A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The tsar’s family were already in exile in Siberia, in Tobolsk. The tsar himself turned down a plan
of escape, hoping to recover his throne. When the Bolshevists took over, they transferred the family
to Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. As loyal troops were not far away, the Bolshevists ordered their
execution. On 16 July 1918, the tsar and his family - the tsarina, four daughters and his thirteenyear-old
son - were taken down to the cellar and shot with revolvers. They were thrown down a
mineshaft. The next day, the tsar’s brother, the tsarina’s sister and four nephews were taken to the
same mineshaft and thrown down alive; dynamite was tossed in after them. In the rest of the
country, the civil war between loyalists and communists continued, with appalling atrocities on
both sides. The whole of Russia was paying for the tsar’s delusion that he could rule like his father.
If humankind were capable of learning from history, the First World War would have taught them
that war had become an absurdity.
The German general von Schlieffen had devised a plan that should have overwhelmed the allies
within months. It was to hurl a huge German force into France, big enough to overrun the country
within weeks, then to turn his attention to destroying the Russians. Unfortunately for the Kaiser,
von Schlieffen died, and his successor, von Moltke, failed to grasp the importance of the time
element. He nervously divided his forces between Russia and France, with the result that the
German offensive bogged down along the Marne river. Both sides then dug trenches, and slugged
away at one another for the rest of the war - four years of it - killing millions on both sides, but
each failing to dislodge the other. Churchill, the British lord of the admiralty, tried to break the
deadlock by launching an attack on Turkey from the Dardanelles, to open a new supply route to
Russia; this also bogged down, with tremendous loss of life.
We find it hard to understand how two enormous armies could sit down opposite each other for
four years, launch offensives and counter-offensives which lost and gained the same piece of
ground, and kill one another by the million. When the British launched an attack in north-eastern
France in 1915, they lost a quarter of a million men and gained three miles. When the Germans
attacked Verdun in 1916, there were two million men engaged on both sides, and half of these were
killed; Verdun was left a ruin but the Germans failed to take it.
Then why did they go on? Why did the leaders of both sides not open peace negotiations, since the
failure of the Schlieffen plan had made all the Kaiser’s other aims irrelevant? Because both sides
were dominated by their emotions, and national pride demanded some kind of victory to make up
for the suffering. It came, eventually, only because the Germans made a second incredible blunder,
and began sinking American shipping to prevent supplies reaching Britain. Sensibly, America had
been determined to keep out of the war; but when American ships were sunk by German U-boats
(the U standing for ‘undersea’), their national pride also demanded revenge. A telegram - probably
forged - purporting to be from the German foreign secretary Zimmerman and offering Mexico large
slices of American territory when Germany won the war, supplied the necessary element of
indignation and outrage; America entered the war in 1917. Her weight turned the scales. The Kaiser
was shocked and distressed when his generals told him there was no alternative to surrender.
Europe was a wreck. Half its young men had been killed, hundreds of its towns devastated. Three
major dynasties had collapsed: the Romanovs in Russia, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the
Hohenzollerns in Germany - the Kaiser was forced to abdicate, and went to live in Holland (where
he died in 1942). As the world took stock of its losses, it was perhaps the most traumatic moment in
the history of the human race. It was also clear evidence that there was something badly wrong with