Drawing lessons from the inferno of 1914-1918

On November 11 1918, the English town of Shrewsbury rang its church bells, all but silent in four years of infernal death and destruction, to celebrate the victory of the British empire and its allies in the first world war. On that day Susan Owen, a Shrewsbury resident, received a telegram informing her that her son Wilfred had been killed a week earlier on the western front. Wilfred Owen was 25. Brave, honest, touched with genius, he was already one of the finest poets of the 20th century.

“Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead,” wrote Owen. A century on, these heartbreaking lines fill us with respect for the sacrifices of Owen’s generation — not just of his compatriots but of all nations drawn into the conflict. Not even the second world war evokes the pity of war as does the conflagration of 1914-18. Such sentiments set the context for the solemn ceremonies on Sunday in which the leaders and citizens of the UK, France and Germany will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war in western Europe.

If, however, we are to draw lessons from the war and the peace treaties of 1919-23, we must recognise that, for much of Europe and the wider world, November 11 did not end the bloodshed. Out of the collapse of four empires — Austria-Hungary, Germany, tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire — there erupted revolutions, counter-revolutions, border conflicts and murderous ethnic disputes. In the Middle East, Britain and France, contradictory wartime promises to regional clients and the pursuit of postwar imperial interests left scars unhealed to this day.

Furthermore, hindsight enables us to see that the titanic battles of 1914-18 were only the first phase of a European civil war that reached its apogee in 1939-45. In their European setting the two world wars were not, fundamentally, about western Europe but about a struggle for mastery between Germany and Russia. Each time German aggression sucked France and Britain into war. Long before anyone had heard of Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg wrote in 1914 that his regime’s aim was “to eliminate for all time that which has been termed the European balance of power and to lay the foundations for German predominance in Europe”.

The German problem received no solution in the 1919 Versailles treaty. The new order, inspired by Woodrow Wilson, was crippled by the US president’s failure to secure Senate approval for the treaty and US membership of the League of Nations. The US disengaged from European affairs, with baleful consequences. Thankfully, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman did not make the same mistake in the 1940s. Unlike Wilson, they knew the value of bipartisanship in foreign policy.

The danger now is that these lessons are being unlearned. Under Donald Trump, for the first time in more than 70 years, the US commitment to a rules-based global system is in question. This is a potential calamity. To the extent that the US turns into a wrecker of this system, its sheer power and the bad example set to smaller states risks unleashing untold damage.

Germany after 1945 evolved into a model democracy, embedded in the EU. But now Russian aggression in Ukraine, disputes over migration and assaults on the rule of law in some eastern European states are testing the EU’s unity and values, just as the UK is leaving the bloc. The Armistice anniversary is a time to reflect that the peace and stability of Europe will require responsible German leadership, US engagement and determined efforts to ease the growing tensions in the continent’s eastern half.

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