The Long Legacy of the Great War

Don't Panic: Crack Regiments Are On Their Way

We are in the middle of a lengthy series of memorials and remembrances in which the hundred-years-ago,  "Great War" is being remembered.  One particular exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand is developing and changing over four years to depict the successive changes and progress (and regresses) of the war through 1914-18. (New Zealand was militarily engaged in the War).  

Historian Robert Tombs provides an overview of this calamitous event--and its aftermath.

The "Great War" haunts the English and British memory as horror and futility, blundered into for incomprehensible reasons, and pursued blindly for unknown ends at unimaginable cost--750,000 lives, and money that could have paid for thousands of hostpitals and schools, and a university for every city.

Across Europe, 9 million soldiers died; one in three of all British males aged nineteen to twenty-two in 1914 were killed.  The war is taken, as in Kipling's searing lines, as condemnation of the old society, its morality and its values: "the supreme and tragic climax of Victorian cant," and "the old Lie: Dulce et deocrum est pro patria mori." ["It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland."]

But today's collective memory distorts the experience of those who endured the war.  They saw it as a struggle for freedom and for a better world--"the war that would end war," as the socialist novelist H. G. Wells declared.  Most still believed it in 1918, and many would continue to believe it as long as they lived. Were they deluded, or are we uncomprehending?  We struggle to understand why the war was fought, but can clearly see with hindsight that it failed. [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 603.]

The issue is even more poignant for Australia and New Zealand: what possible issue of national defence was being served by sending ANZAC men to defend against Germany and its Kaiser?  It remains highly contentious, if not stupid, for England to go to war upon the continent of Europe in 1914.  It is beyond comprehension that Australia and New Zealand should have become involved.

For New Zealand it has cemented into our national psyche a belief that because of our participating in the "Allied causes" (in World War II, as well as the Great War) the Western powers owe us.  Consequently, our national defence policy is one where New Zealand spends virtually nothing on defence; it is without a policy and programme of  armed and trained militia; and it relies on other nations coming to our defence in the event of attack.  We surreptitiously tell ourselves that we are smart.  In fact we are living in a fool's paradise.

It is arguable that the broad relief of this grave mistake was first forged in the Great War.  "They owe us", we quietly whisper to ourselves.  But if New Zealand were ever subject to military attack, it is somewhat doubtful that crack regiments from Belgium or Holland would rush to our defence.  Capiche.