The Great War As the Great Christian Failure
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
–Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae December 8, 1915
While at a conference in Kansas City, Missouri, I had a chance to visit the National World War I Museum and Memorial. It is an impressive structure with a stunning hilltop view of the city and the plains of Kansas as you gaze west across the Kansas River.
Outside of the museum there are carved in stone or embossed in bronze inspiring phrases. The dedication plaque solemnly announces the dignitaries present for the dedication of the giant structure which resembles a cenotaph with faceless sphinxes guarding a tower that gives no light. Present on that November 1, 1921 were the great generals of the Great War: Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France; Armando Diaz, General of the Army of Italy; Earl Beatty, Admiral of the British Fleet; Baron Jacques, Lieutenant General of Belgium; and John J. Pershing, General of the Armies of the United States American Expeditionary Forces.
Entering the museum, you have to walk over a glass bridge – the Paul Sunderland Glass Bridge — that allows you to look down on a field that holds over 9,000 poppies. Each of the poppies represents 1,000 dead soldiers, and so this small version of Flanders fields represents or signifies 9 million soldiers who died in the war. At that point is where the wonderment begins.
According to the exhibits, over 65 million soldiers served in World War I which involved most of the countries of Europe as well as Japan and the United States. With nine million killed or dead as a result of the war, we can use an accepted rule of thumb to say that those wounded or injured by the war accounted for about another eighteen million, to put it conservatively. Therefore, about 27 million soldiers were casualties which means about 45 % of the armed forces engaged in the war.
We must then assess the civilian death toll. The exhibition said that about 10 million civilians were killed, meaning, again conservatively using our rule of thumb set out above, that about 30 million civilians all told were casualties. Combined with the 27 million military casualties, the total comes to around 57 million casualties in the space of about 51 months. That averages out at about 1.12 million casualties of all types per month or around 40,000 a day. Those numbers are staggering, and most people living today may have a hard time fully comprehending the loss. It all begs the big question, What were they fighting for?
We are all fairly familiar with the timeline of events, but a brief recapitulation may be in order. The Austrian Archduke was shot and killed on June 28, 1914. The Austrian Emperor demanded Serbia allow Austrians enter and seize members of the Black Hand, the group destabilizing Austria, and Serbia refused. Austria declared war on July 28 followed by Russian mobilization, followed by declarations of war by Germany, then France, then Great Britain. Armies on the Eastern and Western Fronts clashed by early August, 1914 as the young men of an entire generation giddily enlisted to fight, driven by a nationalist sentiment. By the end of September, the German western advance was halted at the Battle of the Marne. By the end of the year, the Eastern Front stabilized with the intervention of German armies and victories in what is now Poland.
For nearly four more years the European powers continued to slug it out in what amounted to a war of attrition. Italy entered the war pursuant to a secret treaty in early 1915 and Rumania, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire all came into the fray at varying times. Russia exited the war via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in late 1917. America declared war on Germany in April, 1917 and the war continued fought mostly in trenches until November, 1918. What were they fighting for?
While the war aims of each of the major European powers had some differences, they were all similar in that they sought territorial concessions or power or a combination of the two. The leadership, with the exception of France which was a republic and the Ottomans who were ruled over by Sultans Mehmed V then Mehmed VI, were all Christian monarchs of one sort or another. Great Britain was lead by a Christian King, George V. Germany was lead by the Christian Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Russia had its Russian Orthodox Tsar Nicholas II. Austria Hungary had the long-reigning Emperor Franz Joseph I and Italy had King Victor Emmanuel III, both of whom were Catholics. The little countries had their Christian kings too: Serbia, Rumania, Belgium.
Christian monarchs, leaders of ethnic states, ordered and allowed the killing and maiming of millions of their own and of their neighbors all for power, land, glory. All of this supports the long held view that we were taught years ago which is that democracies do not war against each other, and that autocracies are more likely to wage bloody wars.
Religion – Christianity in particular – proved inadequate to the task of stopping the killing. The monarchs ignored Pope Pius X who issued two calls for peace before his death on August 20, and Pope Benedict XV who called for peace upon assuming the papacy in early September, 1914. The kings and queens of Europe rejected the pleas for peace from the popes, and that represented a rejection of the moral authority of the popes. While the royalty may not have had all political power in their respective countries, they had considerable, if not also decisive, political power given their enormous moral and cultural influence. They could have stopped the war. They chose not to do so.
America was the only country that did not have territorial ambitions. Indeed, Americans fought for country and liberty, with freedom of the seas having been a triggering cause for her entry into the war. A desire to right wrongs was America’s stated motivation and so that entry offered the best way forward for peace in Europe. U.S. troops proved decisive in ending the stalemate on the Western Front and leading to an Armistice.
Before that, in August, 1917, the United States, in response to Pope Benedict XV’s peace plan offered on the first of the month, called for the removal of the Kaiser. The American letter set out the moral high ground for such a position:
“The purposes of the United States in this war are known to the whole world, to every people to whom the truth has been permitted to come. They do not need to be stated again. We seek no material advantage of any kind. We believe that the intolerable wrongs done in this war by the furious and brutal power of the Imperial German Government ought to be repaired but not at the expense of the sovereignty of any people – rather a vindication of the sovereignty both of those that are weak and of those that are strong. Punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires the establishment of selfish and exclusive economic leagues, we deem inexpedient and in the end worse than futile, no proper basis for a peace of any kind, least of all for an enduring peace. That must be based upon justice and fairness and the common rights of mankind.
“We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guarantee of anything that is to endure, unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the German people themselves….”[1]
The people of Germany had to be heard, and not the monarchy for it was the monarchy that gave rise to and perpetuated the killing. Indeed, the monarchies, royalties, and hereditary aristocracies of Europe presided over the slaughter of their own peoples, and with that slaughter, the loss of their own credibility and the extinction of their privileged positions in the European countries. It was a fitting end to systems that centuries earlier rejected Christendom.
Secretary of State Lansing’s letter was the foundation of the belief that democracies do not start wars, at least not in the modern era and especially not against other democracies, and that autocratic regimes are more likely to start and wage wars. It is easier for a few to start a war than for the many to start a war. When the people of a nation make the decision for peace or war, they would have to live, or die, with that decision. Most people do not want war and when the decision is left to the most people, war is less likely.
Secretary Lansing’s letter was rooted deep in American history which placed political power in the hands of the people. That political philosophy held that rulers, or governments, that were harmful to society could be changed or even should be changed. The American Declaration of Independence was a restatement of the principles long-established in law and theology that tyrants could be removed for their crimes against the people, and that the people ultimately held the power to decide their own form of government along with the powers they wished to assign it. In the case of the United States, these principles found application or expression by a new and distinct people, the Americans, who brought their new country into existence as an exercise of national self-determination.
The Germans retained the right to change their rulers who had caused them harm, and by August, 1917, it was clear that the Kaiser not only harmed his own people but also other peoples. Dating back to the School of Salamanca, it was understood and accepted that a ruler bringing an unjust war was subject to penal measures. As the authors of an unjust war, the Kaiser and his government were subject to sanctions, or even removal as Catholic doctrine and thinking demanded. To establish peace again, right order was needed which meant removing the causes, or at least reducing the possibilities of there being another war due to misunderstanding or more nefarious purposes. The best way to do that, especially in accordance with the American experience, was to involve a large number of people in intercourse with each other whether that be economically, politically, or socially. America had always brought to the world a coming together, a mingling to achieve common goals, and with that came peace.
The Wilson Administration set out a Fourteen Point[2] peace plan in January, 1918 which acceded to many of the Allies’ territorial demands. However, it also set out principles and proposals to strengthen the international community by increasing contacts between peoples. In relevant part these were:
“1. Open diplomacy without secret treaties; 2. Economic free trade on the seas during war and peace; 3. Equal trade conditions….14. Creation of the League of Nations.”
The Great War was the failure of a system that had signed its own death warrant centuries earlier and finally got around to executing it in muddy, bloody trenches. The leadership of such a system was given to those who had privilege by virtue of birth or religion, and who ultimately felt beholden to no one, not even to God. Appetites and desires for power, intensified by national jealousies, proved too much to keep autocracies from destroying themselves. Christian monarchies failed. It was too hard to see one’s neighbor in the other. The American solution offered the best way forward for peace and authentic human development by removing, or at least ameliorating, some of the most poisonous elements in the international community.
[1] Secretary of State Robert Lansing, letter of August 27, 1917.
[2] Woodrow Wilson, The Fourteen Points found at “The Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and the US Rejection of the Treaty of Versailles,” The National World War I Museum and Memorial.