Remembering the Great War: Mostly It Is Its Barbarity

Danger Was Always Close

By  Annette Becker

The Great War was globalized and totalized  by the inclusion of colonial and newly independent people from all over the world and of civilians, old people, women, and children. The European war became a laboratory for all the suffering of the century, from the extermination of the Armenians to the refugee crisis, the internments, and the unending modernization of warfare.  For the first time in history, the whole world waged war—a war that devoured men, resources and energy; that split loyalties, reignited old fervors and generated new horrors. What began in Europe, and might have been only the “Third Balkan War,” was turned into a global catastrophe upon the whim of the great imperial powers.

Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff coined the term “battle of materials” (Materialschlacht) to describe the battle of the Somme. Their soldiers, however, described it as Verwüstungschlacht: devastation or butchery. Officers of the General Staff and soldiers in the field were both right. Between 1914 and 1918, the various armies were engaged in battles of materials and battles of utter carnage. The more than 70 million soldiers fighting the war were trapped in a new kind of deadly violence. Even if they came out of the war in one piece, over half of those that survived developed psychological disorders, minor and major.

From 1914, the battlefield became a place that was radically different and more terrifying than anything that had gone before. War had been transformed. Where previously soldiers had fought shoulder to shoulder, they were now isolated, spread out across the terrain, hiding wherever a shell had made a crater. While all battlefields had been frightening in the past, nothing had come close to the total dehumanization of this war. The difference between the means of protecting oneself and killing others was massive: machine guns, artillery, flamethrowers, and poison gas turned the terrain into killing fields. Men were not even safe in their bunkers underground.

Disablement Always a Possibility

The intense fighting lasted, on and off, for weeks, then months. But after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the initial period of battles that were brutal but brief was over. Battles on the Western Front, on the Eastern Front and in the Middle East would last for months. They became a series of sieges that laid waste to everything around them—without, however, preventing in the least the besieged from bringing in new supplies and reinforcements, or rebuilding their defenses. Rear lines of trenches extended so far, sometimes dozens of kilometers, that defending forces could repel almost all the enemy’s attempts to break through. But how many were killed or wounded? How many were made prisoners of war? How many were declared missing or used as human shields?

As a result, what is most remembered about the war is the mass slaughter of combatants: over 10 million dead in four and a half years. Unlike in previous wars, very few died of disease; almost all were killed in the fighting. The survivors did not fare much better. Nearly 50 percent of all those who fought were wounded, whether seriously or not, and often more than once. Shells were the main cause; poison gas, though a new terror, caused far fewer casualties.

The new violence got under the skin and into the flesh of those who were both agents and patients. However, few would later be able to say “I survived, and I killed”—like Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss writer who volunteered to fight in the French army:

All at once everything breaks, cracks, booms. General commotion. A thousand blasts. Infernos, fires, explosions. It’s an avalanche of cannon. The thunder rolls. Barricades. The firing pin. In light of the looming departure, oblique, ambiguous men, the index of a signboard, a crazy horse. The batting of an eyelid. The flash of magnesium. A quick snapshot. Everything disappears.

“Everything,” it seems, including bodies:

[H]e was blown up by a shell and I saw, with my own eyes I saw, this handsome legionary sucked up into the air, violated, crumpled, blasted in mid-air by an invisible ghoul in a yellow cloud, and his blood-stained trousers fall to the ground empty, while the frightful scream of pain emitted by the murdered man rang out louder than the explosion of the shell itself, and I heard it ringing still for a long moment after the [vaporized] body had ceased to exist.

It was because there was so often no identifiable trace of killed men that governments started to commemorate the Unknown Soldier.

Sometimes Death Was Inescapable

The war began with many expressing their determination and willingness to take part, but these attitudes shifted to rejection and outright pacifism after the conflict. As Freud said as early as 1915, modern warfare had produced extraordinarily traumatizing situations that nobody was prepared for: the mutilated bodies, the death of so many young people—an entire generation lost—and the massive destruction of homes and of hope. A 19th-century vision of progress and civilization had left behind nothing but barbarity—cruelty, brutality, internalized violence expressed as visceral patriotism—which whether it was accepted or rejected, fought or given into, would be reflected and refracted in the postwar period, in the private sphere and in the political, literary, and artistic worlds

(The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Editors.)

Source: "The Great War: World War, Total War,"  International Review of the Red Cross, 2015