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

by G.J. Meyer

WHATEVER IT WAS THAT FOLLOWED THE ARMISTICE OF November 11, 1918, it was not peace. Something on the order of 9.5 million men were dead: four million from the Central Powers, almost a million more than that on the Allies’ side. Among them were 1.8 million Russians, nearly 1.4 million French, eight hundred thousand Turks, seven hundred twenty-three thousand British, five hundred seventy-eight thousand Italians, and one hundred fourteen thousand Americans. (Romania and Serbia each lost more than twice as many men as the United States.)

The tally was two million dead for Germany, one million for Austria-Hungary. Germany had lost fifty-five men for every hour, thirteen hundred thirty for every day, of the fifty-two months of the war. One in every fifty citizens of the Hapsburg empire had been killed.

In a radical departure from historical practice (a tradition that had given France, for example, a prominent part in the Treaty of Vienna after the final defeat of Napoleon), Germany was excluded as an outlaw nation. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had ceased to exist, and Austria and Turkey hardly seemed to matter.

Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the Yugoslavia that had coalesced around Serbia.

They and others that would soon emerge—Estonia and Latvia in the Baltic, Lebanon and Syria in the Middle East—could only wait on the sidelines (often fighting with their neighbors as they ...

By the end of the war Britain had already achieved its primary objectives. Belgium was saved, the German naval threat was eliminated, and the British army had made spectacular conquests in the Middle East, where the collapse of Russia had eliminated a longtime rival.

A further irony is that Italy and Japan, neither of which had contributed greatly to the defeat of Germany (Japan had contributed essentially nothing), achieved more at Paris than any other country and yet came away not only unhappy but alienated.

Italy found itself stronger than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire and with no neighbors dangerous enough to be feared. It saw little need to remain on friendly terms with Britain or France and chose to be aggrieved. Its young democracy had been badly compromised by wartime struggles for power in Rome, and the way was cleared for the emergence of Benito Mussolini.

Britain took Palestine, opening it to emigration by European Jews under the Balfour Declaration.

After suppressing a rebellion in Mesopotamia, it threw Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia populations together in a new puppet kingdom called Iraq. France was allowed to have Lebanon and, despite deep reluctance on Britain’s part, Syria.

Every one of these developments planted seeds for gener...

While such questions were being debated, the naval blockade was kept in place, needlessly causing the death from starvation and disease of perhaps a quarter of a million Germans, many of them children.

Future president Herbert Hoover, in charge of European relief operations, begged for permission to send food to Germany and was rebuffed even by Wilson. Those Germans who did not die were left deeply, and justifiably bitter.

Not until May was the Weimar government directed to send a delegation to Paris. Upon arrival, the delegates were confined behind barbed wire and allowed no contact with anyone. On June 7 they were summoned to appear before the Allies and presented with what would be called the Treaty of Versailles.

The head of the German delegation, when he saw what was in the treaty, summed up his interpretation of it in four words. “Germany,” he said, “renounces its existence.”

A further source of poison was the fact that the Allies had chosen to deal with the Weimar government exclusively, leaving the German army uninvolved. The ground was prepared for claims that the army, never having surrendered and still in possession of vast conquered territories at the time of the armistice, had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly and traitorous liberal politicians.

Tsar Nicholas and his wife and their five children had been executed by their Bolshevik captors in Siberia.

Kaiser Wilhelm lived quietly on a small estate in Holland until 1940, putting pins in maps, at the end, to mark the progress of Germany’s armies in a new war. His cousin George V died four years before Wilhelm, his last years troubled only by the refusal of his eldest son and heir to break off a scandalous relationship with an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson.

Eighty-four when Germany invaded France in 1940, he was asked to form a government. When the Germans conquered two-thirds of France, Pétain arranged an armistice and was named chief of state with nearly unlimited powers by a new government based at Vichy. His performance during the German occupation was ambiguous at worst—he remained in office out of fear that his departure would lead to worse Nazi outrages, and attempted in many ways to obstruct the occupiers—but after liberation he was put on trial by the new French government and condemned to death. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment by Pétain’s onetime protégé Charles de Gaulle. He died in confinement on an island off France’s Atlantic coast in 1951, aged ninety-five.