I mentioned in an earlier post that The Nations at War by Willis John Abbot (New York, Leslie-Judge Co., 1917) had a profound impact on my early development as a historian. And I began blogging the work chapter by chapter, but sadly I have not kept up with that and haven't written about it in well over a year. The current conflict brought the work to mind again, however. Not only because the roots of the conflict go back to the First World War and beyond, but because I have always found the introduction to be particularly interesting, and it seems relevant today.
It is hard for us to recall now, but there had not been a major land war in Europe in four decades when the first World War broke out. The continent had been at peace for a remarkably long period. Many thinkers claimed that war between modern, industrialized nations was impossible. The war surprised many people (though many others had expected, even craved, a conflict).
In his introduction Willis Abbot, the journalist author of the work, explained why so many thought a major war impossible in 1914:
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| The Nations at War: A Current History by Willis John Abbot (New York, Leslie-Judge Co., 1917) |
rival armaments they thought that the financial ties which bound all nations together were stronger than the political differences which tended to bring them into conflict. The tremendous power of international capital and credit exerted in every land and operating as a unit would certainly check any wasteful war. The bankers controlling the money and credit of the world would suppress the war-like ambitions of the crowned heads by locking up their strong-boxes.
So the wise men thought. But the event showed the bankers bowing low to the will of Kaiser, King, Emperor, and President. Not only did they lend more than twenty billions to the belligerents in the first two years of the war, but stood ready to lend more and more—for a price.
The world thought public opinion would check the war at the outset. Nobody wanted war—except those in high place who alone had the power to make or to avert it. But before public opinion could be expressed the invading columns were on the march, the guns were thundering and the heavy hand of military authority stilled any sound of public protest.
Men thought there would be no war because International Socialism would reduce the belligerent governments to impotence. For years the world had been told that the cause of labor was international, that the workingman's struggle against capitalism was the same in France as in Germany, in Italy as in Austria. With this greater warfare in progress, involving the well-being of the workingmen of all the world, no working man would be deluded into taking up arms against his fellows who happened to speak a different tongue or render fealty to a foreign state.
But at the test the internationalism of labor vanished as had the internationalism of capital.
A long war was impossible, we were told, because the greater destructiveness of modern weapons would make it impossible for human beings to sustain the shock of conflict. Every inventor of a new and peculiarly effective device for wholesale murder, for long time past, had been assuring the world that his first thought in inventing it had been to make war so horrible, so ruinous, that it would be abandoned in horror.
War, thereupon, responded to this theory by stimulating the invention of, and eagerly using asphyxiating gas, liquid fire, lachrymal bombs, armored tractors that crushed the wounded in their path while mowing down platoons of men with their perfectly protected machine guns. Aircraft were perfected— mainly that they might rain bombs upon inoffensive civilians; hospitals and schools being favorite targets. The submarine was developed to a point that outdid the imagination of Jules Verne and was employed largely to sink helpless merchantmen, often with utter disregard for the lives of their passengers whether belligerent or neutral.
One by one the forces which the world had relied upon to avert the calamity of a general war were swept away. The ties of finance, of commerce, of mutual interest, of common humanity, even of a common religion were broken. One War Lord, most vociferous of all in the claim that God was especially enlisted under his eagles, did not scruple to ally his Christian nation with the Turk, and exerted every influence to stir up all Islam to waging a Holy War on the Christian peoples of the world.
The lessons of this war should be political, not military. The world should learn not how to make perfect the art of devastating countries and slaughtering enemies but how to prevent the need, or the excuse for either."
The implied horror that Germany would side with an Islamic state and turn a jihad upon other "Christian" nations is a sign of those times. But sadly many of the reasons he gives for the failure of peace seem sadly appropriate today. It would be easy to read this, and look at the last few weeks and despair. But I hope people do not do so.
Because people did try to learn the lessons Abbot is talking about. They tried to put practical plans into effect, first with the League of Nations, and when that failed they tried again with the United Nations. And humans have tried again and again to add more frameworks for talk instead of war for resolving national differences. And there has been progress. The world has become more and more peaceful over the past decades. The shock of this invasion highlights that - it seems impossible to us all, because we have succeeded in reducing war.
Not everywhere or for everyone, sadly. And it is very easy, when one sees the dead children of the Ukraine, or Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan... well, it is so easy to despair.
Please do not despair. Yes, we have failed to end war. That is not because man is inherently weak or wicked, it is because the problem is very, very hard. It requires humans to understand one another, and understanding another mind is the most difficult thing in the world. It requires trust and empathy, and those have always been in short supply. It has always been easier to destroy then to build.
After the First World War we tried to fix things, and made them just a bit better. And after the Second World War we did the same. When the Cold War ended we took another step, and the world improved again just a bit.
I don't like to make predictions, the minds that are directing events are closed to me. But I do predict this, this war will end, and then we will again work to make things better. And eventually we will succeed at that.
Just do not despair.
All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.
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