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cc The Great War, as they called it then, was supposed to be the war to make the world safe for democracy or the war to end all wars. Was it? And did it? Welcome to University Place Presents.

I'm Norman Gilliland. Whatever the cause of World War I, it certainly changed things radically in just four or five years. It changed the map and the culture and the whole political structure of Europe, and by implication also, the United States too in many ways. We'll find out how the war started and what some of the effects were, and also what it was like to live through it on the front from my guest today.

He's Rudy Koshar, professor of history at UW-Madison. Welcome to University Place Presents. Thank you. It's good to be here.

You know in eighth grade history, once upon a time, they would tell you that it all started with a single event, WWI, June 28, 1914. But they would also tell you that things were very well primed for a war before that event. How do the two come together? It's true that the initial event is the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb terrorist.

It's also true that when the assassination occurred most Europeans did not anticipate the coming of war. And if there was going to be a war, it certainly wasn't going to be the great conflagration that took place, but rather would be a rather localized affaire, perhaps something between the offended Austrians and the provocateurs, the Serbs. But as Europeans look back and as historians look back, they realized also that there were certain elements of European society which made it more predisposed towards war than everyone had assumed at the time. One of the important preconditions of the war certainly was the arms race that had taken place, especially between the major powers.

Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, France, Russia, were all building enormous stockpiles of armaments. Germany and England, in particular, were engaged in a very intense naval competition, naval race. All of this contributed to a sense that, even though war was not anticipated, there was a sense that the war could perhaps be quite bloody, could be quite technical, it could depend very much on industrial resources. What was Europe like in those years before the war then?

Was there not some prosperity? What was the state of mind of the countries in general? If you read the memoir literature of the time you can detect a certain sense of nostalgia for what Europe was like before 1914. That nostalgia often consisted of arguments that Europe was a very civilized place.

It was a very balanced place. More conservative commentators would say that everyone pretty much knew their station in life, even though there was a tremendous amount of labor conflict. Europeans often had a sense that Europe was a good deal more balanced than it in fact way. In fact, Europe before 1914, partly because these societies were industrializing, they were modernizing, they were building big cities, Europe was rent with social conflict.

Labor conflict was very important in places like Germany, France and England. Of course, Russian political culture was extremely contentious. There had been a revolution in 1905, and a great deal of dissatisfaction in Russian society. There was tremendous ethnic and political conflict within the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914.

So all of these societies were, in many respects, suffering some of the growing pains of modern industrial societies. They often could be very intense and very unsteady. So when the slide to WWI takes place between the end of June and the end of July of 1914, many of these governments are thinking about that prior social conflict and considering war as, perhaps, one of the ways in which some of those conflicts can be resolved. We have a couple of images here that are pre-war and give you some idea of the state of mind, and I suppose the state of productivity too, prior to the war.

Is this telling us about this state of preparation for war? The first slide that you see there is actually of a German armaments factory. It's the great Krupp ironworks in Essen in the Ruhr River valley. They're building one of the great dreadnoughts.

This was part and parcel of the Anglo-German naval competition of the time. There had been a strong build-up of the German navy and many German political leaders, as well as military strategists, had felt that a modern nation requires a modern navy. If you're going to be a world power, as many Germans felt they should be given their industrial growth, given the sophistication of their universities, given the high quality of life of their cities, then of course, you had to build great battleships. The photo that you see there is two ironworkers in the Krupp works.

Germany, of course, had the biggest socialist party in the world at the time, a very large trade union movement. The socialist party was based on the trade union movement. They were actually voices of peace. They were voices for moderation within German political culture, but they were also quite frightening to the powers that be in Germany at the time.

Again, the possibility of war seemed to some decision makers to be an opportunity for resolving that internal conflict. By having an external enemy. It's a common strategy, isn't it? By having an external enemy, by arguing, as the German kaiser, the German monarch did when war broke out in July, 1914, arguing that he knew only Germans.

There were no parties, there were no classes any longer. There was an appeal to society to pull together, to establish the unity that hadn't been there before the war broke out. He was successful for a time. In fact, most of the left-wing parties, most of the socialist parties throughout Europe, not just in Germany but in France and elsewhere, were on board at first.

In fact, they argued, as the Germans did, that they were fighting a defensive war. When you're in the center of the continent you're kind of inevitably going to be drawn into a defensive war sooner or later. That's right. What about the principles involved?

That is to say, the leadership, in 1914? We have Kaiser Wilhelm II who of course, from our way of thinking, takes a lot of blame for getting the whole thing started. What sort of a person was he? And what kind of ambitions did he have?

Well, Kaiser Wilhelm II, first of all, and this relates to the slide that we went through as well. Kaiser Wilhelm II, even though he loved to dress up in these rather traditional uniforms and loved the military paraphernalia and loved all the pomp and circumstance associated with the monarchy, he was also an individual who was absolutely enamored with modern technology. He loved to be driven around in modern cars. He loved airplane technology.

He loved machinery and everything associated with modern factories, not necessarily the worker but the machines themselves and what they could do for Germany. His love of technology, his love of things military, reflected, I think, a broader societal enthusiasm for the industrial society that was being developed. The one slide that you saw, the color slide before Kaiser Wilhelm II, this was by the Italian futurist artist, Umberto Boccioni. Boccioni was one of those artists who was very taken by the dynamism, by the power of modern industrial society.

This is his "City Rising." You can see the pride, you can see the fascination with industrial processes and with the dynamism of the city. The futurists, no surprisingly, were also very enthusiastic about war. They said war could have a hygienic effect on society. They said that war would get us away from the feminization of European society, which was a strong argument that was made at the time.

War was for men. War was a masculinizing force. So all of these things came together. Kaiser Wilhelm II, in that regard, reflected some very broad trends.

Even though the European monarchies where generally isolated from their society, nonetheless, they actually embodied some of the broader social trends. I think that was a strong pre-disposing element also in Europe from WWI. Well, we'll find out shortly. Of course, we've alluded to the fact that Serbia was at the core of this and their conflict with Austria-Hungary, Austria in particular.

What kind of leadership did Serbia have and what were their ambitions? Serbia wanted to be a great power. Serbia harked back to medieval times. They argued that in the 14th century, in a battle that militarily actually was not that important, the battle of Kosovo of 1389, they lost to the Turks.

This destroyed the medieval empire that they had built up until that time. Their political agenda was based in large part on this vision of a medieval empire that now could be restored. They thought in very expansionist terms. They were very concerned about the fact that there were many Serbs inside the boarders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This starts to sound familiar, doesn't it? This starts to sound very familiar. They were very concerned that those Serbs would ultimately be loyal to the empire and not to Serbia itself. One aspect of their expansionist agenda was to try to agitate within the Austro-Hungarian Empire-- Get the Serbs to agitate to somehow reunite with Serbia.

Absolutely, and to-- Much like you would hear in Ukraine many years later. To create a degree of discomfort within the monarchy. They could, in fact, exploit of degree of substantial disillusionment within the Austro-Hungarian Empire among the various ethnic communities. There were not only Serbs, there were Croats, there were Slovenians, there were Athenians, White Russians, there were Czechs, there were Romanians, Hungarians of course, and many others.

Those ethnic groups generally did not want to break away from the empire. They generally did not what to establish any kind of autonomy, but they did want to have more language rights, they wanted to have better employment opportunities, they wanted to have better access to educational resources. They wanted their areas to be favored more in terms of economic policy and infrastructural build up. So there was a real chance, I think, despite the fact that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a rather unsteady structure.

There was a real chance of negotiating and balancing all of the various competing ethnic groups. This was something that-- The idea of a greater Serbia was very opposed to. The Serbs were quite happy to roil the ethnic and political waters of the empire. And of course, we know-- Not much was known about this situation at the time, but we have a good deal more information, on a very secretive organization within Serbia.

The Black Hand. The Black Hand. The slogan was "Unite or Death". The Black Hand had its hands in the Serbian military, in the upper stretches of the political establishment.

But they also had agents, they had groups, they had supporters among Serbian student groups within the empire to promote their agenda. Well, if we can let's just look fairly quickly at some of the other principle figures in this. In Russian we have Tsar Nicholas, who has problems of his own at home. He has problems of his own at home.

He's experienced a revolution in 1905. His military forces have been defeated on the battlefield by a non-European nation. That is, the Japanese, in 1905. There's tremendous pressure in Russia for building up the parliamentary regime, the Duma.

Russia is experiencing some of the tensions of modernization, with railroad building and the creation of new factories, especially in the western part of the monarchy. It is a very complex situation that Tsar Nicholas II faces. He has also promoted the idea of somehow being the big brother to Slavic groups in the Balkans. Such as the Serbs.

Such as the Serbs. Now sometimes that support was more symbolic than real. In fact, after the assassination on June 28, the Russians advised the Serbian government to concede all of the demands-- That the Austrians had demanded. Then we move over to Italy where things are also rather volatile.

Right. The Italians were part of the alliance with Germany, Austria-Hungary before 1914, but of course, they switched sides and joined the French and the English. When they did enter the war in 1915 that entry had been proceeded by a tremendous amount of debate, a lot of internal dissension over whether Italy should enter the war. Italy, of course, had great power aspirations.

Italy was involved in North Africa, and of course, they had already attacked the Libyans and had begun a process of imperial expansion. They had used airplanes in their wars in North Africa. They had behaved quite brutally. As they would do again.

As they would do again. So Italy certainly is a contributor to all of this with its instability, but also with its desire to, you know, build up its own position of power within Europe. Then you also have on the wain the Ottoman Empire, Turkey. The Ottoman Empire has been shrinking within Europe for some time.

Many of the conflicts within the Balkans had to do with what would happen to those areas that were vacated by Balkan power. International political arrangement abhor a vacuum, and there certainly was a vacuum that was created in the Balkans. And France of course, also going to become a major player. In France, which of course is highly modern, closely allied with both the Russians as well as the Serbians.

There's a tremendous amount of economic investment on the part of French financial concerns in Russia, but also in Serbia. One of the reasons that Serbia had one of the most well-armed military forces, with a very high proportion of Serbian men within their military, has to do with French financing. There were a series of economic deals that had been forged before 1914 between the Serbians and the French which brought tremendous economic resources into Serbia, part of which was used for infrastructural improvement, building of roads and so on and so forth. A part of which also, a large part, which also contributed to the Serbian military build-up.

And also I suppose at this point the most powerful empire in the world belongs to the English. It belongs to the English. One of the reasons that Kaiser Wilhelm II had said that Germany now need a place in the sun was because he felt that Germany was much like England, German and England not only shared a deep ethnic identity, but they also deserved, in many ways, the right to rule. So both could be imperial powers, both could eventually divide up influence within Europe.

England in many ways provided a model for Germany. And of course, Kaiser Wilhelm II's and many other's hopes where dashed in 1914 that somehow England would see Germany's side and come around and agree with their position. We'll get to the United States later, since it did not play an immediate part in this conflict. The alignments of these powers are a little surprising, a little counterintuitive sometimes when you realize who was allied with whom in this.

That's right. That's correct. Perhaps the most incongruous alignment is that between the French and the Russians. The French were regarded by other Europeans, and often by the French themselves, as the most politically progressive country.

They were not a monarchy. They had a long tradition of revolution and republican government. Yet they were allied with the country, Russia, that was seen as the most conservative, the most reactionary, the most religious, orthodox country in Europe at the time. These alliances-- It's a very different situation that what we had, for example, in the Cold War, were there was a certain degree of ideological affinity between the various sides.

These were not based on ideology. These were based on geo-political interest. Of course the fact that the French and the Russians were allied created great problems, a deal of anxiety for the Germans who-- Had somebody on either side. Who of course assumed that they would have to fight a two-front war if a major European war broke out.

Is this a monument to nationalism here that we're seeing? This is a monument to nationalism. One of the, I think again, pre-disposing factors in Europe before 1914 is this intense sense of nationalism, the attempt to rally their populations behind all of the symbolism of the national state. This was a time of monument building.

The biggest national monument is Europe at the time-- All the European countries were building them, but the biggest national monument at the time was built by the Germans in 1913. This is a monument to the Battle of the Nations which actually commemorated a battle that had taken place in the French wars of revolution a century before in 1813. This was a monument, actually, that Kaiser Wilhelm II himself detested. He hated the architecture, and he was also a bit miffed by fact that he didn't play a great role in mobilizing the resources that it took to build the thing.

Let's look at the map now, 1914. This also speaks, in some respects, of this era of nationalism. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course, is an empire. This is an age of empires.

We have the Russian, the Ottoman, the German and the dual monarchy. Austro-Hungary was called a dual monarchy, which was established in 1867. Austria and Hungary had a kind of consortium in which they ruled over this immense territory with this immense ethnic complexity. The emperor himself was German speaking, he was Catholic.

And part of the problem for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in this period was that it had to balance the needs of the empire and loyalty to the empire with these various competing national interests of all of the different ethnic groups. It was a time when nationalism presupposed that a nation-state had a relatively homogenous ethnic population behind it. The Czechs required, if not a Czech nation, at least a good deal more of leeway within the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. Again, the map on the screen now of the Balkan situation, the main factor to emphases there is the way in which Serbians' great power aspirations are reflected.

That circle that extends out from the mainland of Serbia there gives an idea of the area of influence that the Serbian envisioned as essentially the area that would constitute the greater Serbia of the future. Of course, one of the disturbing things for the Austro-Hungarian Empire is that that greater Serbian extended far into Austrian territory. Is there particular resources here that they would be eager to get, or is this really just a matter mostly of just a lot of territory? Well, it was both.

It was based partly, again, on that historical sense, that sense of historical right. But it was also based in some ways on resources. A large part of that population within Austro-Hungary, as I said before, is Serbian. But also, one of their aims was Bosnia Herzegovina.

Bosnia Herzegovina actually had not been part of the medieval Serbian empire, but the modern-day Serbs, or contemporary Serbs, thought of it as part of the greater Serbia of the future. That part of the empire had been annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1907, and actually had been built up so that it's infrastructure was relatively modern, it was growing economically. So Serbia felt that it had the right and the opportunity to exploit those resources. Now, you mentioned the Black Hand, Rudy.

This was a secret organization that the Serbians used to infiltrate Austria. Right. As a way to gain the favor of those Serbians living in Austria. Right.

Did the Black Hand actually generate assassins that would undermine Austrian politics of the time? It was involved in a very violent form, of really, 1914-era terrorism. It equipped the assassins of Franz Ferdinand with the bombs, with the guns. Also with Cyanide tablets which actually turned out to be rather weak Cyanide.

One of the assassins, after failing in his attempt, tried to take Cyanide and it turned out not to work out very well for him. He was taken alive after having tried to escape by jumping into a river. Now the archduke, was he the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne? The archduke was the heir apparent.

It would have normally been the emperor's son Rudolph, but Rudolph had committed suicide in the 1880's. So Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Franz Joseph II, the emperor. Franz Ferdinand is an interesting character as well. He had particular ideas about the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He had entertained the idea that perhaps all those south Slav groups, the Serbs, the Croats, the Slovenes, could be brought into the empire in a more equitable relationship with the Austrian and the Hungarians. A kind of tripartite arrangement is something that Franz Ferdinand had entertained. This also was something that was a severe threat to Serbian national aspirations, because, again, it was one of those factors that could have actually spoken to Serbian needs within the empire. It may have mollified them.

Without expanding Serbian territory. Without expanding Serbian territory, keeping the Serbs within the empire. So the archduke, Franz Ferdinand, did have some progressive political ideas in that regard. Although, historians debate as to how realistic it was really that he could have realized some of these aims.

He also was interestingly kind of an outsider figure within the Austrian elite, partly because he had married a Czech countess who was regarded as not really royal enough, not for the Austrian royal house. So there was a great deal of controversy over that. There was also a tremendous amount of dislike for Franz Ferdinand himself among the Austrian leadership, which created a rather ironic situation for them when he was assassinated in so far that it was necessary to demonstrate a certain degree of sadness, of course, and mourning about the event, but in fact for many within the Austrian leadership Franz Ferdinand had been as much of a problem as he was a solution. So did Serbia, in putting these assassins up to killing the archduke and his wife too, was actually Serbia after a war with Austria?

Serbia was not after a general war. And as I say, they had used assassination before. They had used assassination against the governor of Bosnia in the previous decade. They really wanted to create a situation of instability and uncertainty, and also remove a figure from Austria leadership that they felt would be a very difficult thing for them, especially down the line if they wanted to expand.

What prompted Austria then to issue these demands to Serbia after the assassination? I think we saw and minute ago and image of Princip who was the actual 19-year-old assassin. Yes. What lead Austria, as it were, to take it personally that Serbia was behind this?

Did they have plenty of reason to believe that it was? Part of the reason was that Serbian/Austrian relationships had been bad for decades. Serbia had been a thorn in the side of the Austrians. At one point, I think, the Serbians had to make a decision, that their prestige as a great power was on the line.

There was a certain assumption among some of the European royal houses and among Europeans more generally, that perhaps Austria-Hungary was so unstable that its leadership was so inept, that the military had performed so badly, for example in 1866 against the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian war. The Austrians felt compelled, in so ways, to make a decisive blow against the Serbians, to demonstrate that they were still a great power. And to also finally put an end once and for all to this constant harassment they felt that they were getting from this upstart Serbia. So there was a lot of internal debate going on with Austria.

There was consultation with the Germans of course, the main ally of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The decision was finally taken to make very strong demands on the Serbians. Strong and, I gather in some cases, so immediate that it would be very difficult to fulfill them. Once the demands were issued the Serbians were given 48 hours to respond.

European diplomacy was not accustomed to seeing that kind of timeline. One of the factors that kept European diplomacy on a fairly even keel before 1914 was the fact that diplomacy took time. Conflicts between countries could result in military conflict, but often of a rather limited nature. Diplomatic maneuvering was rather drawn out.

So here we have a situation where the Austrians are demanding that the Serbians respond, to cede to all of their demands, within 48 hours. And those demands included demands that were violations of Serbian sovereignty. For example, the fact that Austrian police personnel would be intimately involved in whatever investigation the Serbs undertook to determine who the assassins were, and to follow the smoking gun which was never really found. And the war began then how?

The war began with Austria declaring war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. All but the single demand of intervention in Serbian sovereignty were agreed to on the part of the Serbs. So on that one point the whole war began. As I say, internally there was still a tremendous amount of debate.

There was a very strong war party that had been demanding war against Serbia already well before 1914. So this push was already there. And the Germans, of course, had told the Austrians, in the famous Blank Check, which was a rather ambivalent statement on the part of the Germans, that the Austrians should basically do whatever they saw fit and the Germans would follow. There's a lot of evidence now that the Germans probably didn't assume that it would go quite this far.

Especially when, for example, the Russians are advising the Serbians to go ahead and cede to the demands. Yes, of course. But I gather then, from what you're saying then, that there was a fair amount of jubilation when this war broke out. We've got some images of that effect.

There was. This particular image and the one right afterwards show the crowds that amassed in European cities. This happens to be a German crowd in which the proclamation of war actually being read, but we found similar scenes elsewhere. There was a strong part of the European population which had argued that European society before 1914 was boring, was too bourgeois, it was too secure.

This was part of the masculinization discourse. European society had become too effeminate. It had become to satisfied with itself. As one German novelist said, war was like Christmas.

War changed everything. It created an entirely new situation. One of the jubilant onlookers here, this is in Munich the --. It's a chilling image, isn't it?

The a very chilling image is the young Adolf Hitler, who would end up serving in the Austrian military for four years and who would later say in his biography, Mein Kampf, that it was his service in the military where he found his first home. Now historians have done a good deal of research on these crowds and they've found that support for the war was perhaps a mile wide but maybe only an inch deep. Because in the countryside there was a good deal of disillusionment about it. This is after late July, early August, 1915, it's time to bring in the harvest.

All able-bodied, young men in particular, are needed. This also determined mobilization schedules by the various powers. Some historians have been able to show that the decision as to when Austria finally declared war was based in part on ensuring that the Austrian countryside could bring in at least substantial parts of the harvest before having to bring the soldiers in for war. I guess there was also a feeling, wasn't there, that the timing, getting this war started, before the Russians were modernized which they were on the brink of doing, was another reason for starting it sooner.

One of the reasons that the Germans told the Austrians that they should do what they saw fit, and that if they should decide on war they should do it sooner rather than later. What the Germans by that meant was that essentially we have perhaps a two, or perhaps a three, year window before the Russian military would be built up enough to able to present real problems for the central powers. The Germans, as you can see from that slide, had been planning for a long time for what they saw as the inevitable, and that is a two-front war. This is the Schlieffen Plan.

Schlieffen was a German general who had already passed away by the time WWI came. The Schlieffen Plan was modified, discussed in military circles for a very long time before 1914. It was based on the idea of delivering a very quick knock-out strike against the French. To make it a one-front war.

To make it a one-front war. It was assumed that Germany would have a little bit of extra time to move against the Russians. This was the idea. As you can also see from the map, that entailed the violation of Belgian neutrality.

That was never really regarded as a problem by the German military. Just walk right through. That was one of the costs of doing business. The so-called rape of Belgium.

That's right. That was simple collateral damage. Now this is another, I guess, look at some responses to the conflict early on. Again, the enthusiasm.

European intellectuals do not have a very positive role to play here, since many of them were quite enthusiastic about the coming of war. Again, I don't want to necessarily single out the futurist movement but futurism, because of its tremendous adoration for technology, was in the forefront of not only creating very vivid and interesting war imagery, but also for every enthusiastically supporting the war. On the left here we get an English painter who was influenced by Italian futurism, C.R.W. Nevinson, in which he's admiring the great beauty of a shell exploding.

On the right we have Gino Severini who was a well-known Italian futurist. This is "Armored Train." Again, there's this fascination with arms, with technology, with movement, with violence. This is another image that fascinates me here for two reasons. One is hair, asking women to donate their hair to the war effort.

This is something I think we only saw very rarely even in World War II. That's right. Although a short war was anticipated in August of 1914, it obviously turned out to be a very long war. It turned out to be a very costly war.

And it turned out to be a war in which the economic resources of all the major belligerents were going to have to be mobilized in a much more systematic way than in any previous war. That meant that there had to be an appeal to the populations to support them, whether through war loans on the one side, where Germans are being asked to buy war bonds, or on the other side where German women are being asked to contribute their hair because it can be used for -- belts in German factories. Speaking of factories, again, women in factories is something we associate with WWII, but I gather it was also a WWI phenomenon. It was a phenomenon in WWI.

The overall share in most of the major European countries of women who work outside the home does not change all that much in WWI, but does happen is that there's a shift in employment. Women who might have been doing secretarial work or who might have been working as domestic servants begin to shift over into factory work, into the arms industry. And of course, when soldiers are demobilized after 1918 those women would have to leave the factories. The men are favored to come back and take their old jobs.

But these are British women who are working in an armaments factory. This war has this, I'll say fascinating, but also horrific intersection of 19th and 20th centuries. To think that on the one hand you have these horse powered cavalry charges, and on the other hand, coming at them from the other direction, tanks and planes and things like that. There's a tremendous emphasis on technology without maybe even a clear understanding of what it's powers were.

That's right. Some historians have often argued that we had essentially 19th century leaderships who were beginning to wield 20th century technology with no idea of what the consequences would be. The military leaders, political leaders, again assumed it would be a short war. It would be a war of movement.

And that, in fact, was the case for the first several months of the war. But when the Schlieffen Plan failed and it became a war of attrition then it became something quite different. It became a war of the trenches, and it became a war is which new technologies were brought on board. Some of these technologies were known beforehand, the machine gun for example, had been known beforehand.

But the machine gun now was lighter, it was more mobile. It was a good deal more deadly. The use of poison gas as well, we can see. I think these are Austrian soldiers who are donning gas masks.

It gave them a rather other-worldly look about them. A lot of commentators who experienced the trenches had this feeling that they were experiencing as entirely new situation. There's a famous war memoir published in 1919 by the German, Ernst Jnger, called The Storm of Steel. If you read that you realize that Jnger has put his finger on a very new phenomenon, the use of technology on the battlefield and the opening up of what he thought would be a terrible era of industrial warfare in which modern nations would be constantly at war with one another.

They would be using the most up to date technology. And the soldiers themselves would not longer be the heroic soldiers of past wars. They would not longer be chivalric in the old sense. They would be, basically, machine tenders.

They would become anonymous. They would become anonymous, they would become nameless. How could you be otherwise when you have-- Well, you mentioned the mobile machine guns, but look at the air in this picture too. That's right.

You couldn't tell hardly friend from foe, let alone who was who in this on your own side. That's right. And another thing that that photograph reflects is a tremendous environmental destruction. There is an environmental history of the war.

Given the drama of everything else that was going on it really hasn't been emphasized all that much. The denuding of the landscape, the extraordinary transformation on the battlefield of the environment, that's something that perhaps in the future historians will consider more deeply than they have. Again, some of those images are phenomenal, aren't they? Of the no man's land, for example, between the trenches.

It was just utterly denuded of any kind of animal or plant life. Commentators often had to search for the proper metaphors, for the proper language to capture it. People spoke of moonscapes or something like that. It was a very new experience.

In many ways people did not have the language to deal with it. Some of those lost generation poets, however, did touch upon it in very moving ways though, didn't they? They did touch on it in very moving ways. English war poetry, for example, is one of the primary examples.

Also some of the great works of literature that came out of the WWI period. This will give you some sense of that anonymity that we mentioned, this image from an artist of the time. Yes. This is an Austrian artist, Albin Egger-Lienz.

This is called "The Nameless," "Die Namenlosen." It well depicts the sense of the soldiers as shear numbers. A few of them are also wearing steel helmets. I mentioned Ernst Jnger before. Ernst Jnger felt that the wearing of the steel helmet also increased the uniformity of the soldier and captured the kind of machine-like existence that the soldiers on the battlefront had.

It was almost as it human beings themselves became machines. Yes, I can see where that would be an apt metaphor. What about the hospital conditions in this war? If we have improved technology for killing people, do we have improved technology for healing them?

We do, and many of the weapons were thought to be more humane than what had existed in previous wars. Some argued that, for example, poison gas was a good deal more humane. Because although it injured the opponent, it didn't kill him. Of course, leaving aside the fact that very often people's health would be destroyed.

People often never recovered from serious gas attacks. Yes. So this is a WWI dressing station, a German dressing station. There was improved medical technology, but again, the war far surpassed the resources that even the medical profession had.

For example, the medical profession was not at all equipped to deal with what at the time was often called hysteria, which we understand as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many, many soldiers, again, suffered from that. Some were executed because of thought that they were mutinying when in fact they were suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Was desertion a big phenomenon in WWI?

It's an uneven story. It was in some places rather than in others. It of course became quite serious on the Russian front, especially when it became clear that the Tsarist government had no idea what was going on. Things had become quite chaotic, and many Russian soldier were simply leaving.

They were responding partly also to Bolshevik ideology which promised them an end to the war. Which, in fact, Lenin did in 1917. And it became a problem, of course, in Germany in 1918, kind of run up to the fall of the German monarchy. It was a problem in 1917 in France where French soldier really were reacting to the overall development of the war, war-weariness.

They felt that they were under-nourished. They felt that their equipment was bad. They felt that their leadership was incompetent. And there were then significant executions that followed as the French military clamped down on them.

This is one of the more haunting images of the war. I mean, you see it in one form or another. We have just seen a deserter, or an alleged deserter, being executed. But maybe a more powerful image than that even is this, that we see.

Whether it's an English soldier in some pictures or an American soldier in others, caught in the barbed wire and is sort of helpless as he is killed. This is a US soldier. The US, of course, entered the war in April of 1917. There was a tremendous amount of anticipation on the part of the Western powers in particular, that this would be the factor to turn the tide.

It was in many ways. It proved again, as the Germans said, that this was a --. This was a war of material. It was not only a war for pitched battles, it was not only a war of the individual soldier.

It was a war where the country that mobilized it's economic resources most systematically would be the country that would finally come out on top. The US demonstrated to the rest of the world, certainly to the rest of Europe, that they had the economic wherewithal to fight this kind of war. This kind of war, for a long time, being a trench war which had a grimness all its own, didn't it? It had a grimness all its own.

The trenches themselves were almost a separate community from the rest of the world. A lot of the writing about the war was about the fact that soldiers came back and they really didn't recognize their former homes, their former bosses, even their families. They had been put in this situation where it was as if they had almost left for a foreign country in the trenches. It was a very intense situation, but also a situation where there was a lot of waiting around, there was a lot of anxiety about what the next battle would bring.

Of course the outcome of that trench warfare was gruesome, 10 million soldiers killed, perhaps another 20 million wounded. The amount that would return with psychologically related injuries--. The process of mourning the dead began already on the battlefield. It had to be a rather hurry-up affair, as we see here.

I don't know exactly what the nationality of this soldier was but it's a form of rough and ready commemoration. And in a way it doesn't even matter who the soldier is or what the nationality is because it show what a leveler this kind of combat was. Indeed. All the soldiers were really equal on the battlefield, and especially in death.

They are all reduced, finally, to bones. Right. This is another image I think we have here, of the-- It gives you some idea of the extent of the conflict and its aftermath. So this whole mourning, I gather that once this war ended, and of course we know that it didn't end, really, the situation.

But there must have been a lot of, then, memorials all over Europe and of course some in this country too, commemorating the sacrifices made in the war. Indeed. As I say, war commemoration had begun already during the war. After the war, however, it became a very significant problem.

a lot of local communities wanted to establish their own monuments. There were attempts by national governments to properly commemorate the fallen soldiers. It took some time however. This is one of the reasons why the great surge of writing about the war, and even monument building about the war, took place seven, eight years, a decade, after the war.

So the period of the late 1920's is an important period in remembrance and commemoration. The slide you see now was done by the famous German artist --, who lost a son in the war. She would later write that she created this monument of the grieving parents which was placed in a military cemetery in Belgium in 1932. She created the monument, she said, partly because of the shame that the older generation should feel for sending the younger generation off to a conflict which cost so many lives and really wiped out a generation.

This is not only a tribute to the war-dead, but it is also a reminder of what cost it had for the parents, and what the cost of their decisions were. The lost generation. The lost generation. Not only of the soldiers that fought, but also the parents themselves who were left behind, who were in some sense lost and had to live with the decision of many of them having supported the war.

It has been said that WWII had not nearly the effect on the map of Europe and the people of Europe that WWI had in terms of just totally altering the culture, the politics and the map of Europe. That's right. It's ironic in many ways, since the mass slaughter of WWII far exceeded WWI, between 50 and 60 million dead as a result of WWII. But WWI really had some substantial changes that continued throughout the 20th century.

Europe was no longer a Europe of empires but rather of nation-states. Many of those new nation-states which were carved out of the old empires, like Poland, like Yugoslavia, like Czechoslovakia were either very unstable or they were very much the targets of the political ambitions of the greater powers after 1918. Also, one of the effects of the war was that we had much stronger state intervention in the economies. This is something that would continue.

Many European governments, quite rightly, after WWI felt that they were responsible for taking care of the dependants of the soldiers who had been lost, taking care of the war wounded. The entire idea of the state being responsible for the bodies, for the social welfare, of their populations became much more central to their thinking and began to transform their ideas of what the modern states' role really was in society. Many historians have pointed out the fact that this was an important antecedent to the rise of the modern welfare state such as we got it in Europe after 1945. The Treaty of Versailles, did it really leave a lot of unfinished business?

It did indeed. It saddled Germany with the sole guilt for the war. It didn't take a only German patriot after 1919 to recognize that that was not a particularly balanced statement of things. I think historical scholarship on responsibility certainly places a great deal of the burden on the Germans and on Austro-Hungary.

But we know that everyone was playing a great power game. Everyone was gambling. All the great powers entered the war thinking that they might have something to gain. They had more to lose by staying out than entering the war.

But the argument as established in the Versailles Peace Treaty of sole German guilt created an important resource for the rise of fascism, for the rise of Hitler after 1918. But there were many other countries that were disillusioned as well. Certainly the Italians, who felt that they had been badly treated at the Paris peace talks. They had territorial ambitions.

They felt that they had been treated as a second-rate power. That played right into Mussolini's game. He went right back at it in North Africa just a few years later. Precisely.

So the settlement of WWI did as much to unsettle Europe as it did to settle hostilities. What about in this country? How do you think America was changed by WWI? Well, I think America's involvement in the war was another step in our growing sense that we were truly a world power, we had truly global interests.

Our economic infrastructure was such that we could be a model for the rest of the world. Even though, of course, the United States withdrew to a degree from European involvement after WWI, nonetheless the die had been cast I think, in many ways. To reverse the question, the Europeans themselves began to pay attention to the United States much more thoroughly than they did before. everyone recognized already that the United States was a growing power, that there was tremendous economic might there.

But they had a very strong sense of it during the war when they were able to see the efficiency with which the American economy was able to produce armaments and to really mobilize it's forces to fight on the side of the western powers. Well, we've barely scratched the surface, haven't we? But it's been very enlightening for me, some of the surprises that come out of this study of WWI, when you look at the early days and the causes of it. Yes.

Rudy Koshar, thank you very much for joining me for this hour. Thanks very much. It was a pleasure. I'm Norman Gilliland.

Thank you for joining us for University Place Presents.