World War One

World War One broke out over a century after the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars—this does not, of course, mean that there was constant peace in between. Larger and smaller conflicts erupted throughout the nineteenth century, yet none of them involved nearly all of Europe’s countries at the same time, and their technical capabilities remained relatively limited compared to what the twentieth century had to offer.

Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, recalled how Britons imagined the world before 1914: “There were, of course, wars, but they were either colonial wars, in which white men slaughtered yellow men, or brown men, or black men, or wars between second-rate white men or second-rate white men’s states in the Balkans or South America.”²

Winston Churchill, in turn, wrote about the state of the Western soul after 1918: “[…] Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”³

A British doctor recounted his wartime experiences in the trenches: “There is the horror of seeing men and animals wounded and maimed and mutilated, or torn to pieces or lying dead in some grotesque attitude… One has to inhibit nausea and disgust, and the feeling that one may oneself be like that in a few minutes’ time.”⁴

The Great War, as it was called in the interwar period, had several causes. Nationalist passions were not among them—they were more its byproduct. The decision to unleash the war came from the “old school” courts and diplomats, and in particular the overlords of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An American historian has compared 1914 to the collapse of a bridge known as Galloping Gertie.⁵ This was caused, paradoxically, by the structural supports, which crumpled on it, compromising and destroying the whole architecture. The same went for the role of Vienna in the politics of Europe at the time—and the ultimate destruction of this stabilizing component was indeed similar.

Over 1,100,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers perished. Over two million subjects of the German Emperor gave their lives, leaving 500,000 widows and two million orphans.⁶ Between 400,000 and 800,000 German civilians died of malnourishment—this was a result of the allied trade embargoes.⁷

The losses in the armies of the west were equally horrifying, and the icing on the cake was the Spanish flu and the Russian civil war. The latter broke supply chains and brought death by famine to eight to ten million people.⁸

Jan Mleczak, the author’s great-grandfather, a peasant from the Biecz area, fell fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the Romanian front. Aleksander Mleczak, his son born two years before the war, was raised fatherless.