World War I: When the Unthinkable Became Thinkable

As we commemorate eighty-nine years since the end of the First World War, the long-term consequences of that catastrophe as well as its causes shift into a new perspective. The war opened with deliberate acts of cultural vandalism by German troops, who burned down the university library of Louvain, Belgium, with its priceless collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, and shelled the Gothic cathedral of Rheims, the site of the coronation of French kings. Cultural destruction, the extreme result of a culture of war which encompassed not only a war of annihilation but also a war against the culture of the enemy, was a particularly symbolic transgression. It went in tandem with the mass killing of civilians – some 6,400 men, women, and children were executed during the invasion of Belgium and France in August-October 1914.

Why Louvain university library was selected for destruction had to do with its prime place as the intellectual centre of Belgian Catholicism: the mainly Protestant officer corps of the Prussian army were obsessed with the notion that Catholic priests were orchestrating civilian resistance to the invasion and even leading a popular armed uprising. In Louvain, as in almost every case in which German troops killed civilians, they alleged the victims had taken up arms and fought as “francs-tireurs.” This was seldom other than an illusion, derived from German military culture going back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and training which led the troops to expect civilians to fight. The inexperienced, nervous, and often exhausted German men thus interpreted unidentified shots as “franc-tireur” firing, although in reality most came from mobile units of French and Belgian troops, or, as at Louvain, from panicky “friendly fire.” The summary executions and widespread incendiarism that followed were backed by explicit orders given by army commanders to “burn down villages and shoot everyone.”

The world public sphere reacted with horror: the Daily Mail ran the headline “Holocaust of Louvain. Terrible Tales of Massacre.” Opinion in neutral countries, above all the United States and Italy, turned decisively against Germany, as Allied propaganda drew on deep wells of stereotype to denounce the enemy as "barbarian."

To make sense of death in an age of almost incomprehensible slaughter by impersonal weapons of mass destruction (more than 70 per cent of military fatalities were caused by artillery fire), the culture of the enemy was targeted. The German clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, and lay intellectuals, readily used the terms “holy war” and “crusade” to describe Germany’s war. This was not only to defend Germany, but also to spread the gospel of German culture throughout the world. Germany’s foremost intellectuals, including some of the most renowned historians of the day, signed the famous “Appeal to the World of Culture” of October 1914, which denied that German troops had broken international law, accused the enemies of waging war against Germany’s culture, and denounced them for presenting “the disgraceful spectacle of inciting Mongolians and Negroes to attack the White Race”.

The Allies found a great deal more to condemn in the “German way of warfare.” The German attempt to “bleed the French dry” at Verdun in 1916, the ruthless exploitation of civilian and prisoner forced labor in occupied western and eastern Europe, the deportation of Belgian civilians, and the sinking of passenger ships such as the Lusitania, formed a litany of “German atrocities.” Was there something uniquely savage about German military conduct?

In fact, the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 had prefigured the twentieth-century wars of annihilation, combining modern weapons technology with war on the enemy’s culture. An international commission of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that all sides committed atrocities, including the destruction or desecration of places of worship, “widespread and almost universal” rape of women and girls, the mass killing of civilians (of Muslims by Orthodox Christians, vice versa, and of one Christian people by another), and the massacre of captured soldiers.

Meanwhile, mass population expulsions of ethnic Greeks and Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in the years 1912 to 1914 presaged the events of 1915 to 1923. The Young Turk regime had a program in which Turkish ethnic nationalism and Islamism were to replace the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of the Ottoman empire, to “modernize” Turkey. The genocide of the Armenians should thus be seen in the context of the plans to attain the nationalist utopia of an ethnically “pure” Turkish state. Although the genocide of the Armenians is best known today, the nation-building project culminated with the expulsion of the Greek population from Anatolia, in total between 1.2 and 1.5 million people, sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The event that symbolized this tragedy was the burning of Smyrna, during which up to 15,000 Greeks were killed; it marked the end of the nearly 3,000-year history of the Greek presence on the Aegean coast of Anatolia.

Yet even the Entente nations in 1914-18 had their own versions of the dynamic of destruction. French and British intellectuals justified the war as a “holy struggle” and used the language of racism and Social Darwinism. Above all, the reality of modern, industrialized warfare impelled the Allies into responding with massive destruction of the enemy, harboring visions of aerial warfare, and promoting revolutionary conflict and insurgency.

The extreme violence of German war culture was therefore not exceptional. Even Italy, pre-eminent site of western civilization, entered the war with aggressive intentions, hoping to conquer territory from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Italian nationalists ended the war, despite victory, with an insatiable hunger for further violence. Some, like D’Annunzio, wanted to continue the external war of expansion, with the theatrical, but ill-fated occupation of Fiume. Others, like Mussolini and his Fascist movement, wanted a continuation of war to destroy the “internal enemy” – the workers and peasants engaged in mass social protest, the Socialist party, and democracy itself. The liberal state ignored and tacitly supported the brutal violence of the Fascists, and in the end it was the liberal political establishment that called Mussolini into power in October 1922. The Fascist government saw itself as a regime of continuous mobilization to revolutionize Italy; its fixed reference point was the experience of the Great War.

The Bolshevik regime in Russia, too, explicitly saw itself as a mobilizing dictatorship, using the language of militarism, and the practice of war as “social surgery” to “cleanse” society. Indeed, as Peter Holquist has written, Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik violence were “twin strands … emerging out of the 1914-1921 maelstrom of war, revolution, and civil wars.” Ten million died in the Civil War, at least five times more than the number of Russian military casualties in the World War. The peoples of the former tsarist empire suffered in a forgotten cataclysm on a scale that is still hardly comprehended in the western world.

By the time of the Second World War, there was an immense progression in the dynamic of destruction. While civilian deaths amounted only to about one-sixth of total dead in the First World War, the proportion in the Second World War was around two-thirds. The revolution in the technology of war, primarily aerial warfare, and the revolution in ideology, primarily racial warfare, account for this dramatic shift. Yet the potential for mass destruction – of enemy culture, of entire peoples – makes the history of First World War so unsettling, for it made the unthinkable thinkable.