A World-Defining Conflict

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of Germany’s declaration of war on France, precipitating First World War, the greatest and most terrible conflict the world had yet seen. For a month, since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, Europe had been sliding down a slippery slope into war. Now it was on in earnest.

The Guns of August would not fall silent for more than four terrible, world-defining years.

Some of the last and greatest of the Frontier Partisans would play their part in the cataclysm. Elephant hunter P.J. Pretorius would stalk the German cruiser Konigsberg and later serve as Chief of Scouts under General Jan Smuts in the long and grueling East Africa Campaign. Boer soldier Deneys Reitz would fight across South Africa and East Africa before embarking for Europe to fully imbibe the horrors of the Western Front. Frederick Courteney Selous, the greatest hunter of the Victorian Age, would — despite being well beyond military age — serve with distinction in the 25^th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Legion of Frontiersmen). He died with his boots on at the hands of a German sniper in the region of East Africa that now bears his name.

The Great War would sweep away imperial dynasties: The German Second Reich, the Hapsburgs, the ancient Ottoman Empire (they joined Germany and Austria in October 1914), the Romanovs of Russia. Russia would succumb to revolution and a brutal civil war that would enthrone a bloodthirsty and tyrannical Bolshevik regime immeasurably more oppressive than the tsarist autocracy it replaced.

The ghastly nature of a conflict that took some 15 million military and civilian lives blew apart the notion of the continual upward Progress of Man. The most advanced societies in human history bent their social and economic organization, their industrial might and their technological sophistication to finding ever more deadly and effective ways to slaughter one another. We who live in the war’s long shadow know in our bones that the technologies that help us thrive can also destroy us.

Armies, particularly those of the Central Powers — Germany, Austria, the Ottoman Empire — committed atrocities that prefigured still more horrific crimes against humanity that would come later in the century.

The heritage of chaos in the Balkans survived the war, to rear its gory head again in the slaughters and ethnic cleansings of the 1990s. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created the modern Middle East, where cynical imperial gamesmanship ushered in what historian David Fromkin calls “a peace to end all peace” – and conflicts and animosities that plague the world to this day.

The legacy of the war was not entirely dire. As conflicts do, it led to major advances in medicine, aviation, engineering, creating or enhancing technologies that could be turned to beneficial use.

And, as conflict also tends to do, the Great War led to a massive increase in the power of the state, increasing its role for good and for ill in the economies and lives of peoples across Europe and the United States.

The war’s greatest legacy, though, was a second and still more horrific conflict. The failure to physically conquer Germany in 1918 (the Armistice came without a single allied combatant’s boots on German soil) combined with a harsh victor’s peace in the Versailles Treaty to create fertile soil for the exploitation of German rage at the outcome of the Great War. And Adolf Hitler would exploit that rage to profound effect in climbing to power and proclaiming a German Third Reich, which, just 20 years after Versailles, would plunge humanity into the Second World War.

The greater conflict of 1939-45 often obscures the impact of the First World War of 1914-18. But it is appropriate to think of the two wars, as Winston Churchill did, as a Thirty Years War, a massive convulsion of modern civilization, inextricably linked in savagery and profound effect in shaping our world.