A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

by G.J. Meyer

Princip pulled out his revolver,

FN 1910 in .380

the response can fairly be regarded as one of the mistakes that led to war. By declining to yield, the Serbs gave Berchtold, Conrad, and their cohorts the one thing they wanted: an excuse for military action. Worse, they did this unnecessarily. They might have responded differently—not more shrewdly, their document being nothing if not shrewd, but more effectively—had they not been receiving reports about how Russia wanted them to stand firm.

Could they have, though? And maintained anything resembling national sovereignty?

This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of it, made certain that nothing of the kind would happen again.

Dehumanizing the enemy is hard when you exchange Christmas gifts.

When the summer crisis of 1914 rose to its climax, a crew of Turkish seamen was in Britain, ready to take possession of the first of the new dreadnoughts. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill announced that his country was confiscating both ships. He did so on July 28, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and his act was understandable as a way of assuring that two of the world’s newest and most potent warships would not fall into enemy hands. The matter could have been handled more delicately, however. It appears not to have occurred to the British government to negotiate with Turkey—to offer to release the ships in return for an alliance that at least some of the Young Turks would have welcomed. Churchill’s announcement provoked outrage in Constantinople. At the beginning of August, with the start of the war only hours away, the Turkish government proposed a formal alliance with Germany.

Guess Churchill wasn’t much of a tact-tician.

Poison gas, introduced by the Germans early in 1915 and thereafter used by both sides, killed thousands and left thousands disabled. It was “improved” as the war went on, chlorine being succeeded by phosgene and phosgene by mustard, but it never produced or even contributed significantly to a major victory on any front. Its deficiencies came to be so universally recognized that not even the Nazis would use it in World War II.

Did the Nazis forgo the use of weaponized gas because it was fundamentally ineffective, or did mechanized warfare make it so?

To attack the problem Falkenhayn, in his capacity as minister of war, recruited a dynamic young Jewish industrialist named Walter Rathenau. Rathenau got almost miraculous results out of Germany’s chemical and engineering industries.

Stabbed in the back, huh?

Kaiser Wilhelm, who before the war had called the Jews “the curse of my country,” proclaimed the dawn of Burgfrieden, a new era in which all Germans were accepted fully and all would join together to save Germany from her foes.

Politcal pragmatism. Never trust it.

The results of all the propaganda would be tragic. By raising the stakes of the war beyond the limits of reason, the propagandists ensured that whichever side lost would feel terribly, irredeemably wronged. And that whichever side won would find it difficult to deal rationally with the populations it had defeated.

Interesting, but possibly inserting hindsight into events.