#EMPIRE TOTAL WAR RUSSIA HOW TO#
In these areas, outside the four walls of their laboratory, the authorities tested their ideas of how to repress large groups, displace entire populations, even attempt, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at the time, the “systematic extermination” of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.
In some areas, civilians were at the heart of the war invaded, occupied, looted and bombed, they had become everyday targets in a total war. This sowed the seeds of later catastrophes.
The military fronts and the home fronts formed an immense, complex war machine: there were fronts on land, sea and air there were sites of invasion and shelter, of Herculean labour, of military and civilian imprisonment, of tireless battles against wounds and disease, and of mourning and remembrance. Every man, woman and child contributed in his or her own way in factories, fields and schools. The military fronts cannot be understood without looking at those fighting on the home fronts, who also were completely mobilized for the war effort. Civilians were also caught up in the fight – through their tremendous work to keep the supplies moving to the fronts where they were needed – and they suffered and grieved their losses. But it is time to study everyone else's war. Footnote 2įor 100 years, the military fronts – land, sea and air – and those who fought on them have quite rightly received the most attention in discussions of conflict. But the ‘War of the Fronts’ would perhaps express best the character of this gigantic struggle. And the ‘War of the Alliances’ or the ‘War of the Peoples’. The ‘War of the Races’ might also be defensible. The ‘War of Nations’ could garner some votes. What should this war be called? In the beginning, people called it ‘the war of 1914’, then as the war carried on into 1915 it became ‘the European war’ when the Americans got involved it became the ‘World War’ or ‘Universal War’. There was now more than one kind of front: sprawling military fronts mostly made up of men in uniform, and home fronts, where civilians came to be seen as targets, but their suffering went largely unnoticed and was often forgotten. In this way, it exemplifies the terrible novelty of total war. What did civilian lives matter – the lives of the workers and residents of the area – when what counted was winning the war? The painting shows that in that conflict, civilians on the other side were simply the enemy (although Busset did not actually include any civilians in the image, as if they simply did not exist). His own plane can be seen above a factory in flames – bombs falling in a colourful, almost joyful setting in which Busset, a very patriotic man, depicts the destruction of a German factory, perhaps one of those that had produced the asphyxiating gases used on all the battlefields since 1915. He was so proud of his work – in both senses of the word – that he signed it “aviator”, a member of the new cavalry of the sky. In 1918, Maurice Busset produced a large painting entitled Bombardement de Ludwigshafen ( Figure 1). The world would come to mourn the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and ten million combatants, and the loss of an innocence never to be regained.
Four of them – Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia – were destroyed by it, but the war would also leave a vivid scar on the collective memory of all involved. What began in Europe, and might have been only the “Third Balkan War”, was turned into a global catastrophe upon the whim of the great imperial powers. Although the war officially ended in 1918, in some ways it continued into the 1920s and lasted right up to the Second World War.įor the first time in history, the whole world waged war – a war that devoured men, resources and energy that split loyalties, reignited old fervours and generated new horrors. Countries, whether neutral or not, helped maintain the epic scale of the violence through industrialized production of munitions, food and other supplies, while also seeking to uphold as much of the law of war as they could. This took place long before the United States entered the war in 1917. From the very beginning, the British, French, German and Belgian governments made the war global by pulling the inhabitants and resources of their empires into it. The Great War was a total, global tragedy: its setting, the entire world its duration, 1914–18 its main feature, mass violence.