When the War Fronts and the Home Fronts Became One Big Front

Maurice Busset, Bombardement de Ludwigshafen, 1918

Professor Annette Becker, Universite´ Paris-Ouest Nanterre

For 100 years, the military fronts—land, sea and air—and those who fought on them have quite rightly received the most attention in discussions of conflict. But it is time to study everyone else’s war. Civilians were also caught up in the fight—through their tremendous work to keep the supplies moving to the fronts where they were needed—and they suffered and grieved their losses. The military fronts cannot be understood without looking at those fighting on the home fronts, who also were completely mobilized for the war effort. Every man, woman and child contributed in his or her own way in factories, fields and schools.

The military fronts and the home fronts formed an immense, complex war machine: there were fronts on land, sea and air; there were sites of invasion and shelter, of Herculean labour, of military and civilian imprisonment, of tireless battles against wounds and disease, and of mourning and remembrance. This sowed the seeds of later catastrophes. In some areas, civilians were at the heart of the war; invaded, occupied, looted and bombed, they had become everyday targets in a total war. In these areas, outside the four walls of their laboratory, the authorities tested their ideas of how to repress large groups, displace entire populations, even attempt, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at the time, the “systematic extermination” of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.

In his essay, “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War”, the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka fully grasped the paroxysmal nature of the conflict:

The First World War is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars.

Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian philosopher exiled from his country for the first time as a child in 1914, spoke of the importance that the two world wars had had on his life:

The war of 1914 never ended; the revolution and the unrest afterwards, the civil war, all of that comes together in the war of 1914. … The unrest started in August 1914 and never stopped, as if the order of things had been forever disturbed. 

Excerpted from "The Great War: World War, Total War"; International Review of the Red Cross (2015)