The Undoing

What's that old saying, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it"? Considering the current state of the world, it would seem that some of us have certainly forgotten this old adage.
Consider this: a war started on what could be seen as a whim; a quick end to said war was forecasted by the ones who started it; and no true objective was laid out at the outset by the conflicts initiators, and even when the war was well underway. Am I talking about the war in present day Iraq? No. I am talking about a conflict that set the world on fire almost 100 years ago. I speak of The Great War. In G. J. Meyer's A World Undone, he writes that "anyone inclined to believe that some dark force beyond human comprehension intervened again and again to make the Great War long and ruinous would have no difficulty in finding evidence to support such a thesis." A great point to describe the great conflagration initiated in what would later be called, Europe's Tinderbox- The Balkans.

What brought much of the European continent into a constant state of chaos occurred, inauspiciously, on the edge of the vast, yet declining Hapsburg Empire. The news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, hardly sent a ripple across Europe, much less create a sense of crisis. The archduke's uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, "seemed almost grateful" at the reports. Both Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia scarcely reacted to the news, with Tsar Nicholas only declaring "three weeks of mourning in honor of the slain archduke." With this much "fanfare", it is a wonder that the war started at all.

A unique aspect of this massive tome is how Meyer split each of the six separate parts into smaller entities, those of which include a brief introductory synopsis of those disparate characters involved in the war itself. What he did was deconstruct these characters so as to introduce them to the reader and give one an insight on how and why a given person or group of people behaved the way they did and how they came to be, for example: who were the Junkers and why were they so militaristic? This anecdotal filler before a new chapter begins, fits in wonderfully between Meyer's tremendous play-by-play.

Many times througout the conflict, each side squandered opportunities to breakthrough, figuratively and literally; the Germans could have laid siege to Paris soon after the war started, as they followed their Schifflen Plan; as did the British when they broke a thinly garrisoned line at Neuve Chapelle. I found this description of the British leadership by German war planner, Max Hoffman, quite telling. The British "soldiers fought like lions, but were led by donkeys."

As the war roared on, or better yet, stumbled on, battles were initiated to gain or retake useless sects of land; land usually made useless by constant bombardment or useless for tactical reasons: the Battle of the Somme, the Brusilov Offensives of 1916; and the Battle of Verdun, a microcosm of the entire war itself for its "length and cost and brutality and finally in its sheer pointlessness."

Yes, Meyer makes an amazing point about how it seems that some "dark force" aided in the tragic prolonging of the Great War. But the problem can be described in much simpler terms: humans began the war, stupid humans that is. Communications between nations in those years were mediocre at best, but not to the point where people would rather not wait for a formal response to an ultimatum.

Many may ask if there was a point of the war and others will ask if there was anything to be gained in the end. From an American standpoint, US generals gained valuable battle experience, such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but other than that, I would say there was little to be gained as the world is still paying for the sins of The Great War.

How Germany fared post-war is in direct relation to how World War II started. Problems with poorly conceived partioning of already inhabited lands, such as the Middle East by Britain and France still resonate today. Genocide and the like became the norm in the everlasting fractured region of Yugoslavia. To revisit what occurred during this tumultuous era, is an immense undertaking and Meyer's analysis proved as readable and entertaining as any best selling novel.