The debris of World War I

As historical commemorations go, 2014 has been devoted to World War I, the 100th anniversary of the start of which was marked this year. It has led to a series of events across. In India, there have been fine books and even an Australian War Memo-rial exhibition in Chennai to mark the centenary of the Ger-man naval attack and the Emden’s shelling of the city (Madras as it was then called).

World War I was an apocalyptic episode in the history of Europe and indeed of Western civilisation. It was a new type of war, ending the age of chivalry and romance that war and soldiers had come to be (erroneously) associated with. The weapons and tactics used, the intensity and sheer breadth and length of the conflict, the trench warfare, the death in Britain of a generation of young officers who had rushed into the thick of the battle in the belief that they must lead from the front, and had left their regiments bereft of key leadership: all this told on not just the military but on wider society.

World War I marked the cusp between an older order and a modern, more brutal and cynical form of approaching war. It could be argued war has always been brutal and dirty. Yet, World War I culminated a 50-odd year period, going back to the Crimean War, when new communication technologies and increasingly intrusive newspapers and war correspondents began to bring stories and pictures from the battlefront to civilian living rooms. This changed notions of war and warmongering.

World War I also ended the age of empires. It brought down the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The British Empire never quite recovered, though it took another war to finally end it. Midway through World War I, the Bolshevik revolution ended the already declining Russian Empire.

The end of the imperial epoch created smaller nation-states and inevitably led to challenges of stability and viability. Jaswant Singh, one of the few Indian politicians with a sense of history’s tectonic movements, believes the world is still trying to answer the conundrums thrown up by the debris of World War I. Nowhere is that truer than in West Asia. The Cold War saw a patchwork process by which these empires and their networks were temporarily resurrected — by the East Bloc in Central Asia and the old Hapsburg regions of Central Europe; and by American military and naval power, which sought to replicate the British imperial framework using an arrangement of regional alliances. It was short-lived.

The war also brought America, kicking and screaming, into the international system, though not quite. For a half-century between the Spanish-American War (1898) and Pearl Harbour (1941) America went in and out of global affairs, unsure of whether it could afford its traditional isolationism or whether its economic and political interests now warranted an international role. World War I came early in this period.

The debate was between an internationalist President, Woodrow Wilson, and heartland politicians who dominated the Senate and refused to endorse the Treaty of Versailles, signed after the Great War. This left Europe with a fragile peace and the United States unable to play the role of an anchor power. Unerringly, the continent moved towards a second war.

As Wilson had famously said, “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert… to prevent it.” In a sense, the reflex isolationism that Wilson battled at home has come back to haunt America 100 years later. It has all but withdrawn from West Asia and is set to go home from Afghanistan even as its own analysts predict a security vacuum that will only compel another conflict, and some day call for an even bigger American intervention.

Those who lived through World War I — including the scholar-soldiers who wrote poetry in the trenches — realised they were caught in one of history’s momentous transitions. The year 2014 is also the 100th anniversary of the last of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures, His Last Bow, with the events taking place on the evening of August 2, 1914, two days before Britain declares war on Germany. Holmes, coming out of retirement, has fooled a German spy by feeding him erroneous information about British military capabilities. As the distraught spy is told the truth (though why Holmes decides to tell him this is not clear), he asks Holmes who he (Holmes, supposedly his informer) is.

Holmes informs him he has known the spy’s family and alludes to a series of German-linked adventures, including A Scandal in Bohemia. Von Bork, the spy, is incredulous and this leads to one of the more famous exchanges in literature:
“‘There is only one man,’ he cried.

‘Exactly,’ said Holmes.”
Arthur Conan Doyle published the story in September 1917. By this time, the War to End all War — as the conflict had optimistically been called — had dragged on and on. Brave talk of a quick resolution had vanished. There was no end in sight. Conan Doyle must have personally known many families that had lost sons. This melancholy and the knowledge that life would never be the same is reflected in the final paragraphs of His Last Bow:

“As they turned to the car Holmes pointed back to the moonlit sea and shook a thoughtful head. ‘There’s an east wind coming, Watson.’
‘I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.’
‘Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared …’”
Holmes, astute to the last, was right of course. One wonders what he and Watson, veteran of another Afghan war, would have made of the turbulence of our age.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com