The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (62 page)

Most of the Balkans were eventually overrun by the Central Powers. Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and Romania were battered, looted, and starved as the war rolled over them and occupation forces followed. Greece almost joined the Central Powers, but an Allied-sponsored coup removed Greece’s pro-German king.

The Russian front was wider than the western front (approximately one thousand miles north to south versus three hundred miles),
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spreading the troops more thinly and making it easier to outflank or penetrate the enemy line. For the first several years, the front oscillated back and forth as one side or another gained a brief advantage and scooped up huge hauls of prisoners. These fluctuations on the eastern front chewed up the civilian populations much more than the static western front. Armies on the move stirred up and overran columns of refugees, trampled crops, and looted towns. They slaughtered livestock; they spread disease. A third of all of the civilian deaths in the First World War occurred in Russia, mostly from hunger and typhus.

Armenians

In 1915, a Turkish offensive against the Russians in the Caucasus Mountains failed badly, and they had to blame someone for it. As Turkish generals looked around for a convenient scapegoat, they spotted the Christian Armenians living right beside the war zone. Obviously, Armenian treason had undermined the Turkish war effort. Further proof came when these Christian subjects of the sultan welcomed the Russian counterattack as liberation.

As the Ottoman Empire weakened, the Turks had become increasingly paranoid about nationalism among their subjugated minorities, and any suspicious activity could bring down an overwhelming preemptive massacre. The Turks had slaughtered 200,000 Armenians for no reason in 1894, and then killed another 30,000 in 1905, but now they decided that allowing a disgruntled Christian minority this close to the front lines was too dangerous. They had to get rid of the Armenians completely, once and for all, so they moved in and systematically erased the Armenian presence from the Ottoman Empire. They also rooted out the Assyrian (Syriac Christian) community while they were at it.

Armenians who had been conscripted into the Turkish army were disarmed and reassigned to labor battalions, where they were worked to death. In April 1915, the Armenians were cleared out of Constantinople. In June, 15,000 Armenians in the city of Bitlis were rounded up, taken out to the countryside, and killed; another 17,000 were collected from the city of Trebizond and massacred in July.
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Then the Turkish soldiers began to empty the Armenian villages in the northeastern provinces and the Assyrian villages to the south. The men were rounded up and shot. The women, children, and elderly were herded southwest to be resettled, although children and pretty girls were sometimes taken into Turkish households to be raised as Muslims or kept as servants or wives. The major population movements became death marches across mountains and deserts, with Armenians shot, bayoneted, clubbed, or simply abandoned in the wilderness when they stumbled.
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Recently uncovered Turkish records show that 972,000 Armenians died in this ethnic cleansing.
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Civilians

To break the military deadlock, the warring powers put the squeeze on civilian populations. Out of pure spite, the Germans deployed a gigantic cannon to lob shells randomly into Paris, seventy-five miles away, killing a total of 250 hapless citizens. They also sent zeppelins to drop bombs on England, killing 550 civilians. Neither of these came close to affecting the outcome of the war; however, the German naval blockade did.

Hoping to starve the British into submission, German U-boats sank any ship they caught approaching the British Isles. For a time, the strategy almost worked because of new technologies developed over the previous decades. Submarines made it possible to creep within striking distance, and torpedoes made it possible to sink ships with a single well-placed shot.

Like the air war of World War II, the sea war of World War I existed in a murky gray zone of moral ambiguity. International law had developed complex rules of engagement between warships and civilian craft. For example, unarmed merchant ships had to be stopped and searched; crews had to be evacuated; but mounting defensive weapons on a civilian ship made it fair game for immediate attack. It all sounded good in theory but was largely unworkable in practice. Submarines were far inferior to surface ships in speed, armaments, range—everything but surprise. If they surfaced, challenged, and delayed their attacks in order to search a suspect ship for contraband, they lost their single advantage. Therefore, they had to sink any suspicious ship immediately, whenever the opportunity arose.

Naturally, the indiscriminant sinking of any ship approaching British waters sent many harmless passengers to the bottom of the ocean. On May 7, 1915, the ocean liner
Lusitania
arriving from New York was sunk near Ireland, killing 1,200 passengers and crew. The outrage among the neutral Americans was strong enough to shut down the U-boat program for a while.

Eventually the British started moving in convoys, making it more difficult for the German submarines to find targets because the ships were in a few clusters rather than strung out all across the Atlantic. Even if a submarine encountered a vulnerable convoy, the U-boat probably couldn’t fire more than a couple of shots before the faster surface ships fled out of range. More important, the Germans overestimated the extent to which the British relied on imports. As oceanic trade became riskier, the British brought more land into cultivation to make up the food deficit.

The British blockade of German ports was mostly imposed by minefields and patrolling surface ships. Because it generally obeyed the laws of the sea, there was less international outcry, but in the grand scheme it was far deadlier. Germany’s position inside the North Sea offered some useful choke points to the British, who were more effective at creating a food shortage. The official estimate is that 763,000 German civilians died from wartime hunger, especially in the final months of the blockade after Germany lost access to the farms of occupied eastern Europe. After the armistice, despite peace on the ground, the Allies kept the blockade in place in order to keep the pressure on German diplomats negotiating at Versailles.

The warring powers did all they could to undermine the stability of their opponents. When the Russian government began to totter unsteadily in 1917, the Germans shipped the Communist leader Lenin back to Russia from his Swiss exile just so he could make trouble. As Churchill put it, “They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.” The Germans also supported Irish rebels, spawning the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Among the British subjects caught cooperating with the Germans in the cause of Irish freedom was Roger Casement, hero of the Congo (see “Congo Free State”). He was hanged for treason.
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Working in the opposite direction, the British colonel Thomas Lawrence—known to folklore and film as the dashing “Lawrence of Arabia”—hooked up with Arab rebels to undermine the Ottoman position in the Near East.

Collapse

After three miserable years of war, French troops being marched into battle would sometimes bleat like sheep when they passed a cluster of generals. They knew they were being sent to slaughter. In May 1917, after another senseless offensive killed or wounded 100,000 Frenchmen, the soldiers refused to go any further. Tens of thousands of French soldiers deserted, and half of the army—fifty-four divisions—refused to take any more orders from above.

The French mutiny was resolved by a combination of executions and reforms. The ringleaders were shot or imprisoned at Devil’s Island, while many ordinary soldiers were sent home to rest for a while. The high command eventually restored the army’s confidence with smaller offensives that guaranteed limited success, rather than the colossal, bloody gambles they had been accustomed to.

For years, the Italian front had seen nothing but one useless battle after another over the Isonzo River—four in 1915, five in 1916, three in 1917. In the twelfth battle of Isonzo, begun in October 1917, the Austro-German forces finally broke the Italian line, scattering the defenders in panic and scooping up huge numbers of prisoners. Within a month, 280,000 Italians were captured; 350,000 deserted. Even though the front stabilized again sixty miles away before any vital piece of Italy was lost, the Italian army no longer mattered to the course of the war.
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The situation in Russia, however, was the worst. The Russians had thrown away about a million lives in one losing battle after another, and brought back many millions more wounded. The government’s finances were shot and food wasn’t getting to the cities. A series of mutinies and rebellions tossed out the emperor in March 1917, and the nation crumbled into a savage civil war that earns an entire chapter of its own (see “Russian Civil War”). German troops occupied huge sections of the country and began shipping food and supplies back home.

With the fall of Russia, the Germans shifted their combat divisions westward, boosting their manpower enough to resume the offensive with newly developed infiltration tactics.
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Slowly, bloodily, but effectively, a renewed German offensive pushed the Allied lines back toward Paris. As the weeks progressed, however, the Allies learned to counter the new German tactics, and this offensive fizzled out just as fresh troops from the United States launched a counterattack.

For years the United States had been trying to steer clear of the European insanity. Economic ties connected the United States to both sides. General historic kinship nudged the country toward Britain, but substantial German and Irish immigration in the generations before the war nudged it away; however, repeated German attacks against civilian shipping outraged American opinion.

Fortunately for Germany, the European war wasn’t the only war in town. The Mexican Revolution was on full boil, and American troops had just come home from hunting Pancho Villa deep inside Mexico. The Germans offered a secret alliance to the Mexican government, hoping to keep the Americans busy in their own hemisphere, but when the offer became public, the Americans angrily declared war on Germany (April 1917).
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It took almost a year for the Americans to mobilize their full potential. They didn’t fight their first major action until March 1918, but the steady influx of 2 million fresh troops proved to be more than Germany could stand. The Germans slowly fell back in the face of renewed Allied attacks. With the German lines driven relentlessly backward, Berlin panicked. Conquest loomed in their future. Waiting until the army was completely destroyed would leave Germany with no bargaining power. In October, the government began to explore the possibility of a cease-fire.

As the telegrams flew back and forth, Germany’s allies abandoned the cause. An Allied offensive out of Greece was unexpectedly rolling over the enemy armies in the Balkans. Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary called it quits in September, October, and November, respectively. The Austrians even tossed out their emperor while they were at it. As Germany delayed, the Allies made it clear that the German emperor would have to abdicate before any cease-fire could take effect. Kaiser Wilhelm quit on November 9, and two days later, the fighting stopped.

More or less. “The War of the Giants has ended,” Churchill declared. “The quarrels of the pygmies have begun.”
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Embers smoldered in the aftermath of the war. Russia was being battered by civil war. Finland was having one as well. Hungary and Romania fought a new war over where their common border would fall, as did Russia and Poland. Greece and Turkey started fighting over their common border, while two rival regimes in Turkey squabbled over whether to remain a monarchy or become a republic. In 1919, the warring powers gathered in quiet estates around Paris to negotiate the exact details of the peace treaties, but peace would last only long enough for the rival nations to grow a new generation of soldiers.

Legacy

The major lesson of World War I is that war is bad. This may seem like the obvious lesson of most wars, but the previous generation of Europeans had seen an unprecedented era of peace, and they had forgotten what war was like. Most wars in recent memory had been easy victories or clean defeats. World War I reminded world leaders that wars don’t always go as planned. Almost every scheme backfired, and most nations came out of the war broken and shattered.

In upcoming chapters, we will see that many of my top one hundred deadliest multicides easily trace back to the First World War. The Second World War was a rematch. The Russian Civil War was a spin-off. Other multicides are rooted in World War I one step removed. Stalin emerged from the Russian Revolution, and the Korean War grew out of World War II.

Even today, the shockwaves are being felt. Osama bin Laden’s first public comment on the attacks of September 11, 2001, announced an end to the eighty years that the Muslim world had suffered at the hands of the West, most likely a reference to the postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire and the British occupation of Palestine, which began (coincidentally?) on September 11, 1922.
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In fact, some of recent history’s most troubled countries came into existence when the empires of the losers were parceled out by the winners: