World War I armistice is still with us a 100 years later

More: A journey back in time at World War I bazaar

More: It’s 100 years since the 1918 Spanish flu disaster. Could we have another global epidemic?

French, English and Germans met in the Forest of Compiègne to write finis, with the stroke of a pen, to a global conflict that killed something like 40 million people in four years. It was the original Armistice Day — known since 1954 as Veteran’s Day.

A doughboy statue. You probably have one in your town. (Photo: Markell DeLoatch, Public Opinion)

“The Great War,” as it was called then, was a world catastrophe, a game-changer, a turning point in history. Yet what remains of it today?

A few statues of doughboys, unnoticed in a few town squares. A vague impression of guys in helmets like soup plates, fighting an enemy with a preposterous upturned mustache called a kaiser.

No one is now alive who fought in World War I. World War I is not a living memory, not even much of a cultural memory. Yet its fallout — its shadow — is everywhere. Your own life is profoundly different because of what happened 100 years ago in those trenches in Pbadchendaele, the Marne and the Somme.

What if WWI never happened?

Don’t believe us? Try a simple experiment.

Get into your time machine, and travel back to Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. At 10:50 a.m., stop a disgruntled Serbian nationalist from shooting  Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

It was this killing that activated a whole series of alliances (many secret), dragging nation after nation into four years of horrific battles — based, in many cases, on war plans drafted decades earlier by generals just itching for the opportunity.

Now return to 2018 and see what’s changed.

 Here are some things that might — might — never have happened.

♦Adolf Hitler.  Huh? Who? He would have still existed, of course — a mediocre landscape painter railing against Jews. But it took the Versailles treaty of 1919, with its harsh penalties for Germany (132 billion gold marks, equivalent of $442 billion 2018 dollars) to plunge the nation into chaos and give him a desperate audience of millions to harangue. The results — in war, genocide, and the remaking of the European map — can hardly be overstated.

♦The 1969 moon landing. The space race came out of the cold war. The cold war came out of the Russian Revolution. And the Russian Revolution of 1917 came out of World War I privations that drove Russian peasants to the breaking point.

Sure, the Revolution might have happened anyway: it climaxed decades of unrest. But World War I lit the match. The moon landing would likely have happened too —eventually. But without the spur of the Soviets, it might have happened much later. Just a year before Sputnik, the 1956 sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet” forecast the first moon landing for “the final decade of the 21st Century.”

♦9/11. “Why do they hate us?” Americans cried when the Twin Towers fell. In fact, most of our trouble with the Middle East stems from a few World War I treaties.

As viewers of “Lawrence of Arabia” will recall, nomadic Arab tribes were enlisted by the British, during World War I, to fight against Germany’s allies, the Turks. In 1922, the Turkish Ottoman Empire fell. 

But instead of the autonomy the Arabs had been promised by the Brits, the victorious allies carved the Middle East into a series of new nations that had never before existed: Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan (then called Transjordan) and Palestine, which eventually became Israel. 

“Prior to the war, the European powers had been dipping their toes in the region,”  said Sam Mustafa, professor of history at Ramapo College in Mahwah, who teaches a World War I course (his family is from Iraq). “World War I gave them the opportunity to carve it up.”

Groups that had had limited interaction, previously, spent the rest of the century fighting over territory, race, religion and other flash points. Add to that American oil interests, and you get a never-ending, bloody churn from which comes — among other things — 9/11, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and our current flap with Saudi Arabia over a murdered journalist. All of it is World War I, coming home to roost.

Story continues after podcast

More World War I fallout

And that’s just for starters.

Without World War I, there would have been no postwar boom, no “Roaring Twenties,” and no Depression.

Without World War I, there might have been no Soviet Union. In which case, there would be no iron curtain, no red scare, no nuclear arms race, no fall of the Berlin Wall, and no Vladimir Putin, trying to restore the glory of the Soviet empire by hacking our elections.

Without World War I there would have been no push for a new world order: no League of Nations (promoted by New Jersey’s Woodrow Wilson), no United Nations, no European Union, and ultimately no Brexit. “What’s being challenged now is the instruments that we developed as a result of World War I,”  Raphalides said.

World War I accelerated the “Great Migration” of African-Americans, who came North to work in defense plants. World War I accelerated the emancipation of women, who held down men’s jobs for the duration, and ultimately parlayed their new empowerment into the 19th amendment in 1920.

World War I changed the nature of war itself. The mechanization of combat starts here: planes, tanks and zeppelins instead of horses. Mbad civilian casualties start here. So, too, does the creation of a new, expanded government bureaucracy: “Big Government,” the bugaboo of the right, is born in this era.

“This was the first sort of modern, industrial war,” said Keith Chu, professor of history at Bergen Community College in Paramus. “There are tanks, airplanes, poison gas, flame throwers. It was a meat grinder.”

World War I led to a new global role for the United States, which spent the rest of the 20th century as the world’s policeman. Among the consequences: Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Somalia, two Iraq wars. “Woodrow Wilson’s idea was that we are going to be the exporters of democracy,” said George Robb, professor of European history at William Paterson University in Wayne. “It’s never really worked, but we keep still wanting to do it.”

World War I brought the idea of nationalism — building throughout the 19th century — to its logical, bloody conclusion. Something to think about in 2018. “I think uncompromising nationalism is a slippery slope,” Chu said. 

World War I led to a new spirit of cynicism, disillusion, irony that is still with us.

Soldiers who had marched off to war expecting heroism and romance were instead marooned for years in a hellscape of barbed wire, blasted ground, and mangled limbs. Their trauma became a generation’s. “What is there to strive for, Love or keep alive for?” asked Noel Coward in a song he called “20th Century Blues.” It’s a question “the lost generation” asked in the 1920s, and we’ve been asking ever since.

“Your country tells you this is about democracy and freedom and national glory, and when it’s over nobody knows what it’s about,” Robb said. 

For most historians, in short, the 20th century we all know, with all its angst and turmoil and doubt, really begins with World War I.

“Historians work from a different perspective,” Raphalides said. “We look at the 19th century as 1814 — the fall of Napoleon — to 1914. The 20th century didn’t begin in 1900. It began in 1914. That was the new political reality.”

World War I on your wrist

In small ways too, World War I is still very much alive. For instance:

♦Wristwatches. No man, prior to World War I, wore a wristwatch, any more than they would have worn an earring. They were strictly for women. But manly pocket watches proved cumbersome in combat. By the end of the war, every guy wore a wristwatch. The next time you glance down at your Fitbit or Apple Watch, thank a doughboy.

♦Zippers. The principle of a “zip fastener” had been around for a while. But it was only in 1917, when a New York tailor, Robert J. Ewing, put zippers into money belts used by soldiers — their uniforms were pocketless — that the zipper took off.

♦Horror movies. The city streets of the 1920s were full of the war wounded: armless, legless, facially mutilated. Lon Chaney, at the same time, was scaring moviegoers with his cripples, paralytics, and hunchbacks. Is there a connection? Very likely, says critic David J. Skal. No coincidence, either, that a World War I vet named James Whale, after after launching his filmmaking career with the war drama “Journey’s End,” made the film about the ultimate casualty of surgery: “Frankenstein” (1931).

♦”The Lord of the Rings.” Ever wonder, as you watched Frodo and Sam make their way through a wasteland of grim skies and sweeping searchlights, how J.R.R. Tolkien came up with Mordor? Just look at some pictures of the Western Front, where he served.  “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression,” Tolkien wrote in his introduction to his trilogy. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

♦Your exercise regime. Joseph Pilates was a German prisoner of war, who developed his famous method while working with other World War I internees. There are now an estimated 11 million people who do Pilates.

♦Your language. Lady Gaga is “over the top.” The CEO is “in the trenches” with the staff. The Fed “dropped a bomb” on investors. All World War I expressions. 

♦Your diet. In 1917, there was a wheat shortage. Americans were asked to conserve for the sake of the troops. Why not eat corn instead? It was a hard sell: corn, back then, was food for chickens. But what, said the corn lobby, could be more tasty than corn jellies, puddings, pie fillings, sauces, jams — all made with delicious corn syrup! Fast forward 100 years. You have a 44-inch waist, and America has an obesity epidemic.

See? We told you World War I led to your Coolatta.

Local: Signed notes from Washington, Lincoln and Edison go on the auction block in Boonton

History: The story of 10 Capuchin friars who went from a Nazi concentration camp to Ringling Mano

Read or Share this story: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2018/11/09/world-war-armistice-still-us-100-years-later/1896846002/