The Great War

When I was a child my great uncle told me two stories of the Great War. One was being on sentry duty with another guy and hearing something in the bushes. They fired and killed a German. Neither of them knew, whose shot had actually killed the man. My uncle seemed relieved at that. The other story was that of being caught in a German gas attack without any gas masks. One of the men in his outfit, presumably a trench, I never knew exactly where this took place, urinated in handkerchiefs and hand them out. They put that to their faces, which saved them from being killed by the gas.

                  This month marks the 100^th anniversary of the start of the Great War or World War I. It was triggered by a chain of events starting with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. That led to an investigation by Austria-Hungary into the assassination, followed by an ultimatum to Serbia on July 25^th, which Serbia appeared to accept almost all the demands, but upon careful examination actually rejected the ultimatum. This in turn was followed by Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia on July 28^th.

                  It was amusing to hear a news-caster say that July 28^th marks the anniversary when the firing began. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was a very drastic diplomatic move as their army could not be ready for war for several weeks. This triggered a series of events that made a general European war unavoidable. During the initial phase Germany did more than any other power to try to avert the general war, but, unfortunately failed.

                  General war was made inevitable once the initial declaration of war was made due to the tyranny of the railroad timetable, upon which the mobilization of all the European armies depended on. Austria-Hungary quickly realized that they could not mobilize against Serbia only without also mobilizing against Russia, otherwise they’d leave themselves open to attack as Russia was Serbia’s defender. This led to war with Russia. Russia tried partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary, but quickly realized that they would also have to mobilize against Germany, otherwise that would leave them vulnerable. This led to war with Germany. German war plans for a two front war called for Germany to knock-out France, Russia’s ally, first and then turn against Russia, whose army was slower to mobilize. Since they were at war with Russia and not with France, that led to war with France. That in turn led to the German ultimatum to Belgium demanding free passage for their troops. Belgium refused and so Great Britain and the British Empire came to their defense, although not required to by the terms of 1839 treaty dealing with Belgium neutrality.

                  All the powers thought the war would be a quick one and over by Christmas. And had the war been over by Christmas the monarchies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey would have all survived along with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The Great War would have been just that a great war with no World War II. That it wasn’t a short war was due to the war in the west becoming bogged down. The railroads were able to bring more troops to the staging areas then they could be deployed at the front. That strengthened the defense along with the machine gun.

                  The ironic thing is that the Archduke realized that war for Austria-Hungary would be very bad. And had there been no First World War there would have been no Second World War thus no Hitler, no Stalin, no Mao and no Jewish holocaust. In short our world would have been a whole lot different and probably for the better.