The Great War - Why was there no one willing to stop it? Actually, there were. But who would listen?

Remembering the Great War

by REGIS MARTIN

Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin, MCMXIV

By the time the Armistice ending the Great War was signed 11 November 1918—the Guns of August having at last fallen silent—four bloody years of lethal destruction had elapsed, leaving the Old European Order in ruins, its pretensions shattered beyond recall. In the bitter aftermath of disillusion that had, like a dark shroud, blanketed the post-war world, the easy innocence and idealism that had once shaped people’s lives seemed all but blown away. Like the snows of yesteryear, they were no more. The accumulated moral capital of the pre-war world appeared to have been spent. Quite simply, the long lazy afternoon of the nineteenth century, with its smug suppositions about the inevitability of material progress and human perfection, had all been blown to bits in the first weeks of the war, strewn about the poppies growing in Flanders Fields.

Or so it seemed to the survivors, members of a doomed generation,whose cynicism and disgust found voice in Hemmingway’s A Farewell To Arms. There language itself was made to stand in the dock, summoned by the staccato sentences of his machine-gun prose. So many words, said Hemingway, could no longer be spoken. “Only the names of places had dignity …

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The Great War—the War to End All Wars—began exactly a century ago, in Sarajevo, an obscure city then situated within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose hapless Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne, got himself assassinated by a Serbian fanatic, thus catapulting a dozen or so countries into a killing spree that would consume sixteen or so million people. That nearly half the numbers killed were non-combatants suggests the enormity of the tragedy. As for its outcome, who can doubt but that it marked the terminal phase of a civilization that, while it may have once called itself Christian, could no longer maintain the fiction.

“It was three o’clock in the morning,” muses Dr. Tom More, hero of Walker Percy’sLove in the Ruins:

I had been reading my usual late-night fare, Stedmann’s History of World War I.For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. ‘The men in the trenches did not hate each other,’ wrote Stedmann. ‘As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.’

So did no one try to stop the carnage? And if they had, would it have succeeded in putting an end to the senseless butchery? Not very likely, it seems. 

A collective death wish having taken hold of the generation of 1914, nothing short of a miracle could have ended the mass psychosis. How else does one account for the madness of trench warfare? Four hundred and fifty miles stretching from Switzerland to the Channel, that murderous lesion covering France and Belgium known as the Western Front would claim the lives of between five and fifty thousand soldiers a day. “When all is said and done,” wrote the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who despite multiple injuries managed to survive the bloodbath, “the war was mainly a matter of holes and ditches.” 

Yes, and into each bloody fissure along the length of that flesh-eating front, the fairest blooms of European manhood lay fallen and dead. 

Why was there no one willing to stop it?

Actually, there were. But who would listen?

..............

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com