Larry Burchall: Reflection On War And Wars

[Written by Larry Burchall] In 1914, the monarchies of Europe stumbled into a war. 100 years ago today, the Great War of 1914 – 1918 had been going on for just over three months.

By November 1914, thousands of Indian soldiers had been imported from what was then the Indian Empire but that we know today as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

In November 1914, there were not yet any Bermudian soldiers in or on their way to Europe; but Bermudians were now in the process of signing-on as volunteers for active service in Europe.

By November 1914, only one Bermudian, Officer’s Cook First Class William Edmund Smith of the Royal Navy had lost his life. Other Bermudians, from the all-white Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps, did not get to the battlefront until June 1915. Men from the black-manned but white-officered Bermuda Militia Artillery did not arrive until 1917.

By War’s end in November 1918, 48 men from the two units had died whilst serving in the European theatre of operations.

After its relatively inconclusive end, in the Armistice of November 1918, the Great War began being treated as if it had been the ‘war to end all wars’.

The period 1914 – 1918 saw the full energy and intellect of all the developed countries committed to the sole task of killing the men – and women and children – of other countries. New inventions and technical advances helped make the killing process more efficient.

Rickety short-range single-seater string-bag aircraft became multi-crewed long range bombers; tanks were invented and introduced to the battlefield; poison gas and flamethrowers became new weapons; rudimentary radios were put into use; medical advances saw blood transfusions become normal practice; and psychiatrists and psychologists began a long battle to replace the old practice of death-by-firing-squad for ‘cowardice’ with the medical diagnosis of ‘combat exhaustion’.

This is November 2014, 100 years later.

Russian tanks and infantry are said to be crossing into Ukraine. US, UK, French, Canadian, and Danish aircraft are bombing ISIS elements in Syria and Iraq. The President of Syria is killing his own people as he hangs on to power. There is still scrambled fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Boko Haram are still killing and capturing in Nigeria; Israelis and Arabs are still exchanging bullets, rockets, and stones from slingshots; and the apparently nutty President of North Korea is still rattling his rockets.

So the Great War was not the war to end all wars. In fact, the Great War proved to be a key element in the genesis of the Second World War, 1939 – 1945.

So what was achieved?

100 years later, we can see that the era of ‘Great World Wars’ has likely come to an end. That is one successful outcome.

We saw the ‘Cold War’s’ threat of a nuclear holocaust disappear when the concept of Communism began disintegrating in 1989. With that the likelihood of another ‘World’ or ‘Great War’ has likely disappeared.

But the threat of a ‘Great War’ has been replaced by today’s phenomenon of the small universal war. A war in which as few as 19 suicidal men, armed with nothing more than box cutters, can kill thousands and shut down an entire nation, as happened with the USA on 9/11.

Now it’s war by small terrorist groups who wage a new kind of ‘world war’ wherein they will kill anyone, anywhere, any time. These wage war anywhere anytime on anyone who does not look like them or who hold a different religious or political belief.

100 years later, perhaps the real spinoff of the Great War [1914 – 1918] and its progeny, the Second World War [1939 – 1945], is that war has changed from a situation where millions will die, but millions are also safe from the possibility of death in that war; to today’s situation where only hundreds and thousands will die, but where millions are individually threatened with the possibility of death as if they had been suddenly thrust into the blood-soaked, body littered, foul trenches of the Western Front.

100 years later, once distant global war erupts next door.

This is what happened at the July 2005 bombings in London; near the finish line of the April 2013 Boston Marathon; at the October 2014 attack on the Canadian Parliament and the just prior killing of the Canadian soldier on ceremonial duty at Canada’s National War Memorial; at …

- Larry Burchall

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