As we commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War this summer, cast your mind back to Napoleon, the French emperor who engulfed Europe in 12 years of battles at the cost of about seven million lives. Instead of being regarded as a war criminal, as he might be today, he is admired by some as a superlative general and sometimes called "the last of the great enlightened despots".
Look further back, to the European invasions of the Eastern Mediterranean coast between the 11th and 13th centuries. Because it was fought mainly between Christians and Muslims, there might be the temptation for some to identify the opposing leaders in terms of “good” and “evil”. Yet, even at the time, Frankish knights returned with tales of the Sultan Saladin’s astonishing generosity and gallantry that have elevated him to the pinnacle of chivalry in the West’s popular imagination.
Despite Richard the Lionheart of England having perpetrated an infamous massacre at Acre, Saladin had so much regard for his adversary that he bade him farewell, according to his most recent biographer, Abdul Rahman Azzam, by saying that “if he had to lose Jerusalem he would rather lose it to Richard than to any other”.
Have we always been able to regard war, and its accompanying destruction, with such equanimity? Theories of “just war” have a long tradition, grounded in the West on the formulations of Augustine and Aquinas, and in Islam on the example set by the Prophet Mohammed as a military leader and many times in the Quran, such as in Surah 2, Verse 190: “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Truly! Allah loveth not aggressors.”
With the exception of those who either genuinely were, or whom partisan historians have made into, monsters – such as Attila the Hun, Tamerlane and Ivan the Terrible – some of us make no moral judgement on the instigators of war. Indeed, some see them as heroic. Observe how we still name two figures who built or expanded huge empires: Alexander of Macedon is “the Great” and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman is “the Magnificent”.
We seem to agree (if somewhat passively) with thinkers from Clausewitz to Machiavelli, all the way back to Sun Tzu, that demonstrable military prowess was a key attribute of a successful leader. Warfare was simply what states and statesmen did.
But all that ceases to apply when we come to the First World War. The “war to end wars” is universally regarded as a terrible, pointless waste of life.
So why do we suddenly begin to exercise our moral faculties on the act of warfare only since 1914? I put this to two eminent historians.
Aaron L Friedberg, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, pointed to “the sheer magnitude of the devastation it caused, especially the numbers of soldiers killed and injured” as being “surely the biggest single reason why it was seen in retrospect as an unmitigated catastrophe, even by many among the victors. The fact that much of this destruction seemed utterly senseless and produced very little by way of positive results made these losses even harder to bear”.
He adds: “The war also resulted in the destruction of the long-standing political order in Europe, including the overthrow of the tsar in Russia and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. While these developments certainly had their positive aspects, they contributed to the sense that the war had been a transformative event, unlike any in recent memory. To many people it established beyond question that war was no longer an acceptable (or rational) way for ‘civilised’ nations to resolve their disputes.”
With all that we may agree, as we may with John Bew, the Henry A Kissinger chair in foreign policy and international relations at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. He identifies three factors that contributed to a change in attitudes: misguided diplomacy “conducted by self-interested elites with no oversight from a moral public”; the perceived need for a new way to order international affairs, personified by the establishment of the League of Nations after the war; and the fact that “the total mobilisation of nations made for the purposes of the survival of supremacy … was a scary prospect”.
But I can’t help but feel that there is something else. I am of an age to have had great-grandparents who lived through the First World War. I met only one of them, but the distance is not so great for me not to feel a connection with those who knew of the great slaughter in the trenches. It is enough for it to feel personal.
“Warfare is ordained for you,” says the Quran, “though it is hateful unto you.” Long may the latter continue to be so. Perhaps, in a time of unmanned drones and “collateral damage”, the lesson of the First World War is that we must always attempt to keep it personal. War happens to you, me and our families. Even the remote figures from the history books were, however antique their costume and speech, people just like us.
Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based commentator and consultant
