Across Canada, the centenary of the armistice will be celebrated as a great victory, a national triumph as well as the end of a terrible nightmare. At the time, as Captain Robert Clemens recalls in ‘Merry Hell: The Story of the 25th Battalion (Nova Scotia Regiment),’ “as the news spread throughout the world, excitement mounted … almost beyond description.”
In the killing fields, however, “the reaction” was “strangely different:” “after years close to the noise and turmoil of battle, the sudden silence as the fighting ceased seemed to communicate itself” with eerie power, haunting testimony to a ‘dominion of the dead,’ stunning in its scale and waste.
"There’s another ‘little illusion’ we need to lose, the lie that peace ‘spread throughout the world’ that day, that the armistice brought the war, supposedly fought to end all war, to an end."
— Sean Howard
The Canadians had suffered an astounding 45,000 casualties (7,000 dead) in the Last Hundred Days of reckless, often bitterly resented, fighting, a casualty rate 10 times higher than that of the British. But for the ‘Tommies,’ too, as the trench newspaper ‘The Wipers Times’ recorded in its final editorial (December 1918), “one cannot but remark on the absolute apathy with which the end was received. England seems to have had a jollification, but here there was nothing but a disinterested interest,” no doubt because “most of us have been cured of any little illusions we may have had about the pomp and glory of war, and know it for the vilest disaster that can befall man.”
There’s another ‘little illusion’ we need to lose, the lie that peace ‘spread throughout the world’ that day, that the armistice brought the war, supposedly fought to end all war, to an end. The guns did fall silent on the Western Front, but fighting – often funded and fuelled by the victorious powers – raged for months or years in the ‘shadow-lands’ and ‘shatter-zones’ of the former Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
As Robert Gerwarth writes in ‘The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End,’ “as civil wars overlapped with revolutions, counter-revolutions and border conflicts between emerging states without clearly defined frontiers or internationally recognized governments, ‘post-war’ Europe between the official end of the Great War in 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 was the most violent place on the planet.” “Well over four million people,” he estimates, “more than the combined wartime casualties of Britain, France and the United States, died as a result of armed conflicts,” with “hundreds of thousands” more civilians, from Beirut to Berlin, starving “as a consequence of the Allied decision to keep up the economic blockade beyond the end of hostilities.”
By the time of the armistice, the ‘Starvation Blockade,’ imposed primarily by the British Royal Navy, had already killed millions, with most German civilians “subsisting,” as Tim Cook notes in his study of Canada’s comparatively well-fed ‘Shock Troops,’ on “800 calories a day, the amount of nutritional energy needed to sustain a three-year-old.” And while the suffering was drastically worsened by the gluttonous demands of the military dictatorship in Berlin, the siege from the outset was designed to destroy vast numbers of infants, children, women, the infirm and the elderly.
In ‘Ring of Steel,’ his landmark study of the German and Austro-Hungarian home fronts, Alexander Watson argues the blockade “placed Britain outside the pre-war moral consensus on how naval warfare should be conducted” and, in its “erosion of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants,” did “more than any other action to radicalize the conflict.” Though British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith claimed in March 1915 “there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not feel ourselves entitled to resort,” American Secretary of State Robert Lansing was right to conclude, in October that year, that “the methods employed by Great Britain … are without justification,” that “the blockade upon which such methods are founded is … illegal and indefens