BEIJING, July 28 (Xinhuanet) -- World War I was the first global industrial conflict. The economic cost was catastrophic. It brought down four empires and left the Europe’s economies devastated for decades. The mighty British Empire survived, albeit in a much weakened state with vast debts. But it was the human cost, which cut the deepest: millions killed and countless millions more scarred for life.
The human cost of World War I was unimaginable. Ten million soldiers and an estimated 12 million civilians died in four years of industrial scale killing.
"Globally, this is the first modern war. It’s when industrial skill is applied to the business of killing, mass killing. It’s also the first total war, because it’s a war that involves Home Fronts as well as Battle Fronts. It involved women and children, mobilizing the whole community for War," Professor David Reynolds with Cambridge University said.
The cost in human life matched only by the monstrous new mechanisms of war, gas, attacks. Machine guns and artillery..
"The power of artillery had grown so great that it could literally bring armies to a dead halt and it was very, very difficult to start again. And that’s why everybody goes to ground that’s why the trench network begins and once you’re in the ground, you’ve set your fortifications down, it took two or three years for both sides, for all sides to figure out how to overcome that obstacle," Nigel Steel, principal historian with Imperial War Museum London, said.
One hundred years later historians still ask how the shooting of one man could draw the world into such apparently mindless mass killing.
"What people today struggle to undertstand is whether that was a fair price to pay. Historically, to me that’s the way it was. And there’s a political issue as to whether the War should be fought at all. But within the War itself, it’s a necessary process because such is the nature of industrialised warfare in 1914, nobody is prepared; no-one understands it and it takes years for people to get to grips with it," Steel said.
But at what a cost in both human and financial terms.
"It bankrupts a number of governments and, of course, it brings them down. The Ottoman Empire; The Hapsburg Empire, that’s in the Danube, Austria Hungary, in the end the Russian and German Empires are all brought down by their inability to pay for the war," Professor David Reynolds said.
The called it the War to End all Wars. It didn’t of course. Echoes of the First global industrial conflict echoed down through the 20th century causing yet further violence in following years.
(Source: CNTV.cn)
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