15.7: The Aftermath

At the end of the war, approximately forty million people, both soldiers and civilians, were dead. For Russia and France, of the twenty million men mobilized during the war, over 76% were casualties (either dead, wounded, or missing). A whole generation of young men was almost wiped out, which had lasting demographic consequences for both countries. For Germany, the figure was 65%, including 1.8 million dead. The British saw a casualty rate of “only” 39%, but that figure still represented the death of almost a million men, with far more wounded or missing. Even the smaller nations like Italy, which had fought fruitlessly to seize territory from Austria, lost over 450,000 men. Environmentally, a huge swath of Northeastern France and parts of Belgium were reduced to lifeless fields of mud and debris.

Politically, the war spelled the end of three of the most powerful empires of the early modern period: the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire of Austria, and the Ottoman Empire of Southwest Asia. The Austrian Empire was replaced by new independent nations, with Austria reduced to a “rump state”. France and Great Britain divided up control of former Ottoman territories in new “mandates”. Meanwhile, Turkey itself achieved independence led by Mustafa Kemal, or “Ataturk,” meaning “father of the Turks.” In Russia, after a bloody civil war, the world’s first communist nation emerged: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While Germany had not been a major imperial power, it also lost its overseas territories.

After the euphoria many soldiers felt at the start of the war, the survivors were left psychologically shattered. For soldiers who survived but were unable to function in society, the British term “shell shock” was applied, a vague diagnosis for what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Today, P.T.S.D. is understood as a psychological issue that requires medical and therapeutic intervention. In 1918, it was considered a form of “hysteria”, a deeply gendered diagnosis that compared traumatized soldiers to “hysterical” middle-class women suffering from depression. The focus of treatment revolved around trying to force former soldiers to somehow “tough” their way back to normal behavior. Some progress was made in treating shell shock cases by applying the “talking cure,” an early form of therapy related to the practices of the psychologist Sigmund Freud, but most of the medical community held to the assumption that trauma was just a sign of weakness.

Europeans dubbed the conflict "The War to End All Wars." It was inconceivable that it could happen again; the costs had simply been too great to bear. The European nations were left indebted and depopulated, the maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn as new nations emerged from old empires, and there was profound uncertainty about what the future held. Most hoped that the bloodshed was over and that the process of rebuilding might begin. Some, however, saw the war’s conclusion as deeply unsatisfying and, in a sense, incomplete: there were still scores to be settled. It was from that sense of dissatisfaction and a longing for continued violence that the most destructive political philosophy of the twentieth century emerged: fascism (which will be discussed in a later chapter).

Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):

Black Hand - Creative Commons License

Schlieffen Plan - Public Domain

Alliances - Creative Commons License

Soldiers in Trench - Public Domain

Australian Propaganda - Public Domain