The Battle of the Somme, 1916
Michael Walsh is a brilliant author. He has also been a foreign correspondent, classical music critic and columnist. In The Guns of November he points out the end of fighting in WWI was merely the first act of a continuous world war that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1991. The ramifications of WWI haunt us to this day – politically, culturally and socially – even though America struggled to stay out of that conflict.
In the end, the guns fell silent at the appointed hour: 11 a.m. on the 11th of November, the 11th month of the year 1918. For four brutal years Europe — and much of the rest of the world — had been first drawn into and then fully involved in the most ferocious conflict in history up to that time. A war that began almost accidentally, with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkan backwater of Sarajevo, soon morphed into a domino-toppling series of alliances and ententes, from which no nation or empire emerged unscathed. Nineteenth-century battlefield tactics collided head on with the mechanized warfare of the 20th; millions of young men were blown to pieces, had limbs severed, were blinded, crippled, driven mad as they crouched in the trenches, waiting for the orders to go over the top, and charge into certain death for King, Kaiser, and Country.
and,
Wars that don’t end conclusively exact a terrible price at their next, inevitable, iteration. The Germans withdrew to find that their Emperor had fled and the old Prussian order was tottering toward the grave (it would vanish entirely by the end of World War Two). The notion of the Dolchstoss — the “stab in the back” — arose in post-Wilhelmine Germany, festered, and took hold in the minds and imaginations of the National Socialists, who were .itching for another go at it, just as soon as they’d cut their teeth with their street battles with the Communists during the Weimar Republic. Meanwhile, communist “republics” briefly took hold in Bavaria, and in what was left of Hungary. Nothing, it seems, had been solved by the “war to end war” and, absent a definitive conclusion, its sequel would come along in the span of one generation.
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Even more long-ranging have been the cultural effects of the war. Europe not only lost its manhood in the Great War, it lost its pride. The glories of European civilization, from the Greeks on, were rendered nugatory in the eyes of many, including the nascent school of cultural Marxists we have come to know as the Frankfurt School. From the ashes of empires arose the notion of Critical Theory, which posited that — old Europe having just failed so signally — there was nothing about European (and, by extension, American) civilization that could not be questioned, attacked, and destroyed.
Walsh’s last two bestselling books are The Devils’ Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West and it’s sequel, The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.
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