The War to End All Wars? Lessons of World War I Revisited

For one thing, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker warn against an overreliance on the memoirs of soldiers who were not trained historians. Given that ten million servicemen died in the war, many of these witnesses must themselves have been killers. And yet surprisingly few describe the business of killing, and even fewer of their relatives and descendants have commemorated them in those terms. Instead, they have become victims. As the authors point out, the attempts to procure posthumous pardons for those executed for military offenses show how contemporary notions of political correctness can be used to distort the past. That there were miscarriages of justice, especially by today's standards, is very probable. Yet it is at least as likely that many of those sentenced were recidivists who were threatening the good order and discipline of their armies in a time of national crisis. As an example of this modern-day trend of exculpation, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker cite the absurd mayor of Craonne, France, who, on welcoming Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to the Chemin des Dames on November 5, 1998, announced that the Nivelle offensive of April 1917 -- the trigger for mutinies in the French army -- was "the first crime against humanity." This same sort of reverse and perverse logic traces the roots of the Holocaust to Verdun.

The authors of 14-18 do not dispute the brutalizing effects of war in general and of World War I in particular. But unlike the mayor of Craonne, they make connections that work forward, not backward. In the first part of the book, they discuss the failure of international law or any other agency to protect nonbelligerents: prisoners of war, civilians living under German occupation, those deported as forced laborers, and children, who had been instructed in the rightness of their own nations and the wrongs inflicted on them. These are, to borrow from the title of another book on this theme by Becker, World War I's "forgotten" victims. Their postwar neglect was what enabled the persecution and extermination of those who found themselves in the same position in World War II.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Although 14-18 strives for breadth, a weakness of the book lies in the influence of its national origins, which are ultimately revealed in its attempts at continuity. The significance of World War I for France has to be set against its defeat, disgrace, and division in World War II. In light of this humiliation, no other major participant in World War I has more reason than France to privilege the damage and death of the first war over the second -- unless, like Turkey, it managed to stay aloof from World War II entirely. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker tilt the scales of impact toward World War I by arguing that, with the exception of Russia, each nation's losses per day were greater in 1914-18 than in 1939-45. But what distinguished both world wars from earlier conflicts was less the number of losses per day than the fact that losses occurred every day -- and night -- of the year. In previous wars, battles were defined events that took place on single days, with climatic and logistic considerations preventing active hostilities for much of the year. In the two world wars, however, fighting was continuous; it was never really all quiet on the western front. Thus the length of the war mattered, and for several belligerents, if not for France, World War II was longer.

This concentration on France produces some skewed judgments and generalizations that do not weaken the book in overall terms but do vitiate its comparative dimension. The authors explain the Ottomans' massacre of the Armenians in 1915 as a response to the Allied landings at Gallipoli. But they overlook the fact that the Russian advance across the Caucasus into eastern Anatolia was what made the Armenians seem an immediate threat. Switching to the western front, they write that raids by small groups were abandoned quite quickly; in fact, British commander-in-chief Douglas Haig deliberately adopted a raiding policy in 1916 to harass the enemy, establish dominance over "no man's land," gather intelligence, "blood" inexperienced troop formations by exposing them to combat, and disrupt the tendency of trench warfare to lapse into "live and let live." And the third section of the book stumbles over its focus on France and the United Kingdom despite its raft of insights. For example, the unity of time for the yearly commemoration of World War I -- established by the authors as November 11 -- in fact represents an Anglo-French bias and does not work for many other states that were liberated or found their identities on different days. Above all, it does not work for Germany, which had to accommodate the revolution of November 9, 1918, and then Kristallnacht on that same day 20 years later.

In addition, the fact that Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker describe World War I as a "total" war because of the violence it visited on civilians creates two problems. The first is the lack of precise evidence; the second is a muddled concept of "total war" itself. In regard to the first, 14-18 implicitly poses but never answers a key question: How many civilians were actually killed in World War I? Recent scholarship has provided some answers for Belgium as well as for France, but Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker fall back on a report written by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss of the University of Lausanne in 1915 about the Austrian atrocities in Serbia. Furthermore, there are no reliable figures for East Prussia and Russia, let alone the Ottoman Empire. Even the impact of the allied blockade on civilian mortality rates among the Central Powers is in dispute.