The Guns of November

[Right_in_Virginia]

The Guns of November
PJ Media, Nov 11, 2018, Michael Walsh

In the end, the guns fell silent at the appointed hour: 11 a.m. on the 11th of November, the 11th month of the year 1918. For four brutal years Europe -- and much of the rest of the world -- had been first drawn into and then fully involved in the most ferocious conflict in history up to that time. A war that began almost accidentally, with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkan backwater of Sarajevo, soon morphed into a domino-toppling series of alliances and ententes, from which no nation or empire emerged unscathed. Nineteenth-century battlefield tactics collided head on with the mechanized warfare of the 20th; millions of young men were blown to pieces, had limbs severed, were blinded, crippled, driven mad as they crouched in the trenches, waiting for the orders to go over the top, and charge into certain death for King, Kaiser, and Country.

When the war ended -- with an armistice, not a peace -- German troops were still occupying swaths of France. Romanov Russia, which had fought on the side of the British and the French, had cratered and, in a sequence of revolutions, would soon enough be in Bolshevik hands. The Hapsburgs, too, would vanish, with Austria reduced to a rump province of what would become the Third Reich, and the Kingdom of Hungary losing two-thirds of its territory. The "Sick Man of Europe," the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had fought with the Germans, the Austrians, and the Italians, was sundered and split up into some of the artificial states, like Iraq, which bedevil us yet today. Poland gained its independence from Russia, only to lose it again 21 years later, and thus occasion World War II.

Of the putative victors, Britain and France had both been bled dry, losing the cream of their young manhood to Big Bertha and her legions of bayonets and machine guns. Only the Americans, whose troops eventually turned the tide during the summer and fall of 1918, and who suffered significant casualties as well, emerged from the carnage as a bolder, stronger nation.


More:  https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/the-guns-of-november/

[Fishrrman]

A superb piece by Mr. Walsh, worth your time.

"In sum, the war to end all war itself has not yet ended, and perhaps never will. That it was the wrong war to fight, and fought at the wrong time, is in retrospect clear. A strong Europe consisting of loosely allied but independent nation-states -- the original, professed ideal of the European Union, but since drastically perverted -- would have been vastly preferable to the destruction and chaos that followed. Instead, it fell to America to tilt the balance of power in 1918, then refight the war in 1941, and finally administer the nearest thing to a global peace the Western world had seen since the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

How long that peace will last is anybody's guess. For the sad truth of human history is that peace is the aberration and war the natural state of mankind. Earlier cultures found glory in it, but as the boys from the English Midlands and the American Midwest discovered in the trenches, modern war brings only horror. And yet we drift, refusing to learn from the past while imagining a feminized future in which conflict can be talked out and territorial matters can be postponed, if not actually settled, by endless negotiation. Striped pants and diplomatic briefs can keep the world in balance, or so we -- like our forbears in 1914 -- believe.

And then Gavrilo Princip steps toward the Archduke's open car and, in the name of something of other, opens fire."