World War I
Jean Gathoni
Mr. Beeson
Long Essay
Time: 1 hour
World War I
The first “world war”, from 1914 to 1918, was fought throughout Europe and beyond. It became known as the war to end all wars. It cast an immense shadow on tens of millions of people. One of the soldiers wrote back home saying, “This is not war.” “It is the ending of the world.” Half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at war’s outbreak were dead when it ended. More than one third of all German men aged 19 to 22 were killed. Millions of veterans were crippled in the body and in spirit. Advances in the technology of killing included the use of poison gas. Under the pressure of unending carnage, governments toppled and great empires dissolved. The Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris stated punishments Germany had to go through. However, Germany did not stay quiet. The results of the first world war were severely disrupted as another war was stirring up in the sidelines; colonized peoples received empty promises of freedom from the colonials.
The humiliation of Germany’s defeat and the peace settlement that followed in 1919 would play an important role i the rise of Nazism and the coming of a second “world war” just 20 years later. The first world war just made things worse. The Germans did not learn and understand the immense pain it caused the rest of world. Germany cared about was coming back strong. The agreement that was signed in Paris dictated Germany to be deprived of any significant military power, its territory reduced by thirteen percent, and was forced to accept the full responsibility for starting the war and to pay heavy reparations. Copious amounts of people, including former army corporal Adolf Hitler, seemed the country had been “stabbed in the back,” betrayed by subversives at home and by the government who accepted the punishment. In fact, the German military had quietly sought an end to the war it could no longer win in 1918. Adolf Hitler wrote, “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain,” “We demand vengeance.”
The victorious Entente allies, especially the British and French but also Belgians and Japanese, managed to hold on to, and in fact enlarge, their empires. But the hardships endured by the colonized peoples and the empty promises made by their desperate colonial overloads during the war gave great impetus to resistance to their empires that spread from the Middle East and India to Vietnam and China. Gandhi, one of the leaders in India, led a salt march which impacted the British much harder than they thought. The Indians refused to buy the salt being sold by the British due to the high prices they enforced on the salt. They used the ocean water to get their salt by evaporating the water. Revolutions not only happened in India but also in Africa. Tribes in Africa fought against their colonists to give them their lands as well as their freedom back. Colonists had no other choice but give them what they wanted and sooner or later the colonists went back to their countries.