Anniversary

November 11, 107 years ago, at 11:11 a.m., the armistice between the Entente and the Central Powers came into effect, officially ending the Great War, later hastily called ``World War I.'' Although it was not even remotely the first global conflict (that honor would go to the Seven Years' War, the French Revolutionary War, and its spin-off, the Napoleonic Wars), it was the first global industrialized slaughterhouse in history, the first world conflict in the Machine Age.

Although it officially ended in the sign of four aces, it continues to cast its shadow to this day, as arguably the greatest turning point in modern history. Without it, there would have been neither Adolf nor Lenin nor Ataturk nor Yugoslavia nor the House of Saud...I fear that not 107 but 207 years will be too short to heal the wounds that began on a sunny Sarajevo morning on June 28, 1914...Despite the passage of a century, despite the death of the last known veteran a few years ago - the tail of that conflict is still dragging around. The war of all wars. The second one was only the second half. The banal phrase that `those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it` implies that people can learn from the past.

As can be seen, it is obvious that no one understood anything...

The first war is much less present in the media, public discourse, in cooperative conversations and in the memory of paradise - than the second one. Why this is so is a mystery. Perhaps because the second war was black and white enough to be experienced as a clash between good and evil. Or perhaps it was just a more photogenic clash. The first war has no shortage of iconic characters and weapons, Lawrence of Arabia, the Red Baron, Old Charles, Fat Bertha, Mata Hari, Zeppelins over London, the Apocalypse at Skagerrak, and even the greatest military tactician of all time - the never-defeated Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who with a handful of colonists and native Askari tied down disproportionately large Entente forces in southern and central Africa.

But despite this, it lacks the attention it deserves. And it all started so naively...The Austro-Hungarian government, irritated by the alleged participation of the Serbian government in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, opened the war with river armored ships that shelled Belgrade. A few days later, Germany attacks Belgium for some reason (Schlieffen Plan) and later France. Russia, as an ally of France, attacks Germany from the east and Britain joins immediately, first at sea and later on land. Along with Britain, the dominion states of the Empire join in and in less than a month the war becomes global. People enjoyed the summer, in some countries people went on vacation, loosely... and oops! In two weeks the whole world is at war...

It is considered the first global conflict in which the industrial method of killing entered the scene. Until then, you often had to kill the enemy by looking him in the eye. Since then, you can also do it from afar. The machine gun (it had existed before, but this time it was used en masse, by entire villages) the mortar, poison gas, the tank, the submarine, the airplane and barbed wire enter the scene. Probably the most innovative war in human history, never before have so many revolutionary ways of killing people debuted as they did then.

The number of victims is difficult to determine, some claim 10 million and some go as high as 40 million. It depends on the methodology, whether the epidemics that spread because of the war are counted as victims of the war, whether the Armenian genocide is counted as part of the war, whether the shit in Ireland is counted, and so on, but an average figure would be 21 million dead and at least five times as many maimed, wounded, sick and displaced. Not the second, but the first war is responsible for today's map of the world. Why is it so long and wide? As for these areas, the number of people who died here is at least twice as high as in the second war. The devastation is also incomparable, an entire front passed here, Bitola was ruined by shelling. In Bitola there are both French and German cemeteries where thousands of dead are buried.

And the second war has all the hype, the first one is forgotten. That's probably because of the Nazis, they were an impressive bunch, with uniforms from Hugo Boss. The turning point of the war was the so-called `miracle of the Marne` in 1914 when the French stopped the Germans and the war from then on turned into a trench party on the Western Front, without any changes until the end. Another moment is the defeat of the German submarines who (fun fact) were the closest to winning the war for the Central Powers. Germany is falling apart from within, they have no resources and the people there are fed up with war, mass desertions, revolutions and uprisings break out, the Kaiser flees to the Netherlands and Germany surrenders.

The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire cease to exist. In their place, new states emerge, Germany becomes a republic, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia appear on the scene and with Versailles - the stage is set for the next carnival of Evil, after 21 years - which will be three times larger.

There is a category of citizens who glorify the past, who look for mythical 'real men' in the uniformed sheep of that time. For those who think that post-traumatic stress syndromes and Vietnam syndromes are an invention of the new spoiled generations and that the old ones were brave men who didn't even bother with a fly, think again. Except that back then, trauma was called shell-shock and all the symptoms remained a family taboo. No one was allowed to know about the daily nightmares, about the shaking of various parts of the body, about the immense pain rooted in the soul, about wetting his pants at any loud sound. Such was the time, a man was not a man if he showed any emotion in front of his family or the public. And most often he had to hide it from himself.

Because future generations would also have to be sacrificed. It would have been extremely selfish for an average believer in a supernatural or secular God of that time to break the cycle of evil. New generations should have been given the chance to witness new mass slaughters.

(Roger Mortis, 109)