I may be the only holdout. For me November 11 will always be Armistice Day.
I’m not sure why that is. I do not feel the need to make everything about us, about the present. For me remembrance is the most human of human actions.
In remembrance of the end of the Great War, you might want to take a look at this speculative article on what would have happened if the Central Powers had won World War I:
As a preliminary matter, we should note that the actual outcome of the First World War was a near thing, a far nearer thing than was the outcome of World War II after 1941. While it is true that the United States entered the war on the allied side in 1917, thus providing vast new potential sources of men and material, it is also true that Germany had knocked Russia out of the war at about the same time. This gave the Germans access to the resources of Eastern Europe and freed their troops for deployment to the West. The German Spring Offensive of 1918 actually succeeded in rupturing the Allied line at a point where the Allies had no significant reserves. (At about this time, British Prime Minister Lloyd George was heard to remark, “We are going to lose this war.” He began to create a record which would shift the blame to others.)
I both agree and disagree with Mr. Reilly’s ideas on the subject. I think that his answer is far too Eurocentric.
With the Tsar gone and Russia in a state of chaos following the revolution there would have been an opportunity for the expansion of Austro-Hungary. Germany might well have expanded westward as Mr. Reilly suggests but Austro-Hungary would undoubtedly have expanded eastward into Romania and Ukraine.
If the Central Powers had prevailed would the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire have taken place? If the empire were still unified would the Turkish War of Independence have succeeded? I just don’t know enough about internal Turkish society and politics of the early 20th century to speculate. I’m pretty confident that a Middle East that remained under the Ottoman would have been very different from the one that existed in the middle of the 20th century or the one that exists today.
I’m not so Austria-Hungary would have expanded that far. As I recall the last emperor was something of a reformer and may have focused more on solving the empire’s internal political problems.
The real question is if the Germans and Austro-Hungarians would have provided enough support to the Whites in the Russian civil war to prevent the Reds from gaining total mastery of the remnants of Russia.
Also, I’m not sure how long peace would have prevailed afterwards with wounded French pride and Kaiser Wilhelm II still on his throne.
I’ll have to read the whole thing later; I agree that the war could have gone quite differently, but the devil is in the details. Oddly, I think the collapse of Russia might have overextended Germany and hastened its exhaustion. Also, there is the matter of giving material form to Germany’s fear of a Communist revolution that encouraged Germany to seek peace. Possibly if Russia had held together long enough, but without posing much of an offensive threat, Germany would have had more resources to throw at the Western Front.
In any event, I am skeptical of the claims about French morale at the beginning of the piece. France was occupied territory — some of the soldiers had no home to go to until the Germans left and occupation gave them more backbone to hold the lines than the other belligerent powers. WWI French not the same as WWII French.
In his last job, my husband’s boss was a direct descendant of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I regret never having had the opportunity to discuss the history with him, and my husband wasn’t inclined to do so. His impression is that the family does subscribe to the “reformer” narrative of the last emperor (and the would have been emperor) but even if so I suppose it’s hard to know if that is revisionist.
I couldn’t find the interest to finish reading the link last night; it seemed to build from an unquestionable statement: (i) this war was closer than it may appear in hindsight, to a simple assertion that (ii) the Allied powers could have exhausted first. I don’t buy (ii), and I think its clear that the end phase was dictated by it not being true, which is why the Germans purposefully risked U.S. entry into WWI by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. France and Britain were not being as materially exhausted because they had ocean access.
Speculating about a Marxist uprising in Scotland doesn’t seem convincing, plus WWI had divided the communists between the internationalists and the nationalists. It would not be inconsistent for Britain to form a new government along Communist ideological lines and still keep fighting the Germans.