The 11th Hour on the 11th Day of the 11th Month

Ninety-two years ago this past Thursday at the 11th hour, on the 11th day, of the 11th month, the guns fell silent along what was then known as the Western Front of World War I. In a railway carriage secretly parked on a siding in the Compiegne Forest of France, the Allies and Germany signed an armistice after more than 1,500 days of fighting to stop “The War to End All Wars” on November 11, 1918.

World War I was without precedent. Never before had so many nations taken up arms to fight on so large a battlefield and inflict so many casualties. Sixty million soldiers from all sides of the conflict – mostly Europeans – took up arms and killed nine million of each other, including 50,000 Americans, wounding 20 million more and causing the collateral deaths of 12 million civilians.

Because trench warfare became the method of fighting World War I, enemies spent months if not years several hundred yards apart instead of maneuvering as military units did in subsequent wars. As stationary targets, each side was able to inflict ghastly casualties on the other using machine guns, artillery, and the most notorious weapon – poisonous gas. Predictably, stationary warfare made battles costly beyond comprehension in lives lost and wounded.

The first and second Battles of the Marne, for example, claimed 500,000 lives in 30 days, the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest, claimed 1.5 million in less than 20 weeks – the British had 57,000 killed in one day – and in the First Battle of Ypres, four months of heavy fighting produced casualties of 750,000 on the German side and 995,000 on the French side. The four battles which collectively made up the 17-day Second Battle of Ypres saw the first use of lethal gas warfare in which the French suffered 70,000 casualties and the Germans, 35,000.

The Battle of Verdun, the longest battle and one of the most destructive of the war, cost 250,000 French and German lives and 500,000 wounded. Gallipoli cost 43,000. Chateau-Thierry/Belleau Wood had the single bloodiest day in Marine Corps history — until Tarawa in 1943 — 9,777 casualties in a single day, of which 1,811 were fatal.

It’s hard to believe that this carnage arose out of the assassination of a relatively minor political figure in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. But German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had predicted, “If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” Indeed it did.

The assassination on June 28, 1914 triggered the network of military alliances formed during the prior decades so that within weeks the major powers of Europe were at war and their colonies around the world joined in the conflict, reaching far into Africa and what would become the modern Middle East.

These interlocking treaties ensured that once one power went to war, all of Europe would quickly follow. Events happened so quickly that the war they produced was likely not what any one of the treaty signatories expected. The allies — chiefly Russia, France and Britain — were pitted against the Central Powers — primarily Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Eventually, the war spread beyond Europe as the warring continent turned to its colonies and friends for help. This included the United States, which joined the war effort in Europe in 1917 as President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to "make the world safe for democracy."

In fact, the event that brought America into the war had nothing to do with making the world safe for democracy. America’s entry was triggered by an intercepted telegraph, famously known as the Zimmerman Telegram, which was decoded by British cryptographers and later turned over President Wilson. The telegram was dispatched by the German Empire’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, on January 16, 1917 to the German ambassador in Washington, D.C.

It instructed the German Minister to Mexico that if the United States appeared likely to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for a military alliance with Germany. He should offer Mexico Germany’s help in reclaiming territory lost during the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase, specifically the American states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. At the time American popular sentiment was anti-Mexican because General John Pershing had long been in pursuit of the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had carried out several cross-border raids.

The Zimmerman Telegram was released to the American press on March 1, and on April 6 the United States declared war against Germany and its allies.

The insanity of World War I becomes even more bizarre when it is realized that most of the heads of Europe who were fighting each other were related by blood. The British monarch George V's predecessor, Edward VII, was the German Kaiser's uncle and, via his wife's sister, uncle of the Russian Tsar as well. His niece, Alexandra, was the Tsar's wife. Edward's daughter, Maud, was the Norwegian Queen, and his niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain. Marie, another niece, was to become Queen of Romania.

When Edward VII died on the eve of the war, nine Kings attended his funeral. But despite these familial relations, European politics was all about power and influence and the protection of territorial possessions. In a sense, World War I was a family quarrel which cost some family members their countries and others – the Tsar and his family – their lives.

The Tsarist Imperial army threw itself into the fight against the Austro-Hungarian army along the eastern front. However, with the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed, the Tsar and Tsarina and all of their children were executed, and Russia was pulled out of the war. By the end of hostilities, the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires had been militarily and politically defeated.

The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires ceased to exist as countries. The Allies dismembered the Ottoman Empire and created the modern Middle East from it. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the surviving relic of the millennia-old Holy Roman Empire, ceased to exist, as did the relatively new German Empire. Maps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East were redrawn in a manner which still causes conflict. The centuries-old Russian Empire was replaced with a socialist system and later the Stalinist system which led to the death of millions.

The peace settlement of World War I remains a controversial topic. The international order created by this settlement lasted barely twenty years. The 1919 Versailles settlement failed to establish a stable international order, illustrating that winning a war does not always mean winning the peace. In the aftermath of the war, major geopolitical changes occurred. The center of wealth moved from Europe to the United States, the political map of Europe was significantly redrawn, and Germany was left in financial shambles, its people driven to the brink of starvation – a situation that helped create the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, World War II.

The Versailles treaty’s declaration that Germany was entirely to blame for the war was a blatant untruth that humiliated the German people. Furthermore, the treaty imposed steep war reparations payments on Germany – the equivalent of $400 billion today – meant to force the country to bear the entire financial burden of the war.

The principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in 1919 in protest at the scale of the reparation demands, warning correctly that it was stoking the fires for another war in the future.

When Wall Street crashed in 1929, the Weimar Republic spiraled into debt. Germany had to print money to pay off the war debt, triggering inflation in the country to the point where ten billion marks would not even buy a loaf of bread.

It has taken 92 years for Germany to repay its World War I debt, but remarkably the last $93.8 million installment was paid just six weeks ago on Sunday, October 3, 2010.

In historical retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that the political leaders in 1914 really understood the savage killing machine they had turned loose on themselves. Like the beginning of many armed conflicts, the citizens and leaders of that time believed this one would be over by Christmas 1914. But by the end of the first year, it became apparent that a new kind of war emerged on the battlefield like none that anyone had ever been seen before – or thankfully repeated since. This was total war – horribly stuck in a stalemate.

Even in the most gruesome human experiences there are those who can see glimpses of beauty. Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade was just such a person. In civilian life he had authored several medical texts but also a growing collection of poetry.

With the 1st Field Artillery, McCrae spent 17 days treating injured men – Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient. It was an ordeal he hardly thought could be survived as he later wrote:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of those seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly disturbed McCrae. A young friend and former student, 22-year old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was killed by a shell burst on May 2, 1915. He was buried later that day in a little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of a chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station in Flanders, McCrae could see a profusion of wild poppies growing in the torn up earth of the Ypres battlefield and its improvised cemeteries. There, as he mourned Helmer’s death and the deaths of all the soldiers, he scribbled in his notebook the poem that elementary school students in my generation were required to memorize and recite each year on November 11 – In Flanders Fields.

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.

Two years later while serving as the command surgeon of the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne, Belgium, McCrae contracted pneumonia. It became complicated by pneumococcal meningitis and quickly led to a brain hemorrhage.

John McCrae died on January 28, 1918,

He was only 45 years old.