From The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College
By Paul G. Kengor
On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip
killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. It
was the shot-heard-round-the-world, unleashing a series of events that
by August 1914 embroiled Europe in war. That deadly summer unfolded 100
years ago, and the world truly was never the same.
Civilization was soon engaged in a horrific conflict marred by
mechanized warfare previously unimaginable: tanks, subs, battleships,
air power, machine guns with names like “the Devil’s paint brush,” and
legions of poison gas—the largest-scale use of chemical weapons in
history. Winding through all the agony were rotten, death-strewn
trenches, an incomprehensible maze of thousands of miles of freezing,
disease-ridden, and rat-infested tunnels where men subsisted below the
earth. They rose from this hell only to be fed into a worse one—no man’s
land, a dénouement with the human meat-grinder.
It was World War I, the “Great War.”
Ever since, professors have struggled to explain to students how the
major powers became engulfed by this nightmare. I start my lectures on
WWI with an hour on its causes. These ranged from colonial and tariff
disputes to a complicated network of alliances that inexorably committed
various countries to battle, beginning with Austria-Hungary, Serbia,
Germany, and Russia.
Still, as I cover these causes with my students, they are confused,
frustrated, unsatisfied. Where was the Pearl Harbor? Where were the
concentration camps? Where was the Hitler-Stalin Pact? Who was the
brutal dictator?
There was none. No such blatant evils precipitated this war.
It was a disastrously wasteful affair that Pope Benedict XV publicly
declared an unjust war, a mad form of collective European suicide. The
pontiff rightly judged that there were no salient moral issues dividing
the combatants. These countries should not have been at war, let alone
slaughtering their boys by the millions.
The moral calamity was obvious to all. Quite apart from the bishop of
Rome, the acclaimed atheist-leftist intellectual Sidney Hook might have
best summed up the catastrophe when he referred to World War I not as
the “Great War,” or “War to End All Wars,” or the “Kaiser’s War,” or, in
President Woodrow Wilson’s famous line, the war to “make the world safe
for democracy,” but as something considerably less inspiring: World War
I was, said Hook mordantly, “the second fall of man.”
And so it was.
Religious metaphor best captures the gravity of this giant fall from grace. Historian Michael Hull evokes the image of O Cristo das Trincheiras,
“The Christ of the Trenches.” This life-size statue of Jesus Christ
hung with arms outstretched on a tall wooden cross was erected on the
Western Front. Soiled, bullet-scarred, and, most of all, crucified, the
French presented it to the government of Portugal after the war to
memorialize the thousands of Portuguese who sacrificed themselves at the
Battle of Flanders. It’s an appropriate symbol for the millions who
gave their lives for this colossal sin.
Michael Hull maintains that World War I was, in a perverse way,
arguably more horrible than World War II. How so? “The horrors of World
War I,” writes Hull, “exceeded those of World War II in terms of the
sheer futility of squandered lives.”
Moreover, the horror didn’t end. It simply begot more horror.
Here’s what the modern world should know about World War I: This
wretched war, whose reasons still baffle, enabled Hitler in Germany and
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It helped lead to World War II and
the Cold War. The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor put it plainly,
“The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far
as one event causes another.”
The bloody disaster would be a mere warm-up, the first of two
worldwide wars, fostered by the “punitive peace” imposed upon the
surrendering Germans at the unforgiving hands of the French and other
Allied leaders at the Versailles Conference. That punishing peace did
not produce a peaceful heart among the Germans, many of which mistakenly
believed they had won the war and surrendered only to agree to
acceptable conditions of peace. Instead, the conditions at Versailles
helped sow the seeds for Hitler’s rise.
The war not only permitted the cataclysm in Germany; it also enabled
the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia. It’s difficult to imagine the
Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanov dynasty without the intervention of
WWI.
Ultimately, World War II far surpassed World War I’s carnage, and the
Soviet global communist ideology killed even more still; both
precipitated by a “Great War” in which no great moral issues were at
stake.
World War I unleashed death, principally death. It was a result that
Mr. Princip could have never imagined when he pulled that trigger 100
years ago.
Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His latest book is 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative. His other books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
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