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BACK in 2008, in the wake of Russia’s conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia, Moscow’s ambassador to Nato, discerning a certain echo in the pattern of events, expressed the hope that Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili wouldn’t turn out to be “the new Gavrilo Princip”.
He was referring to the young Serbian nationalist who assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo a hundred years ago this week, triggering a chain of events that led shortly afterwards to bloodshed on an unprecedented scale across the European continent and beyond.
More recently, during the initial stand-off over Ukraine, the events of 1914 — when a relatively minor dispute spiralled into a gargantuan confrontation — were again cited as a cautionary tale. Two decades earlier, during the siege of Sarajevo, it was commonly observed that the 20th century was drawing to an end precisely where it had effectively begun.
And just last week another reference to World War I sneaked into contemporary reportage when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) declared that its latest successes in capturing territory on the border between Iraq and Syria had obliterated the Sykes-Picot lines — a reference to the Anglo-French accord of 1916 on dividing the spoils of the disintegrating Ottoman empire in the Middle East.
History’s lessons all too often go unheeded.
A century later, historians are still divided on the precise causes of the conflict that engulfed Europe. Would Austria-Hungary have gone as far as it did without having been egged on by Germany? Did Russia mobilise its forces too quickly? Would Germany have reconsidered its belligerence had it known in advance that Britain would plunge into the war?
The consequences are somewhat clearer, albeit not without areas of contention. The industrial scale of the mass slaughter that ensued — mainly in France and Belgium, but also in Turkey, which had joined forces with Germany, and in Ottoman outposts such as Mesopotamia — can in part be accounted for by recent innovations such as aerial and chemical warfare and new-fangled hardware such as tanks and machine guns.
Much of the combat, though, was rather more old-fashioned. At the start of the war, some of the troops still carried lances on horseback. And a popular anti-war slogan famously categorised the bayonet as “a weapon with a proletarian at both ends”.
Communist propaganda on the eastern front, among the ill-equipped and poorly fed Russian troops, was instrumental in facilitating the October Revolution.
More broadly, given that the belligerent powers were driven to a considerable extent by rivalry over colonial conquests, the outcome of the war sealed the fate of more than one empire. And it is widely, albeit by no means universally, held that the punitive Treaty of Versailles imposed on a defeated Germany in 1919 more or less guaranteed that “the war to end all wars” turned out to be nothing of the kind, with Europe reverting to bloodshed barely two decades later.
Some historians, meanwhile, consider the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam to be among the key consequences of the war. One of them, Philip Jenkins, notes: “Armed Islamic resistance movements challenged most of the colonial powers in the post-war years … That wave of armed upsurges would be instantly recognisable to American strategists today…
“[B]etween 1919 and 1925, Britain’s newly founded Royal Air Force saw action against Muslim rebels and enemy regimes in Somalia, Afghanistan, Waziristan and Iraq. Throughout the 1920s, the Basmachi revolt fielded tens of thousands of guerrillas against the Soviet Union, fighting on behalf of an autonomous sharia state and operating across most of Soviet Central Asia.”
Such reminders reinforce the sense of unfinished business, and not only in the Muslim world — witness the continued tensions in the Balkans and the tendencies towards spikiness on Russia’s borders.
There is, of course, nothing particularly novel in the notion of the present being fashioned by the past. The tragedy is that history’s lessons all too often go unheeded. And some of the current controversies over how best to commemorate the centenary of World War I illustrate humankind’s reluctance to recognise that there are always more desirable alternatives to an orgy of slaughter.
This fairly simple idea was perhaps most potently articulated by one of that war’s best known victims, Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, who died in combat a week before Armistice Day. Relating the effects of a chlorine gas attack on one particular comrade, he writes: “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/ Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,/ My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.”
That “old lie”, taken from an ode by Horace, roughly translates as: It is a sweet and wonderful thing to die for one’s country.
Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2014
