CR5 Issue 152 Jan 2018

One Hundred Years On
‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’ they’d said. But
Christmas had come and gone four times, and
the war was no closer to an end. January 1918
saw the Great War continue on the Western
Front much as it had for the preceding three
years, with bitter cold and snow making life
on the front line even more arduous, though
at least the all-pervading mud had frozen.
From our distance now, a hundred
years away, we can see that the war will
finish before another Christmas is celebrated
amongst the barbed wire, but to the Tommy
in the trenches it seemed unlikely. Spring
of 1918 saw the German forces launch an
immensely successful offensive that pushed
their armies 60 kilometres through the Allied
lines. Now within range of Paris, they began
to shell the city, and much of the civilian
population panicked and fled. Some Germans
began to think that victory was within their
grasp at last, and quite possibly, quietly, some
amongst the Allies may have thought so too.
It didn’t happen. Overstretched,
without tanks and artillery in enough numbers
to help consolidate their gains, the Germans
lost all the ground they’d won and by the 20th
July were back where they had started,
having lost well over a quarter of a million
troops in the process. Let that sink in for a
while. A quarter of a million men. 250,000.
To try and put that in some sort of modern
day context, British Military Forces in
Afghanistan lost 456 men between 2001 and
2015. Each of those was undoubtedly a
personal tragedy, leaving behind wives,
friends, children, parents.
But imagine the impact of that
multiplied by over five hundred times.
In a matter of a few months, not 14 years.
Anti-war sentiment in Germany, already
growing, turned into vocal opposition, and
on top of a successful counter-offensive by
the Allies in August, the War finally turned
and road to peace, at least in Western Europe,
was at last visible.
At 5am on the 11th November, 1918 on a
train at Le Francport, near Compiègne in
Northern France, the armistice was signed,
and a ceasefire between Germany and the
Allies came into place at 11am. But the war
didn’t finish then.
For Britain and its Empire, we
remained legally ‘at war’ with Germany until
January 1920. And with the Ottoman Empire
(Turkey) until August 1924.
‘The War to end all Wars’ as it was known,
was nothing of the kind. The collapse of not
just the Russian Empire, but the German and
Austro-Hungarian Empires too, saw fighting
continue across Europe and Asia for years to
come.
And as the guns of the Western Front fell
silent, another killer stalked the world.
A strain of the illness popularly called Spanish
Flu took advantage of the masses of troops
moving around the world to create an
epidemic of incredible proportions. Worse
than the Black Death or plague of medieval
times, the death toll was somewhere
between 50 and 100 million or 6% of the
world’s population, wiped out between 1918
and 1919. In a Britain already trying to come to
terms with its losses from the War, a further
250,000 people died.
So, if sometimes, with all the talk
of Trump, ISIS, North Korea, terrorist attacks
and Brexit the immediate future looks a little
bleak, then cast your mind back to what they
had to deal with just a hundred years ago.
We’ve got it easy…
Happy New Year.
Paul M Ford writes for GrayDorian
– The Writing Bureau.
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