An Cosantóir

www.military.ie THE DEFENCE FORCES MAGAZINE | 27 BY SGT TERRY MCLAUGHLIN RETD A t 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 silence fell on the Western Front for the first time since the Great War began in August 1914. Just before hostilities broke out, British Foreign Secretary Viscount Edward Grey is said to have uttered a phrase that came to encapsulate the magnitude of what was about to befall Europe and the world. In contrast to many who expected a short, sharp campaign, and for the troops to be 'home before Christmas', Grey, stand- ing with a colleague in Westminster looking out of a window watching a lamplighter going about his work, said: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Grey's vision was the more prophetic. By the end of the war the old world had been shattered. The Austro-Hungarian and Ot- toman empires had collapsed; the Czar and the Kaiser were gone, while the British Empire began a slow but inexorable decline. Millions of young men lay dead on battlefields, mainly across Europe; thousands of them who had come to help Britain in her hour of need from the four corners of her empire and domin- ions: from Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, to mention but a few. Russia descended into chaos after calamitous defeats on the Eastern Front, leading to Lenin's Bolsheviks taking power and withdrawing Russia from the war. American 'doughboys' joined the fight in 1917 after their country abandoned its isolationist policy; an event that gave impetus to the final thrust for victory by the broken, dispirited and exhausted Allies. Military casualties are estimated at anywhere between 15 and 19 million, with between 9 and 11 million dead. (Poor Russian records make the figure hard to calculate accurately.) Around 1 million troops from Britain and its empire died, while France suffered 1,357,800 deaths from a total deployment of 8,410,000. Germany lost roughly the same amount of men as France, but from a larger deployment of 11 million. These almost incomprehen- sible figures fail to take into account the millions of lives ruined by catastrophic injury such as the loss of a limb, blindness, or shell shock. Civilian casualties are estimated at around 8 million, most from famine and famine-related disease. The number of Irish soldiers killed fighting with the British Army is recorded as 49,000, from an estimated 210,000 who enlisted (this despite conscription never being introduced in Ireland). The lights had indeed gone out forever on the world Viscount Grey knew. Women had won the vote and were working in factories and on the land, doing jobs that had always been the preserve of men. The old semi-feudal, class system had begun to unravel as previous certainties were replaced by increasing democratisa- tion and changing world views. Many communities across the UK had been devastated, par- ticularly by the deployment of Pals Regiments, which tragically often saw a whole generation of young men from a single town or village being wiped out in one fell swoop. On top of the carnage of war a deadly worldwide flu pandem- ic emerged in late 1918 that dwarfed the war's death toll, with estimates as high as 100 million deaths; nearly 250,000 in the UK. Devastatingly, given the death of so many young men in the war, the flu mainly killed those in the 20-40 age group. Even though the end of the war brought additional territo- ries into the British Empire, it was actually the beginning of the end, as the US began to usurp Britain's economic and industrial dominance, and in Ireland a full blown war of independence had begun, which would see it emerge as the first country since the United States to break from the empire by force. However, unbelievably, worse was yet to come. Rather than being 'the war to end all wars', it turned out to be only round one, with two huge heavyweights staggering back exhausted to their corners, only to re-emerge 21 years later, stronger than ever, for an even deadlier second round. British Foreign Secretary Viscount Edward Grey The Signing of the Armistice in November 1918, print by Maurice Pillard Verneuil. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art CWM 19830483-001

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