Recently, I linked to a post by historian Adam Hochschild about the historical parallels between the First World War and the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Last week, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Hochschild’s new book in the New York Times. There’s also an excerpt from the book, if you’re interested.
The media have reported the death of Australian WWI vet Claude Choules, the last living combatant to fight in that conflict. Only two days ago, this excellent article by Evan Fleischer was posted at The Awl, talking about Choules and the overlapping of generations between the major wars of American history. Whether Fleischer knew something we all didn’t or not, the article is presciently well-timed, but it’s also a really good piece full of interesting tidbits about veterans of a number of wars. Only Florence Green, who served as an RAF canteen girl during the war, is left alive.
A guest post at TomDispatch.com by Adam Hochschild considers some of the parallels between the politics of the First World War and the politics of the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Hochschild is the author of a new history of the war, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″. Here’s a pullquote from the TomDispatch post:
Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.
The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.
In the wake of the death of Bin Laden, the question “Was it worth it?” looms large over military action that promises to linger almost indefinitely among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, much as it lingers still over the poppies of Flanders.
Ninety-one years ago, in a railroad car in Compiegne, France, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers that ended the conflict we now call the First World War. Several months later, as Woodrow Wilson sailed to France to preside over the negotiations to formalize the peace and impose reorganization and reparations on the demolished empires of Europe, he did so with the promise that the conflict would become “The War To End All Wars”. His grand designs would, of course, sow the seeds of the Second World War to come twenty years later, which, in turn, would result in thirty years of confrontation that threatened a Third World War big enough to destroy the entire planet.
And so it comes to pass that today the Chancellor of Germany, herself a prisoner of that unwaged war, would become the first leader of Germany to stand side-by-side with the President of France at the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the fallen soldiers of both nations in the very same week when she also stood in Berlin to mark the end of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the reunification of her country.
Though Wilson was disasterously wrong in his schemes at Versailles, in the long term the notion of a Europe in peace, with self-determination for many of the people who for centuries had been subjects of empires, has largely come to pass. Even the upheavals in the Balkans, which were the precipitating events that led to World War I in the first place, have not seriously threatened the security of the continent. Today, the European Union, largely driven by the co-operation of the French and the Germans, covers the breadth and width of the continent. As the last remaining veterans of that War To End All Wars have finally been laid to rest, perhaps so has a war-driven Europe once and for all.
Meanwhile, on this day we have co-opted to celebrate our military might rather than to reflect on the horrors of war, the current President of the United States stands poised to send tens of thousands of troops to a war initiated by his predecessor eight years ago, with neither an achievable objective nor a justifiable rationale for continuing a struggle that has cost several thousand soldiers their lives, bankrupted the nation, and called into question whatever moral authority this country might once have had. How many wars will this nation fight until it realizes that in the long term the way of peace is the only right one?
And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all– “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, by Eric Bogle
Over the past weekend, the next-to-last surviving French veteran of World War One, a man named Louis de Cazenave, passed away at the very advanced age of 110.
Yesterday it was announced that the last surviving German veteran of World War One, Erich Kaestner, passed away on New Year’s Day, aged 107.
Only about 20 more, one of whom is the only surviving female veteran, remain. Within the next couple of years, the War To End All Wars will have slipped from living human memory completely. War, unfortunately, will remain all too fresh in the minds of millions for the foreseeable future.
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