To get a fuller picture of how the West named itself — and how we have come to live the lives we lead — we should turn our attention back to Western Europe and consider the question of what the societies there did with the two hundred years’ worth of resources they were able to extract before they lost their formal grip on the Americas. And make no mistake, these resources were the foundation for the wealth of Europe; at a rough estimate, the combined surface area of Spain, France, Germany, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the statelets between them is one tenth the combined surface area of the Americas. It would be a miracle if two hundred years of funnelling as many raw materials, precious metals, and specialty crops extracted through slave labour as possible from the latter landmass into the former did not fundamentally transform the former’s production and accumulation of wealth.
The major societies of Western Europe spent an embarrassing amount of this newfound wealth, as you might expect, on disastrous and mostly-futile efforts to dominate one another in the Westphalian game. But, for all of this ceaseless and senseless violence, the most consequential developments from Europe’s newfound wealth were philosophical, cultural, and technological. People began to ask questions of their religious and secular leaders at a pace and a scale that those leaders could not suppress — though many leaders sought lustily to do so, often with the tried and true method of torturing the questioners into confessing treason or heresy (or both) and then executing them in a public display of authority.
But the printed book, and the literacy required to engage in the ever-more-important commerce of the day, meant that no leader could stop inconvenient questions from arising and spreading among the general population. Before the printing press, the only literate people of consequence in Western Europe were priests, whose musings could be philosophically constrained to a Christian framework, orthographically constrained to Latin, and physically constrained to monasteries to which the general public had no access; by the end of the Thirty Years’ War, by contrast, millions of books were being printed in dozens of languages every single year, and the proportion of the population who could both afford and read these books increased dramatically.
It is therefore hardly surprising that even in the face of medieval reprisals, a critical mass of people developed across Western Europe who grew suspicious that Jesus was taking an awfully long time to return, and in the meantime His self-proclaimed lieutenants tended to be terrible people unworthy of anyone’s respect but for the awesome and awful authority they wielded by dint of their birth.
Slowly, fitfully, the medieval theory of authority and social organisation dissolved. This dissolution, and the new social and political environments it led to, are collectively referred to as the Enlightenment. We call it this in order to contrast it with the brutal, illiterate, ignorant modes of living which reigned for more than a thousand years before its advent (whether or not one wishes to call these “the Dark Ages”). We remember individuals such as Baruch Espinosa and René Descartes and John Locke and David Hume (among many others) for being among the first men in the West to publicly question the nature of truth and the basis of knowledge outside of an explicitly theological framework without suffering a tortuous death by the keepers of God’s Word.
We will never know just how many suffered that fate in the thirteen hundred years between the Christianisation of the Roman Empire and the middle 1600’s, but by that time Espinosa and at least a few of his contemporaries could shun the Church’s power and live to tell the tale — though not without a great deal of censure and accusations of atheism or heresy or treason, often risking house arrest or exile or widespread shunning by their communities.
The upshot of these changes in thought was an introduction of empiricism to Western philosophy; that is, the notion that answers to questions about how or why the world works a certain way are best found by interrogating the world as perceived by the senses. To be clear, empiricism was not invented during the Enlightenment; a good argument can be had that it was first developed in Ancient Greece (or China, where everything was invented first, backward and in foot-bound toe-shoes). But it did not exist in Western Europe between the Great Schism and the advent of the Enlightenment — or, if it did, its proponents were dealt with in manners already discussed.
Reason shifted from the art of finding religious scholarship to buttress an argument to justifying an argument through appealing to physical demonstrations of facts and logical extrapolations from the same. Philosophy escaped the bounds of theology to engage in what we have come to term science, in all its various fields, from physics to natural history to economics and politics and mathematics.
The Dutch invented the idea of a publicly-traded company, and almost immediately experienced a stock bubble — over tulip futures, of all things. Though tulips now form an integral part of the Dutch economy and landscape, there was a time when tulips were an exotic good that many people got rich on importing, before a lot more people went broke betting on the price of tulips rising forever. But, despite the dangers posed by speculating on the value of stocks in publicly-traded companies, such companies became a major part of the government exercise of colonial power. Companies in England, France, the Netherlands, and beyond claimed monopolies of trade and production in Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. (There were also more trading bubbles somehow even more hilarious than the one over tulips. The South Sea Company was kind of the Theranos of its day, and wound up nearly bankrupting the Bank of England, for example.)
At the same time, some dangerous ideas were resurrected from the past or summoned from the aether — about the scope of state power, the responsibilities owed to the citizen by the state rather than always the other way around, the mandatory nature of religious observance bound to state power, the source of state authority, and the very nature of what being a citizen of a state meant in the first place. And when I say these ideas were dangerous, I don’t mean that they were mouthed by tweedy academics at a PEN festival or unshaven edgelords on a podcast; I mean that their deliberation, in France and in England and North America, and eventually elsewhere in Europe, cost millions of people their lives and fundamentally altered the way people in these places (and eventually the world over) lived. For example, the first stirrings of these ideas contributed to the English Civil War, which kicked off just as the Thirty Years’ War was wrapping up (because of course it would), and tore Great Britain apart over whether it should be Catholic or Protestant — and then over exactly which sort of Protestant —and whether it should be a parliamentary republic or a constitutional monarchy. The republican dictator, Oliver Cromwell, also saw fit to kill a frankly embarrassing number of Irish people for reasons he failed to elaborate before the Monarchists regained control of the country and cut off his head.
A century after the British monarchy re-established itself, British subjects in North America relied upon Enlightenment philosophies to buttress their arguments for secession; these arguments, along with the considered application of violence and France pitching in with another war in Europe, saw those subjects break away from Britain and form the West’s first substantial representative democracy. We have already covered the broadest strokes of the United States, and we will consider its role in shaping the West later on, but for now it suffices to note its formal split from Britain as another consequence of the philosophical and geopolitical developments of the period.
We must also not forget that while a small number of philosophers and public intellectuals carved out a space in which to debate notions of citizenship, liberty, rights, duties, sovereignty, and secularism — and while armies marched in part to write the discussions of these notions in blood — the Church (Catholic and otherwise) did not simply recede into the margins of society, at least not all at once. And we must not pretend that everyone in the West became enlightened during the Enlightenment, if indeed we can claim to have been enlightened at all. In particular, we should recall that the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, a year in which Espinosa, Locke, and Descartes were all alive.
One facet of the religious fanaticism of the age we have not yet discussed is the collective madness which took hold of much of the countryside (which comprised the great majority of every society during this period) just as the Enlightenment began, during the course of which communities tore themselves apart searching for witches. Estimates vary by several orders of magnitude, but at the very least tens of thousands of people — virtually all of them women — were accused of witchcraft. And though Christians had burnt the odd witch pretty much as soon as Christians could get away with it, the madness that gripped Europe and its settler colonies in North America from the 1580’s to the 1650’s affected nearly every community in Western Europe to one degree or another. And though the crisis peaked shortly after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, embers of paranoia sporadically flared up into conflagrations of madness throughout Western Europe over the next two centuries.
Today we are in the grip of a social revolution — and arguably a moral panic — driven by mobs of hecklers who are building a system of condemnation and damnation in which a stray comment or misinterpreted gesture made at any point in one’s past can cost someone their livelihood, and occasionally their life. In some ways, large parts of social media are like a European village in the grip of a witch hunt, though being cancelled has not yet reached the depths of depravity and inhumanity that we reached during this period of history.
Picture the Twitter mob bent on cancelling you, except the mob is your neighbours, and if you do or say the wrong thing, they will accuse you of consorting with the Devil and practicing black magic. You will be hauled before a magistrate and tortured into confessing your imaginary crimes and producing the names of others with whom you conspired or cavorted, who will face the same fate as you. This torture will officially involve lashing and beating in such a way as to leave no marks. Unofficially, it will often involve abrading the sensitive skin of your genitals, ripping off your toe- and fingernails and driving splinters or screws through the exposed flesh, inserting expandable spiked implements into your orifices and ratcheting them open click by click, strapping you to elaborate mechanisms to contort your limbs out of joint, and whatever else the inquisitor can think up to get you to confess. Once you have confessed or demonstrated your guilt through a superhuman endurance to torture, you will be executed in front of the very people who accused you of witchcraft in the first place.
Imagine the paranoia of knowing that at any moment, any petty grievance someone perceives or invents can turn into this sort of life-ending experience, and the only recourse open to you is to be lost in the anonymity of the accusing mob, and to pray that its fickle attention never falls upon you.
This describes a great deal of the world in which the Enlightenment was born. It is difficult to say if the fever broke and slowly — so very, very slowly — receded *because* of the Enlightenment, but insofar as the Enlightenment helped to place a wedge between people’s religious paranoia and the exercise of state power, we can say that the Enlightenment helped to break the spell of inquisitors and witch finders (general and specific). Though, as already mentioned, the story of the Enlightenment was itself not bloodless; aside from the martial violence inspired by those who took its ideas seriously, the Enlightenment also entailed more than a bit of witch-hunting in its own right.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was published in France in 1789. It can be considered the crowning achievement of Enlightenment philosophy and political theory. It is also a beautiful document, much shorter than this chapter — only a brief preamble and seventeen concise clauses — and if you’ve made it this far, I suggest you read it (or at least this convenient translation) for yourself.
The thing to consider in the clauses of the Declaration is a society in which such clauses are necessary to publicly assert; among other things, we can infer that French (and broader European) society before the Declaration was one in which the nation was treated as the private property of its rulers and the mechanisms of the state were the rulers’ personal agents, where you could be arbitrarily imprisoned for expressing opinions contrary to those of the ruling class, where citizens were barred from public and private offices on arbitrary grounds, and where there was no public input in how the state’s resources were collected and allocated. The Declaration asserted that all of these things and more were antithetical to the functioning of an orderly society.
Today we take these things as matters of course, and we give no thought at all to the possibility that the ideas elaborated in the Declaration are not the bare minimum of a functioning society. But it is worth noting that the men who drafted, refined, and published the Declaration also brought about the French Revolution in order to reform their society in the Declaration’s image. Said Revolution almost immediately devolved into a chaotic orgy of paranoia and state-sanctioned massacre called The Reign of Terror, in which French society writ large collapsed into a zeal for hunting its own witches, whose crimes were countering the Revolution rather than consorting with the Devil. So many people were murdered by the revolutionary state — very much including almost everyone who started the Revolution in the first place — that the guillotine was invented as a humane and efficient method of execution.
The madness only stopped when Napoleon Bonaparte turned the revolutionary French Republic into an empire with himself as its emperor (though, like the Romans of old, he insisted that France remained a republic even as he seized complete control of it). And once Napoleon had stopped France from committing suicide one counter-revolutionary at a time, he was able to fend off the reactionary invasions from the other Western powers who at this point were terrified of the French Revolution’s ideas toppling their own ancient regimes. Over the next fifteen years, he conquered essentially all of Western Europe south of Scandinavia and outside of the British Isles. And though he was a corrupt autocrat, as corrupt and autocratic as most of the men he defeated and demoted, he broke many of the political and dynastic realities that had gripped Spain and Germany and Austria for centuries, and his soldiers introduced Enlightenment-inspired French revolutionary ideals everywhere they went.
Ultimately France proved unable to launch an invasion of Britain, and Napoleon turned his attention to Russia, which by this time had grown into the largest contiguous empire in the world — encompassing at its height about 24 percent of the Earth’s land area, which is its own fascinating story that has little bearing upon this recollection. What matters here is that the old Russian and new French Empires eventually came to blows, and though Napoleon was able to march an army of nearly half a million men to Moscow, he had to flee all the way back to Paris. The great majority of the men he’d taken to Moscow did not make it back to Paris with him.
Napoleon’s ambitions cost about a million Frenchmen their lives, and at least three million other Europeans, and he wound up dying in agony on an island in the South Atlantic, with a reactionary monarch ruling a France whose borders were more-or-less identical to those before the Revolution. But the French Revolution’s Enlightenment ideals did not die with Napoleon. Indeed, he had broken the Westphalian order so badly that a new order was consciously established, which we now call Concert of Europe.
This Concert was far from peaceful, but its players all tried to keep violence within Europe to an acceptable minimum between the participating states, and to any maximum required to keep order within said states. In particular, the players crushed the waves of rebellion and nascent revolution which erupted throughout the continent in 1848.
One of the main characteristics of these liberal and quasi-socialist rebellions which seems bizarre to us today, and which will have disastrous consequences a century later, is the left-wing nationalism that gripped much of the populace of Germany and the Italian peninsula. Recall, however, that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the nation is asserted as the source of sovereignty enjoyed by the state.
Up to then, a “nation” was a group of people of a common language and culture, but it wasn’t the basis of a state. But when the Reformation and the general tardiness of Christ’s always-imminent return eroded the theological foundations for state power, the Enlightenment brought forward the nation itself as the foundation for a state. Almost by coincidence, this was effective in France, where almost everyone (in Europe) who considered themselves French lived in France, and very few people who weren’t French did so.
The cases of Germany and Italy were more difficult; in each, what could be considered a nation was fractured across dozens of state structures which saw each other as rivals, whose incentives even after Napoleon’s reorganisation did not incline them to unite. Thus the concept of the nation was revived in Italy and Germany as a romantic and liberal notion upon which to found centralised states whose purpose was the preservation of the rights of those states’ citizens rather than the enrichment of hundreds of squabbling aristocrats. In other words, emphasising the national character of Germans and Italians in particular was one of the major ideological movements of the mid-1800’s among radical socialists and revolutionaries explicitly because the formation of the German and Italian nation-states was seen as a path to liberation from the sclerotic autocracies still being propped up by the Concert of Europe.
The Concert did not allow Germany and Italy to unite during the revolutionary fervour of 1848. Instead, these countries united piecemeal over the following decades, one war at a time, driven at least as much by the naked ambitions of the politicians and aristocrats within Prussia and the Piedmont as by romantic and liberal ideals. For Italy, these wars were largely confined to the small Italian states themselves; in the case of Germany, Prussia took a bit of territory off of Austria and Denmark before manoeuvering France into declaring war, which drew the non-Austrian German states into formally joining together into the German Empire (and also taking a bit of territory off of France). These nations both became states in 1871, and they both joined the Concert as conservative and reactionary players, rather than attempting to overthrow it.
Despite the manifold failures of the French Revolution and the conservative reactions to it, the Enlightenment and its associated Scientific Revolution continued, or at least they spurred further developments in philosophy and politics and economics and industry. The governments of the Concert evolved from courtly sycophants of hereditary monarchs into permanent civilian bureaucracies steered at least partly by elected bodies, especially in Britain and France. These bodies gained power over the aristocrats in small steps over decades, one compromise at a time instead of all at once, and the rights which those bodies afforded their citizens slowly came to resemble those set forth in the Declaration.
Largely outside of the purview of these governments, advances in metallurgy spurred the invention of machines which burnt coal and oil to boil large amounts of water on command. This allowed people with enough coal and the right kinds of metal to push that metal with steam, which for the first time in human history offered a method of moving things around on land that did not rely on some combination of gravity, running water, or human and animal muscle power. This began a process of exponential growth in what economists call “capital goods” — that is, industrial machinery, tooling, equipment, and transportation infrastructure.
Exponential growth is a fancy mathematical concept which describes a particular way population’s size changes over time; namely that in a given unit of time, the population’s rate of increase will depend on the absolute size of the population in the previous unit of time. Even more simply, the more machines you have, the faster you can make machines, which means next year you can make even more machines, which in turn allow you even more machines, and so on. Concretely, the more pumps miners had, the more coal and ore they could mine from waterlogged areas of Britain and the Netherlands, which meant they could make more pumps and more mining carts to dig more coal and more iron, and also more trains and railroads to ship that coal and iron to other places, and on and on.
Up to this point, across the entire history of the world, a society’s industrial and agricultural production had scaled more-or-less linearly with population and access to fertile land and resources. In just a few decades, however, the powers of the West multiplied their industrial, agricultural, and military power many times over, which turned the relatively small lead their forebears had managed to claw out in the previous four centuries into a yawning chasm of disparity in wealth which the rest of the world has yet to fully bridge.
In the cases of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, this disparity was greatly deepened by advances in chemistry, medicine, and communication which emerged out of that exponential economic growth. Recall that, in the Age of Exploration, Europeans could not establish a physical presence of any size in these places — we previously considered Africa in detail, but a similar analysis obtains for India, Indochina, and Indonesia — namely, these areas were all settled with sophisticated cultures that could fight back against European incursion, and they all had endemic tropical diseases to which Europeans had no immunity.
The discovery of quinine (among other fantastic medicines) did much to eliminate the latter problem; it prevents malaria, which is likely the single-largest cause of death for human beings in all of our history. It was certainly one of the most devastating parasitic diseases which Europeans encountered in their explorations of the tropics. Quinine mixed with water is also the tonic in a Gin & Tonic, by the way, so if you hate G&Ts and like performative displays of social justice, you can denounce it as the coloniser’s whistle-wetter.
In any case, steam ships, telegraph lines, the link between citrus fruits and scurvy, and quinine all came together about the time of German and Italian unification. The generation which came of age after 1871 was, up to then, the most peaceful that Europe had experienced since…well, ever, probably. Thus period became known as the Belle Epoque, the Beautiful Age, for the lack of bloodshed and the possibilities of civil life that this lack enabled.
The Concert averted further war within Western Europe itself between 1871 and 1914 through three principal methods. Firstly, as our examination of certain emerging technologies suggests, the major powers of the Concert cooperated in carving up Africa, India, and Southeast Asia with a new wave of colonisation. They also collaborated in the economic domination of China, though this stopped short of outright colonisation, except for a few tracts of land on islands or peninsulas. Hong Kong is the most famous of these, only nominally returned to Chinese control in 1997 and only coming under actual Chinese dominion within the last couple of years.
It is under the auspices of this method of preserving peace within Europe that the West named itself, by the way, in contradistinction to the rest of the world. Where in that previous age Catholicism had been excuse enough for the Iberians to bring the Americas to heel, the players of the Concert refounded their shared culture upon the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution (somewhat hypocritically, as we have seen) in addition to a sort of ecumenical Christianity which encompassed all of the various sects and cults that had arisen out of the Reformation. They called themselves Western, establishing everything not-Western as a kind of playground in which to exercise their aggression without any one of them coming to dominate all the others.
Secondly, the states of the West developed international diplomacy as we know it today, with permanent embassies staffed by professional diplomats whose sole responsibility was facilitating constant communication between the apparatus of their host and home states. Dedicated postal services and, eventually, telegraph and telephone lines allowed this communication to take place over the course of hours or days, continuously, rather than requiring special gatherings of leaders in order to exchange any information whatsoever, as had been the norm for most of European history.
Thirdly, the Concert established a countervailing alliance structure which amounted to two distinct blocs of interlocking defensive alliances, on the understanding that any aggression from a member of one bloc upon a member of the other block would invoke a chain reaction of declarations of war that would eventually set both blocs against each other. This tactic took shape relatively late during the Beautiful Age, after that generation raised in relative peace made up the majority of the population in the West.
These peaceful populations could not imagine their hard-won peace ending in catastrophe. The further away the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent revolts and unifications faded from memory, the more unthinkable it became that war could arise as a civilisational threat to the newly-minted West itself. Even as Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Russia put millions of men through training with the new weapons which they were all busily using to expand their empires outside of Europe; even as their military deterrent against one another was built with the logic of mobilisation timetables that would put those millions of men under arms and on the borders within a paltry sum of weeks; even as the lingering aristocrats and the bureaucrats to whom they had largely ceded political power found themselves chafing for the glorious battles of their ancestors, more and more people began beating the drums of war.
Somewhere around the early 1900’s, an outbreak of war within Europe went from an unthinkable horror to a forgotten relic of a more barbaric past and then to a notion greeted with a sort of romantic longing, a curative for the self-diagnosed decadence and ennui which seemed to grip the peaceful domestic societies of the West in the absence of existential struggle. This itself was a kind of mass psychosis, a delusion that struck nearly every facet of European society. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor; by the summer of 1914, an unbelievable number of people yearned for a proper war on European soil once again, seemingly heedless of the tragedy such an undertaking would be.
Their wish was granted when a Serbian terrorist murdered an Austrian aristocrat, the Austrians crafted an intentionally unacceptable list of conditions to be met the Serbian state in recompense, the Serbs capitulated to all but one of these supposedly-unacceptable conditions, and the Austrians invaded Serbia anyway. The Russian Empire considered this invasion an affront to Russia’s self-appointed role as the protector of Slavic ethnic interests in the Balkans, and so Russia declared war upon Austria. The German Empire was Austria’s main ally, and, following the logic of deterrent alliance, the Germans declared war upon the Russians. The Russians’ allies, the French, then declared war upon the Germans.
At first, Britain played at being neutral, though the British public was as horny for a war as the French and German and Russian and Austrian publics were. And, as you will recall, the British and French had made a habit — almost a ritual — of murdering one another at least once a generation for a solid nine hundred years at this point. It is also notable that the modern-day House of Windsor was originally named the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and its members came from…well, from Saxony and from Coburg and from Gotha. These locations all happen to be German.
Furthermore, Queen Victoria — who ruled Britain during most of the period of the Concert of Europe and who is by far the most culturally influential British monarch to ever live (it is mostly her fault that Western brides often idealise white gowns on their wedding day, as one example) — spoke German as her native tongue; she used it almost exclusively in her private life, and taught it to her children. She also counted Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany at the outbreak of the sought-after war, among her descendants. (Indeed, the monarchs of Britain and Germany and Russia were all cousins, and in the years running up to the war, they wrote to one another as affectionate family members even as they helped stoke the lust for blood amongst their people.)
You may be forgiven, after reading these things, for assuming that Britain and Germany would have been natural allies, and that together they would have made short work of France and Russia in the conflict. Instead, Britain and France had pursued an unprecedented reconciliation during the closing days Concert of Europe, and by the time the war broke out, the British government and the British public were quite sympathetic to France and very wary of Germany.
There are two main reasons for this, one geopolitical and the other philosophical. Geopolitically, Britain had spent centuries building a world-spanning empire — even larger than the Russian Empire, though scattered over more continents — and had the largest navy in the world in order to secure the political and economic domination of that empire. Indeed, Britain during the Concert pursued a “two-power standard” naval policy; that is, the Royal Navy should have as many ships of comparable classes as the two largest navies amongst its rivals. But these ships were all made of wood — so much wood that Britain itself nearly became deforested in the pursuit of this policy.
By the time the German Empire emerged, the technology and economy existed to make self-propelled ships entirely out of steel, ships whose hulls were impervious to the largest cannon on wooden ships, and whose guns could smash wooden ships to bits. In the 1880’s, the German Empire began building these ships in earnest. Though on paper Germany never got anywhere close to British naval capacity, all of Germany’s new ships were made of steel, and any one of them could theoretically have destroyed an entire flotilla of wooden Royal Navy ships without incident. More broadly, the German Empire had transformed within a single generation from a backward collection of largely agrarian fiefdoms into the single most industrialised and scientifically advanced society on the face of the Earth, with little end to their rise in sight.
The British took these developments, and their implications for British hegemony, quite seriously; not only did their German-speaking monarchs encourage a naval arms race with the upstart Germans, British diplomats made overtures to the French to put their old rivalry to bed, in order to play the French and Germans off of one another. These overtures succeeded so fundamentally that few people today can really understand how fierce and how long the enmity between the French and British lasted before the Beautiful Age.
The philosophical grounds for the Anglo-German rivalry are a bit more difficult to get a grip on. Though the German Empire was itself a new country, and had some features of representative government, it was far more conservative and authoritarian than the British Empire had become by this point. And while it is true that the German Empire was technologically and culturally and philosophically advanced, counting Beethoven and Kant and Nietzsche and Schiller and Rilke and Goethe and Marx and many many many others amongst the canon of post-Enlightenment art and philosophy and science, the authoritarianism and suspicion of modernity evinced by German aristocrats and bureaucrats bespoke a fundamentally medieval attitude which still held a great deal of purchase in central Europe.
This medieval attitude, along with a great deal of personal trauma Wilhelm II grew up with, led him to welcome war with France and England and Russia. When the Austrians pressed for war with Serbia, Wilhelm granted the Austrians a “blank cheque”, by which they understood his unconditional support for a maximalist position. It was widely understood at the time that, but for this blank cheque from Germany, Austria would likely have balked at the threat of war with Russia, and what followed could well have been averted, at least for a time.
The blank cheque was granted, however, and the bloodthirsty masses on all sides were jubilant. Crowds of women gathered at the soldiers’ mustering points, putting flowers in the barrels of rifles and kissing strange men for good luck. War was declared at the end of July, and everyone thought they would “be home by Christmas!” after a few months of glorious mettle-testing.
What wound up happening, of course, was a four-year nightmare of trench warfare and human slaughter on a scale impossible to really conceive. New infrastructure allowed for the mobilisation of so many men and the production of so many new weapons, and new medicines and surgical techniques and hospital organisation kept so many soldiers from becoming unfit for service through disease or minor wounds, that a violent death at the hands of enemy action became the primary driver of casualties. Previous wars, even the world-changing wars of Napoleon and the generational grinds of wars whose names count the years it took to fight them, usually saw far more soldiers succumbing to dysentery or infection or starvation than direct confrontation with an enemy.
But this war, at the end of the Beautiful Age, gave every soldier in it a chance to die for their nation, the source of their sovereignty. The battle became one of the very existence of those nations, and of competing visions for what those nations should be like once the battle was won. Should the medieval warriors in the middle of Europe re-impose aristocratic authority? Or should the shopkeepers on the western fringes keep the Enlightenment’s promises of individual liberty alive? Would Germany even be allowed to survive as a nation-state? Would France? Would Britain? Would Russia?
Christmas came and went, and the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, and very nearly the one after that. In the West, the war between Germany and the Anglo-French alliance almost immediately ground to a halt along a front line that stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea through Belgium; tens of thousands of young men lined up to die in single battles whose outcomes shifted this line by yards at a time.
Germany’s new ships proved unable to match Britain’s new ships after all, and the British imposed a blockade that eventually saw the entire German population face a famine as a tactic for depriving German factories of the workers required to make the weapons and ammunition to continue the prosecution of the war; some sixty-odd million people were essentially put under siege for more than four years.
At least nine million men died by the time the guns fell silent, at least seven million of whom died directly from violent enemy action.
As it endured past that first Christmas and the scale of the horror began to set in, the conflict became known, simply, as The War.
Later, as morale flagged in Britain and France, they called it The Great War in order to try and recapture the initial romance which had kicked the whole thing off.
Then, when it became clear there was no greatness or glory to be found, they called it The War to End All Wars — under the theory that, if they kept killing each other so brutally, eventually the West would wake from the madness and decide to abolish war for good and all.
Today we call it the First World War.