When the Guns Fell Silent

Eleven Eleven Eleven

The choice of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was not accidental, but nor was it entirely ‘poetic’. Although the first acknowledgement amongst Germany’s leaders that the War was lost came in late September, it took more weeks of heavy fighting and retreats at the Front, as well as several changes of government, for this reality to be acted upon. On 10 November, after two days of painful arguments with the Allies’ representatives about the details of what the German armed forces should do following the end of the fighting, the new, Social Democratic leadership of the German Empire – now without an emperor – conceded that the War must end on the terms dictated by the Allies. Already, Germany’s allies had sued for peace: Bulgaria had signed a ceasefire on 29 September; the Austro-Hungarian Empire had progressively collapsed as a functioning state during October, although a formal ceasefire did not come into effect until 4 November; and the Ottoman Empire had signed an agreement with Britain on 30 October to end the fighting with effect from 1 November. On the 11th, the agreements were finally signed in a railway carriage at Compiègne around 5.15 am (Paris and London time) to come into effect at noon (German time) and hence 11am for France and the UK. In an era before reliable and easy mass communication to armies in the field, it is extraordinary that the agreements were so widely and effectively implemented, beginning on the Western Front. But as the guns fell silent on that Monday, what might those people in the battle lines have reflected upon? What of the changes in the world that had come about during wartime or had been accelerated by the cruel necessities of pursuing victory? Beyond the overwhelming relief of being alive, of having survived the War, was it ‘worth it’?

A Calculus of the Incalculable

In terms of the millions of people killed, maimed, bereaved, starved and impoverished, surely not. Yet in many respects, so many features of the world that we recognise (and welcome) today emerged during or from the War so that we cannot, simplistically, wish that the clock be turned back to the summer of 1914 and to a somehow ‘better’ world. It is nevertheless a struggle to identify what good came about because, in retrospect, it is so hard NOT to see the Great War as foreshadowing even greater horrors in the mid-twentieth century that might have been avoided if the Peace in 1919 had been better made.

To create a list of the ‘benefits’ of the War requires an act of imagination in at least two respects. On the one hand, drawing up a ‘profit and loss account’ of periods of human history is ethically questionable, as if the ends in the present justified the means then, so that when we weigh up the elements we should not lose sight of the enormity of the suffering experienced during the period under review. On the other hand, an accounting presupposes that we modern readers can agree on what the ‘good’ outcomes might be when we are now surrounded by an almost unquestioned tide of relativism. Perhaps we can, however, begin with what contemporaries already viewed as worthwhile achievements, whilst acknowledging that the list of ‘bad’ consequences remains longer and its numbers of victims larger, by far.

Civilian Life Restored

Belgian and French civilians on the Western Front were, surely without doubt, the immediate beneficiaries as their towns and villages were liberated by the Allied advances in the autumn of 1918, and in the prompt withdrawal of German forces from occupied territories after 11 November. Amongst the earliest and most obvious truly innocent victims of the War, those who had fled as refugees were able to return and those who had suffered during occupation were together again under the restored authority of their pre-War governments. In to our present day, this liberation is marked in such ceremonies as the ‘last post’ at Ieper/Ypres. Whatever else may have been at work to lead the British Empire to declare war in 1914, the public casus belli was the German invasion of Belgium, in flagrant breach of the 1839 international treaty that guaranteed Belgian neutrality.[1] Britain and its allies fulfilled the promise to Belgium.

Militarism Quelled

Military conquest of neighbouring states in Europe was, at least for a short while, eliminated. Before 1914, European states had pursued arms races and sought military alliances that were intended to prevent the domination of the Continent – and, potentially, the world – by one or other set of allies. For contemporaries, however, the main threat to peace before 1914 was Imperial Germany. This was on account of its history (German unification was forged out of the successive defeats in crushing military campaigns of the Danes,[2] the Austrians[3] and the French[4]), its irascible and unpredictable ruler (Kaiser Wilhelm II and his behaviour in successive diplomatic crises between 1890 and 1914),[5] its apparently subservient and/or irrelevant popular politicians,[6] and its commitment of vast resources to building naval power for which there was presumed to be no other purpose than to challenge the British Empire.[7] Such was the fear of Imperial Germany before 1914 that republican France had allied with the autocratic Tsarist Empire, and both had allied with their global imperial rival, Britain. Within Germany, the Schlieffen Plan,[8] despite all of its shortcomings, remained the military’s preemptive answer to encirclement because none of those with the ear of the Kaiser could imagine responses that did not require armed force. In the face of such apparently unflinching commitment to the ruthless deployment of military might the Entente Powers, latterly without Tsarist Russia but joined by the USA, committed themselves to the comprehensive defeat of the Central Powers. In the words of Clemenceau, in 1914 as much as in 1918, war in all its aspects was the only possible way to counter German ambitions and to preserve “the independence of nationalities in Europe.”[9]

‘The war to end wars’ was more than a slogan and at the heart of both the Armistice and of the Versailles Settlement was a determination to strip Germany – characterised by the Allies as the principal aggressor – of the capacity in future to wage aggressive wars. Despite earlier pronouncements, this was by no means ‘multilateral disarmament’: only the Germans had meaningful treaty limits on the size and weaponry of their armed forces.[10] Whereas peace may have been preserved in Europe between 1871 and 1914 by the existence of armed camps threatening mutual destruction, from 1918 the elimination of one side of that equation – in Germany by treaty and in Austria and Hungary by the diminutive size of the successor states – was a practical means to maintaining peace for as long as the victorious Allies had no territorial ambitions on the Continent. Militarism had been defeated.

From Autocracy to Democracy

Autocracies, and the multicultural empires over which autocracy had held sway, were overthrown in Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire as well as already in Tsarist Russia. This had not been a War Aim in 1914 but it was the consequence of the failure of autocracies to mobilise the peoples and resources within their empires or to provide compelling justifications for their subservient peoples to fight to the utmost to preserve them. Even more unexpectedly, what succeeded the autocracies was democratic constitutionalism, at least in aspiration. The model here was, remarkably, the United States, which exemplified (in its own perception, if not in reality) government of the people, by the people, for the people. However much the intellectual inspiration for this came from British and French political theorists in the eighteenth century, the practical demonstration of it was in America, despite all of its obvious flaws with respect to the treatment of issues of race and of gender. That this was the admired model meant that the other great engine for re-making the world, Bolshevism, was not the automatic successor to autocracy. It was US President Wilson who was largely responsible for this, not least because of what he had enshrined as the Allies’ War Aims, in the Fourteen Points of January 1918. Even Britain responded to this climate of opinion, not only by extending the franchise in parliamentary elections to (some) women, but to all men over the age of 21 – notwithstanding that conscription at its height had taken in men aged only eighteen and a half.[11] As Sellar and Yeatman expressed it in the 1920s, “America was thus clearly Top Nation, and history came to a .”[12]

The Nation State Redux

Across Europe, new or restored nation-states were proclaimed in the months either side of the armistice, as a direct result of the defeats of the Central Powers. Although ‘nationalism’ has conventionally been described as a product of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, it was given a substantial boost in the way that the War ended in 1918. With a slogan of ‘national self-determination’,[13] Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and Czechoslovakia managed to maintain their independence, whilst Ukraine, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia did not.[14] The cost of nationalism, however, was that much further tragedy soon surrounded the assertion by some ‘nationalities’ of their ‘rights’ to self-determination at the expense of minorities of ‘others’ who had for long resided within the newly-announced territorial frontiers. Mass movements of population in and out of the new states re-drew the linguistic and cultural map of Europe – until they were again re-drawn in the 1940s.[15]

Further afield, the turmoil of war and the defeat of Germany and her allies seems to have encouraged new aspirants for statehood. In the Middle East, the end of the Ottoman Empire created the spaces within which Arab self-determination could emerge in Iraq and in what would later become Saudi Arabia but, as in Europe, some ‘nationalities’ had their rights denied: Armenians and Kurds, for example, remained subject peoples. In British India, French south-east Asia and even in China, mass movements for nationalist overthrow of outside control were more active in the aftermath of the War.[16] Once ‘out of the bottle’, the genie of ‘national self-determination’ would prove difficult to contain.

Order, Order

It was the fervent hope of some that there would also be a new world order, enshrined in the League of Nations. The work of the League was intended to ensure not only the preservation of peace but also the improvement of working conditions,[17] just treatment of native inhabitants,[18] control of human and drug trafficking, promotion of global health, treatment of prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe.[19] The way that the War ended created the opportunity for these ideas, previously propounded by an ‘eccentric’ few, to gain enough traction to be incorporated in the Peace of 1919.

Power to the People

For Britain, one immediate consequence of the ending of the War was the first General Election since 1910.[20] It was held on 14 December 1918, and although the electorate was now potentially three times larger than in 1910, only about half of those enfranchised cast their votes. In the confusion of party and personal allegiances in Parliament that the War had intensified, voters were ‘guided’ by the designation of individual candidates as supporters of the wartime Coalition, with a “coupon”. The result was a decisive victory for the Conservative Party in coalition with the wartime leader, David Lloyd George, and his (relatively few) supporters from other parties. Mass democratic populist politics had arrived.

References

[1] For the text and some commentary, see https://www.firstworldwar.com/source/london1839.htm

[2] 1864: variously titled the Danish War, Prusso-Danish War, Second Schleswig War. German-Danish War.

[3] 1866: the Austro-Prussian War or Seven Weeks’ War.

[4] 1871: Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). The German Empire was first proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

[5] As with all matters in history, scholars continue to debate: here, it is the extent to which the Kaiser was the key decision maker or was manipulated by those around him.

[6] Despite the fact that in Imperial Germany all males aged over 25 had the vote from 1871, the politicians for whom they could vote had no constitutional control over the Imperial government.

[7] Always associated with Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, between 1897 and 1914, Imperial Germany came to possess the second-largest naval force in the world. Tirpitz’s career was promoted by the Kaiser.

[8] Named after the then chief of the general staff, the plan was first drawn up from 1905 as a response to the threat of war simultaneously on two fronts, against France and Tsarist Russia. The plan was for a swift and decisive offensive against France, avoiding the well fortified Franco-German border, only after which attention would be turned to Russia. Another subject of lively debate amongst historians, it has been argued that the ‘plan’ was invented by German officers in the 1920s in an effort to counter Allied efforts to blame Imperial Germany for the War.

[9] https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Clemenceau_Calls_France_to_Arms

[10] Although President Wilson had advocated general reductions in armaments in his Fourteen Points and the Covenant of the League of Nations, these ambitions were unfulfilled by the combination of the USA’s refusal subsequently to join the League, and the defence needs of the other victors. In terms of treaty limitations on armed forces, Austria was supposed to limit its army to 30,000; Bulgaria to 20,000; and Hungary to 35,000, but their losses of territory and population were probably more significant brakes on the size of their military establishments. The treaty with the remnant of the Ottoman Empire was rejected by Turkish nationalists and resisted by war, leading to the victory of the republic of Turkey.

[11] In the manpower crisis of spring 1918. The Act extending the franchise came out of cross-party consultations beginning in late 1916, “Interest in electoral reform during the war years came from MP’s who championed the rights of men in military-useful industries who MP’s believed should have the right to vote. Alongside this, the case for the female vote had gained strength due to the contribution of women in the war effort.” (https://ukvote100.org/2017/06/16/the-representation-of-the-people-bill/ )

The first reading in the Commons was 15 May 1917.

[12] 1066 and All That, first published in 1930, had originally appeared in instalments, in Punch.

[13] For a brisk summary of the further questions provoked by the phrase, see for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination

[14] Whilst Ukraine became one of the constituent republics of the USSR, the other states were merged in a kingdom of Yugoslavia.

[15] The hatred between ‘races’ is an important element in his explanation for the duration and inhuman ferocity of the first half of the 20C in Europe that Prof. Ian Kershaw gives in his recent synoptic account, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (London, 2015).

[16] Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

[17] The International Labour Organisation was founded in 1919 as an agency of the League and in 1946 became the first specialised agency of the United Nations. Centenary celebrations of its ongoing work are outlined at https://www.ilo.org/asia/media-centre/news/WCMS_644347/lang–en/index.htm

[18] The aspiration behind the Mandate system.

[19] For a convenient summary of the League’s interest in these issues, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_of_the_League_of_Nations

[20] For a convenient summary, see https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/khaki_election_1918

Header image: Photograph taken in the forest of Compiègne after an agreement had been reached for the armistice that ended the First World War. This railway carriage was given to Ferdinand Foch for military use by the manufacturer, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Foch is second from the right. Image credit: Stated to be in the public domain by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_11_November_1918)