JON WELLS:
War without end
EUPHORIA IN HAMILTON and around the world on Nov. 11, 1918, marked an outpouring of relief that the Great War was over.
But the meaning ran deeper, channelling hope that something fundamental had changed, that world war might never rage again.
The toll from Canada’s deadliest conflict was staggering: 60,000 soldiers killed out of a country of eight million.
More than 2,000 Hamilton soldiers perished, two per cent of the city’s 100,000 population.
In the Battle of the Somme alone, a slaughter lasting 141 days, 146,000 allied soldiers were killed and 164,000 German soldiers killed.
The war might have become even deadlier had it lasted into the new year.
By early 1919, production of poison gas in the U.S. and Britain combined would have reached 300 tons a day. By comparison, Germany had averaged 14 tons a day since it first used the weapon in 1915.
As one writer put it: “The horrors of 1919 remain buried in the archives of the great antagonists.”
But the glow of the armistice declared 100 years ago was no time to dwell on the darkness that might have been.
The Hamilton Spectator wrote that, God willing, peace “from the brutal work of slaying each other will be a permanent one.”
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a leading voice of such optimism.
An article in The Spectator, nestled below the celebratory headlines, quoted him saying that “everything fought for has been won,“and the task was establishing “just democracy throughout the world.”
When he had urged the U.S. Congress to end American neutrality in the war, he predicted that winning would make the “world safe for democracy.”
Wilson is often attributed with having coined a phrase that would eventually be mocked for its irony: He called the First World War the “war to end all wars.” But he was just one among many who believed it.
He likely borrowed the words from British author H.G. Wells, who wrote an article in 1914 titled “The war that will end war.”
Wells suggested it would “exorcise a worldmadness and end an age … Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war!”
And Wells was no warmonger. He was considered a pacifist and a futurist.
The protracted fight between the allied and axis powers marked the end of many things but clearly war was not one of them, although there seemed a fleeting chance in 1918 to prevent a second massive conflagration.
The tragedy of what followed the armistice was failed diplomacy, said Jonathan Vance, a history professor at Western University. His grandfather lived in Caledonia and served in the war.
“The peace was bungled. If you had an enlightened peace treaty in 1918, if you had created more prosperous and tolerant societies, then the cost of the war would not seem as bad. Instead, it didn’t produce anything positive in a tangible sense.”
The Treaty of Versailles, signed June 28, 1919, left Germany broken and bitter, its people open to exploitation by a nationalist demagogue preaching revenge.
One covenant in the treaty was the creation of the League of Nations — predating the United Nations by 26 years — that had been proposed by Wilson as a mechanism for cultivating peace and freedom.
It ended up a shadow of what it could have been, when Congress rejected the league and the U.S. never joined.
At the signing of the treaty, French general Ferdinand Foch famously declared: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Twenty years and 66 days later, France and Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR exposed the horrors of the Holocaust, led to the pulverizing of entire cities and 50 to 80 million deaths, culminating in the atomic decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A cold war between the U.S. and Soviet Union followed, with a nuclear arms race and hot proxy wars between the superpowers over the next four decades, including the Korean War, where 516 Canadian soldiers died serving.
In Hamilton, monuments to courage, sacrifice and waste in war without end dot the landscape:
A dozen stone cenotaphs stretching from Dundas to Stoney Creek; Dieppe Veterans Memorial Park on Beach Boulevard; a reconstructed armoured military vehicle outside the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope, in memory of four local soldiers who died during the war in Afghanistan.
Conflict and vulnerable hot spots persist around the world, from the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East, the Caucasus to Africa and South America.
To cite just one example, civil war continues in Yemen at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, that started in 2015 and where tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed.
More than 50,000 children died from starvation last year in the country, and 12-13 million civilians are at risk of starvation in the next three months.
And yet viewed through a different lens, cross-border warfare, or world war, has never seemed a more remote possibility.
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli-based historian and author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” wrote that since 1945 most warfare has been limited to civil conflict and coups: “What could lead to war between Germany and France next year? Or between China and Japan? Or between Brazil and Argentina?”
He writes that the cost of war between states is too high to risk — the economic cost in an interconnected world, and the unimaginable human toll from nuclear war. (There are an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world spread among nine countries, down from a peak of 70,000 in the 1980s.)
And while wealth once consisted of treasure and land to conquer, today it is primarily human capital: There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley to seize.
But Harari adds ominously that a “string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction … It takes a lot of wise people to make peace, but it is sometimes enough to have one fool to have a war.”
THE FLAWED HUMAN CONDITION is among the messages in a sermon that Rev. Alan McPherson will deliver on Remembrance Day at West Flamboro Presbyterian Church. Now retired, he served 10 years as chaplain for the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
“Despite the age of enlightenment, and the belief that we can legislate behaviour and thus improve the societies we live in,” he will say, “people are still people. And that means that ‘I’ — what I think, what I want, what suits me, what will maintain my position and my power and influence — still ranks awfully high on the human agenda.”
In the social media age, it is there for all to see, the potential for ignorance, hatred, and twisted ideology within the human beast.
In extreme cases, it finds expression in the martyrdom sought by self-styled “soldiers” in a relatively modern form of warfare: Terrorism.
Hamilton suffered loss in this war, too, when a 24-year old Argyll, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, was slain in cold blood while guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier in Ottawa.
His stone stands in Woodland Cemetery, in Section 18, among the weathered markers of soldiers from old wars.
Four years ago, his casket lay in Christ’s Church Cathedral on James North. A plaque on the wall honouring war dead includes the name of another local son, Maj. Frederick Travers Lucas, killed fighting near Vimy Ridge in 1917 after being wounded twice in battle. He was buried in France because soldiers’ remains could not be transported home.
At the funeral, the pastor, seeming to invoke the essence of the Christian story, said Cirillo “gave his life for us.”
It remains a faith that dying in righteous battle is not in vain, because the sacrifice will contribute toward human redemption, light the way to peace and freedom.
The service included a reading from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season ... a time to be born, a time to die; a time to kill, a time to heal.”
A time to kill: Words written by an ancient sage perhaps thousands of years ago.
Another sage wrote that humanity has never been in a position where, having not “improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination … Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve.”
Winston Churchill penned those words with dark prescience in the immediate aftermath and ashes of the war to end all wars.
“A string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction … It takes a lot of wise people to make peace, but it is sometimes enough to have one fool to have a war.” YUVAL NOAH HARARI Israeli-based historian and author