The Great War in Global Context

In 1906, a German writer F.H. Grautoff warned that “a war in Europe… must necessarily set the whole world ablaze.”

I.             Origins of the Conflict

A.     Dangerous Nationalism:

1.         European Instability

2.   Alliance System

                                 Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy

                                          vs.

France and Russia (Britain loosely allied)

B.     Lighting the Fuse

1.         Assassination

Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, "Unification or Death."

2.     Russia Mobililzes

                   (Willy and Nicky Correspondence)

                     3. Romantic Nationalism and

                                    "Kultur"

4. War in Verse

A.     Edgar Guest

B.     Wilfred Owen

II.         Bloody War

A.     Trench Warfare=Stalemate

B.     Air War

     (Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen)

C.      Trenches in the Sea

III.     War's End:

A.     Exit Russia

B.     Enter the U.S.

C.      Germany's 1918 Offensive

IV.        How was the Great War different because of global intervention?

The Times History of the World in 1914 wrote,

“The instinct which made us such sticklers for propriety in all our dealings made us more reluctant than other nations would feel to employ coloured troops against a white enemy.”

V.            How was the globe different for having intervened in the Great War?

Tipperary mbali sana sana (swahili)

“It’s a long way to Tipperary”: King’s African Rifles marching song

France recruited = 500,000 colonial troops between 1914 and 1918:

166,000 West Africans (mostly laborers, 20% death rate)

46,000 Madagascans

50,000 Indochinese

140,000 Algerians

47,000 Tunisians

24,300 Moroccans. Most of these French colonial troops served in Europe.

GENOCIDE

VI. CONCLUSION:

A.            TOTAL WAR

8.6 million combatants killed

6.5 million civilians killed

11% France  

(casualty rate=killed or wounded)

9% Germany

8% Great Britain

B. HOW NOT TO END A WAR!

Treaty of Versailles

C. WAR IS BEAUTIFUL.

"I esteem the moral values of war rather highly…it seems to me that a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life." Hermann Hesse

"War is an aesthetic pleasure without comparison." Ernst Glaeser

"Poetry, art, philosophy, and culture are what the battle is all about."

Rudolf Fischer

THE END OF HISTORY, Francis Fukuyama

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."