History - Who knows?

This year is the Centenary of World War 1, starting on 2nd August 2014. There are many events planned, all around the world, in Flanders and other places.

I have a theory about these events and I will be watching them over the next few years to test this. My theory is that the most enthusiastic commemoration event in the world will be Gallipoli. There is a ballot for people from Australia to attend the ceremonies in Turkey. The enthusiasm for this is partly a spin off from the increasing crowds at the Anzac marches in Australia each year on 25th April, and partly because Gallipoli has become a secular holy day and is part of national identity, coming just 14 years after Federation of the states into the country Australia.

In contrast, I suspect that most of the other events around the world will be a little low key and will talk about individual sacrifice and the social attitudes of the day. I think the "accepted" opinion now is that World War 1 was caused by rigid national attitudes and was forced on the people of the world by a number of heartless and stupid rulers of the countries involved, who caused the death of millions of soldiers and civilians.

I am not convinced that this is the whole truth.

I can't claim to have studied this fully, but I have recently read a few books, and it seems to me that many citizens of the countries felt they were fighting for a good cause and showed great commitment to it. Some evidence for this is the large number of volunteers, even in Australia, where people walked from country towns in the so-called "cooee marches" to Sydney to enlist. In Europe, the governments assumed there would be a large number of deserters from the army and the various radical groups who were violently opposing their governments on other issues would now cause trouble for the war effort and would have to be resisted. This turned out not to be true. The number of deserters was small and many left wing groups became enthusiastic supporters of the war.

For example the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst became a very public supporter of the war effort, although her daughter Sylvia opposed it. A possible cause of this type of support was the feeling that the war would force changes on society and advance their causes, which was probably true in some cases.

History is always written in hindsight, and it is easy to paint the politicians and generals as stupid and evil. No doubt there was some stupidity, but I doubt many of them realised the level of carnage that would come (although it was predicted by some people). Warfare was just at the point of changing from the colourful and "glorious" adventure of centuries past, into the ruthless killing fields of machine guns, rapid fire artillery, tanks, gas, aeroplanes, submarines etc. The unusual phenomenon caused by this technology is that in almost all battles in World War 1, the attacking side lost more men than the defenders.

Considering this, the Schlieffen plan used by Germany seems very foolish and was obviously likely to fail because it assumed a series of unlikely successes. However no-one else put forward another plan, so it was used.

It is also useful to remember that the Schlieffen plan had existed for about a decade before 1914. There were other events before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that could have triggered war, but did not. Why then? One theory is that Russia was getting better equipped, for example by building more railways, so Germany felt it would soon be a the mercy of an alliance between France, Britain and Russia and would be confronted by an impossible war on two fronts.

I just feel that the social and political causes of the war are complicated and were not just driven by evil politicians and generals.

There are also some interesting articles about this by Frank Furedi, here and here.