The world had seen artillery used in apocalyptic concentrations, deadly gas, flying machines duelling in the skies, terrifying mechanized monsters crawling through the mud and a final return to a war of movement resulting yet again in untold thousands of young men being crushed, mangled, killed, a final offering of sacrifices on the altar of Mars.
It ended not in a bang but in a sizzle only to be replaced by a "not-peace". There was a savage civil war going on in Russia, revolution and counter revolution all across the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire was about to plunge into a war that would give birth to the Republic of Turkey, the Arab Revolt was to be betrayed by the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of the Entente Powers and the Arab holdings of the Ottomans where carved up into a collection of puppets and colonies.
Germany was tearing itself apart in a politically charged "almost civil war" (anyone ever heard of the "Peoples Republic of Bavaria"?) and struggles in it's former eastern provinces all the while troops scattered across the former Russian Empire's Ukrainian Oblasts all the way to the Crimea tried to get home.
The sacrifices of this war had created a (legitimate) perception in the possessions, colonies, dependencies and dominions of the Entente Powers of being owed something, preferably freedom and independence for the sacrifices made on the altar of a war that many thought was not their concern to begin with.
The world was a destabilized mess, the great Empires either smashed and carved up or bled white.
The treaties reached in 1919 where, as Marshall of France Ferdinand Foch put it, "an armistice for twenty years", a return match was perceived to be unavoidable (probably something that made it unavoidable) and when it came it was and even deeper decent into barbarism and the unleashing of the power to end not the enemy but all of humanity on this planet.
And you know what the really scary part is?
Most of the problems today are long time results of this very war.
Not of the second.
Irredentism, revanchism, a perception of being denied the proper place among nations by sinister means and unfair treaties, the restoration of former empires once powerful forces in the world, religious fanaticism motivated by political betrayals... without specifying anything in this list explicitly you all know these things are with us, and if you look past the surface you will find that most if not all of them result from the maelstrom of blood and fire of the suicide of the Old World.
And that's a very, very scary thought.
Let's just hope this century won't begin like the last three did.
Didn't mean to preach or sermonize, sorry, but these things keep working in my mind... I'm a weirdo
.Here, have an optimistic picture of flowers to disperse the gloom!=>
In Flanders fields the poppies blow...
(I fail optimism forever....)
Best regards
Raoul G. Kunz
