--fought on land, sea, and in the air.

World War One was the world's defining event of the 20th Century. It would destroy the economic, social, and political order of Europe, become the economic catalyst for the world's Great Depression of the 1930s, serve as the foundation for the rise of fascism in Europe and thus the advent of a second even more devastating world war in September of 1939, and sow the seeds of Arab distrust of Western influence and of ethnic hatreds in the Middle East.

From one of the most disillusioned memoirs of World War One, Rudolf Binding's quote became the most appropriate verdict: "This generation has no future, and deserves none. Anyone who belongs to it lives no more."

Russell E. Bearden of Sherwood has a graduate degree in 20th-Century European history from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Editorial on 07/27/2014

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