Chapter 2    Part B 

World War I recruitment poster 

   

   When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe, and in the cities of all other countries that were attached even remotely to the main belligerents, there were banners flying, troops marching, bands playing, and huge crowds of men, women, and kids all shouting for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. Finally, the superior armies and ideals of “our way of life” were going to sweep aside the barbaric, inferior armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies.

   

48th Highland Regiment getting ready to leave Toronto 

    Exhorted by their leaders and in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, along with all of their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories that were being told in their newspapers and got set to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history finally brought the European tribes into head-on confrontation.

Anti-German propaganda poster 

               

      My country, Canada, in 1914, was part of the British Empire, and Canadians were just as gung-ho as any of the loyal subjects in downtown London, England. Young men leapt out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and across to Europe, the fighting would be over. Girls clustered around guys in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform.

               

        Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ terms even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern, scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly line ways. The whole process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically-designed factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what Science could do.

               

         We saw.

   Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties – wounded, missing, and killed – on the first morning of the first day of the Battle of the Somme than the British Army had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that day. France, Russia, Germany, Britain, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all of the others got hit with similar experiences, over and over, for four long years.

               

       In the end, nine million combatants were dead, three times that many permanently disabled. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on Earth was touched, or we should say wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Of the 600,000+ Canadians (from a population of eight million) who went over to Europe to fight, one in nine died there. (65,000+)

               

      Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war had been discussing in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because young men would simply refuse to use them on other young men. Repeating rifles, torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers ...the horrors they’d cause. No. No one would be able to use them.

early French postcard depicting the year 2000

   

    Other writers a few years before had even been speaking of the coming “Golden Age”. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-saving machines, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

               

      The point is that the First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe that they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in general in the West had come to believe that the wise men of the West were in control now: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and therefore the sufferings of the past were going to gradually be reduced until they became only rare anomalies or dim memories recorded in books.

   There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had held onto the loyalties of people in the West because, firstly, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, secondly, the ways of the West, mostly, had seemed to work, and thirdly, there really hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider. 

    But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle that power began to seem more and more inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of the Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. 

   As Science, with its new media of communication, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mold people’s minds, Science was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons ...while the philosophers and social scientists dithered. The outcome had a feeling of inevitably to it. A global arms race had become normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.  

German soldier's belt buckle (standard issue) WWI 

    

    Descartes’ compromise way of Christian morals being used to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West performing previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing them mostly to each other. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. “Gott mit uns” was embossed on every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was being sung at every English-speaking Sunday service.   

    There was no doubt about it; the old beliefs and values just weren’t up to the hard tests that the new, scientific age was posing for them. The sages that many people had been looking to, namely the scientists, in all fields, asserted that, on the subject of morality, they had nothing to say. 

  In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. They went on spouting the platitudes that had got them and their nations into the horror to begin with. The moral systems appeared bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the ordinary to the poor. 

   If the morals of the West had led to this, then, people could not help but think, maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the set of moral beliefs that it recommended had also all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw”. Survival of the fittest. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

   Before the Scientific Revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of the citizens of the West, even if people couldn’t grasp why bad things sometimes happened in this world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering of others, people could still believe God had His reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

    But World War I was just too huge. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham.