CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE PEACE TREATIES
CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE PEACE TREATIES
CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE PEACE TREATIES
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
<strong>THE</strong> <strong>FIRST</strong> <strong>WORLD</strong> <strong>WAR</strong> <strong>AND</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>PEACE</strong> <strong>TREATIES</strong><br />
(France and Russia). For Britain the defence of Belgian neutrality<br />
was a matter of “life or death” for the honour of Great Britain.<br />
The document regarding “The Violation of Belgian Neutrality”<br />
1 records the violation of Belgian neutrality and the atrocities<br />
committed by the invading German forces: the German military<br />
proclamations and the burning of Louvain. The terrorising of the<br />
civilian population was – and would become – an instrument of<br />
modern, total warfare. As recorded in our second document, 2<br />
the German Army, for the first time, used poison gas in its attempt<br />
to break through the British and Belgian lines at Ypres.<br />
Ypres, as a monument to senseless and cruel warfare, would also<br />
become the symbol for the allied and associated powers of their<br />
championing small nationalities and the sanctity of treaties<br />
against a ruthless, authoritarian and aggressive Germany. From<br />
the outset and increasingly so, the war extended from the battlefields<br />
to the minds of men, as is shown in the document on the<br />
propaganda war. 3 For the Germans “treacherous” Britain became<br />
the principal target of hatred. For the Allies the German<br />
rulers were the source of all evil.<br />
The year 1915 was marked by two other decisions on the part<br />
of the central powers that would have lasting consequences for<br />
the war and the history of the twentieth century.<br />
The first one was the decision taken by the young Turkish<br />
movement, which ruled Turkey since 1908, to deport and exterminate<br />
the Armenian population. In the first, premeditated and<br />
carefully organised mass killing of this century, 4 more than a million<br />
Armenians perished for no other reason than their religion<br />
and nationality. Ottoman rule outside the Turkish heartland was<br />
replaced by Western rule and lasting Western involvement in the<br />
turbulent Middle-East.<br />
1 Document I.1.1 in “Western Cooperation” on our website.<br />
2 Document I.1.2.<br />
3 Document I.1.3.<br />
4 It was not until 1949 that mass killing of members of a national, racial<br />
or religious group was defined as the punishable crime of genocide<br />
in the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of<br />
Genocide.<br />
37