Talking Tuesday (on a Wednesday): The Great War

Via

This is a picture of the telegram sent by the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister to Serbia, informing them that they were at war, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, launching the devastation of Europe, and forever changing the world.  This month marks 100 years since the beginning of World War I (or the Great War).  These days, the Great War is largely overlooked in favor of World War II, or later 20th century conflicts, but it really deserves much more attention.  It is difficult to explain the scale of change that came about as a result of that war.  The entire landscape of Europe was changed on many levels; almost all the major monarchies fell, revolution and civil wars followed, country lines were redrawn, and a generation of men and women lost their faith as a result of the devastation wrought by modern trench warfare.

The Great War changed the way that war was waged, and the civilian and military losses were devastating.  The way that the war was concluded--with onerous reparations for Germany (who, rightly or wrongly was blamed for the war in the end), arbitrary national lines drawn in the sands of the Middle East and Africa, and a hugely disillusioned and wounded population--not only set the conditions for the wars that followed and the cultural revolutions of the 1920s and 1960s, but for many of the Middle Eastern troubles that continue today.

I recently finished watching Parade's End, a miniseries that aired on HBO earlier this spring, and while there are some definite flaws with the script and costuming, the acting is superb, and subtly illustrated to me some of the ways that society changed during the Great War, and in particular, the costs borne by the men who fought.  (I thought several times during the series that it must have been a book adaptation, because I felt there were gaps in the storyline of the sort that happen when a large book is condensed into a television series.  Turns out it is based on a four-book series by Ford Madox Ford, and I intend to read it as soon as I can to understand what I missed)  Another excellent movie that illustrates these themes for me is Sunshine, a story which examines three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, beginning at the close of the 19th century and going right through the middle of the 20th.

The book I always tell people to read if they want to better understand the origins of the Great War is Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra.  The book is about the last of the Romanovs, and covers the time from Nicholas' coronation to 1917,  just before everything fell apart, but there is a section in the middle that contains the correspondence between European heads of State from early in 1914, and Massie's analysis is spot on.

Our world is the legacy of the Great War, and we would do well to understand its lessons.