On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania, a large passenger ship of the British Cunard line, sunk off the coast of Ireland.  She had been struck by a torpedo, without warning, from a German submarine, and went down in a matter of minutes.  Of the 1,959 people aboard her, 1,195 perished, including 128 Americans.  The furor over the attack and loss of life was instant and thunderous.

Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in March, and had warned neutrals and belligerents alike that any ship near Britain or Ireland was liable to be attacked.  In fact, Germany made two attempts to specifically warn passengers of the Lusitania, including purchasing advertisements in over 50 newspapers that ran next to the advertisements for the Lusitania.  Even though Britain denied it at first, Lusitania was carrying war materials in the form of over four million rifle cartridges, which would probably make her a legitimate target.

Their protestations justifying the actions of U-20 fell, for the most part, on deaf ears.  Allies like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were unhappy with the sinking, and even German newspapers spoke out against it.  The sinking of the Lusitania risked bringing the United States into the war, and in fact has been sited as one of the contributing factors to our eventual entry in 1917.

The question of what is and what is not a legitimate target bedevils militaries across the globe to this day.  Is the image on your screen a command bunker or an air raid shelter?  Do the presence of known terrorists justify the bombing of a civilian facility?

Now, imagine making those kinds of decisions, in the middle of the ocean, when all you can see of your target is a grainy, blurry outline on the horizon.  If you can find a way to justify the loss of civilian life in furtherance of a military goal in recent wars, can you condemn the same decision made by a young officer, under trying circumstances, without the aid of modern intelligence?

When there is no good way through, when going straight forward gets you nowhere, you try to find a way around.  That’s exactly what the Allied powers tried to do in 1915.  In an effort to find a way around the stalemate of the Western Front, the Allied governments tried to force the Bosphorus Straits with a naval fleet in February 1915, but that effort was fruitless.  A plan for a land invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula was hatched.

Hopes to surprise and overwhelm the Ottoman Turks were dashed after initial, but bloody, success on the beaches.  Troops from across the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Great Britain, and France, were able to get onto the beaches, but their efforts to punch further inland were stymied by a well-led, motivated Ottoman defense.  Their effort quickly bogged down into the exact type of warfare that the planners wished to escape.

When the last Allied soldier left the beaches in January, 1916, each side had lost almost a quarter of a million men dead, wounded, or captured/missing.  The straits were still closed to Allied shipping, Turkey was still in the war, and the grinding down of human capital in the trenches, mountains, and swamps of the war continued for almost three more years.

While it is humbling to think of the men on those beaches, both invading and defending, it is even more so to think of their continued ability to fight on, to keep going, that strikes me the most.  It is men like these that I point at and say to my sons, “Be that.  Just be like that.”

The Ottoman Empire, like the Austro-Hungarian, was an admixture of many peoples and religions.  Turks, Assyrians, Kurds, and Armenians, Muslims, Christians, and Zoroastrians, all of them made up a fractious empire.  On April 24, 1915, the tensions between the Muslim Turkish majority and the ethnic and religious minorities in the Empire broke, leading to the deaths of up to 1.5 million people.

Modern day Turkey, one of the successor states to the Ottoman Empire, vociferously objects to applying the term “genocide” to this horror.  To this day, Turkey and our own government refuse to acknowledge the systematic murder of men, women, children, and old people during World War I.

What brings one people to wish for the extermination of another?  Our history is replete with stories of mass murder and the destruction of entire peoples.  What is it in our souls that allow us to make fellow human beings “the other”, less than human, and deserving of all the suffering we can dish out, and to deserve to starve, to work to death, to take the bullet in the back of the neck, to be locked, naked and afraid, in the gas chamber.

Conversely, what is it about our governments that they will not admit the faults of our past?  It is only in the past fifty years that the worst abuses of the Indian Wars were acknowledged.  Germany has come to terms with its guilt in the Holocaust of World War II, but Japan still drags its feet.  The Turkish government, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, from victims and witnesses, as well as historical documents and forensic studies, continues to deny that what happened to the Armenians and other minorities was a genocide.

I’d like to say that we as a race learned from this, but I can’t.  Places like Lviv, Treblinka, Nanking, Warsaw, Berlin, Choeung Ek, Sabra and Shatila, Halabja, Dos Erres, Srebrenica, and Sinjar are testaments to our continued ability to treat human beings as disposable, as a corruption that needs to be burnt out of the world.  It’s an ability and an inclination that I’m afraid we will never lose.

100 years ago today, the German Empire unleashed a new type of weapon.  German soldiers released chlorine gas from thousands of canisters in front of German trenches near Ypres, and the resulting cloud of poison floated across to trenches held by French Colonial troops.  The injuries to the Morrocan’s lungs and eyes caused them to panic, killing or blinding thousands in minutes.  The resulting 4 mile tear in the front line could have been disastrous to the Allies, but the Germans failed to take advantage of it.

A new era in warfare had begun.

Gas, in many forms, soon became a common affliction to the men fighting on all fronts in the war.  Gas shells were added to the mixture in bombardments, and new forms, including phosgene and mustard gas, were developed and fielded.  They were one more tool in the kit of military planners who were desperately trying to find a way to punch through the lines and end the slaughter.  In their efforts, they unleashed a demon that haunts us to this day.

How horrible is living through a chemical attack?  If you’ve never been in a chemical suit, try imagining putting on something thick and bulky, then putting a heavy cloth hood with foggy eyepieces over your head.  To get the idea of breathing through the filters necessary to keep the vapors and droplets out of the lungs, lay both your hands over your nose and mouth, then try walking and running while breathing through the tiny gaps between your fingers.

Now, stay that way for hours, maybe days.  Go through your day, doing all the tasks of life while in this garb.  Every so often, have someone make you run for your life.  While all of this is going on, watch people around you drop, gasping and screaming.

And remember, failure to do this will probably result in either a fast, horrifically painful death or a long, lingering, painful death.  If you’re lucky, all you’ll get is blindness, permanently injured lungs, and scars over a massive portion of your body.

All of these agents are the boogiemen that have haunted the dreams of military planners for generations.  To see how horrific these weapons were, please note that during World War II, the European powers and the United States were willing to bomb and strafe civilians, were willing to develop and use atomic weapons, but none used chemical weapons.

Update – A few people have pointed out that the Japanese were quite liberal in their use of gas against the Chinese, and of course the Germans used gas to murder helpless victims at their death camps.  I think what I was trying to say was that the European powers, who had all had gas used against them in the First World War, were careful to not use it against anyone who might reciprocate.

I’ve struggled with how to approach the battles of the First World War.  They seem to take on a ghastly, but wholly predictable pattern:

1. A general and his staff point to a line on the map.
2. Massive supplies of arms and men concentrate on both sides of the front line.  Both sides can see what the other is doing, making the element of surprise almost worthless.
3. Artillery preparation, sometimes lasting days, sometimes lasting weeks, is made in an attempt to soften the enemy lines.
4. Waves of infantry attempt to get across to the other side’s trenches.  Enemy artillery, machine guns, and infantry emerge from dugouts to slow down or stop the attackers.
5. The enemy counter-attacks and attempts to retake any trenches that have fallen to the attack.

Progress was measured in hundreds of yards and thousands of lives.   From the safe distance of a century, the various battles on both fronts begin to blur into a melange of mud, blood, and suffering.  There was always an almost static level of dead and wounded from such things as artillery and sniping, but that steady flow would become a torrent when the whistles would sing and men would go over the top to run into the teeth of a sophisticated, well-prepared defensive line.

I will be talking about major battles and events in the war, but to discuss each and every one of them would numb me to the importance of what happened on those fields of France and Poland.  I’m going to discuss the battles that were turning points, either in results or method, and major events.  But, please, keep in mind that the fighting never stopped, and the armies never stopped grinding against each other.

How many mistakes can you make, when seen in hindsight, before the world falls in on you?  German leadership at the beginning of World War I didn’t think that the British would come into the war.  They thought that France would crumble as quickly in 1914 as they did in 1871.  They didn’t think that the Russians would be able to bring their armies into the field in time to stop the German juggernaut.

Finally, and fatally, they didn’t think that any of the neutral countries would respond when German U-Boats began sinking their ships.   The sinking of American shipping in 1915, 1916, and 1917 was probably the one big casus belli for the United States, a nation that had only recently gotten involved in any overseas conflicts, into the war.

On February 4, 1915, the German government declared a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against shipping that appeared to be headed for Allied ports.   The Germans discarded the gentlemanly practice of forcing a merchantman to stop, allowing the crew and passengers to escape on lifeboats, then sinking or capturing the ship, assuming that it did indeed carry war goods for the opposition.  Rather, German captains began to torpedo merchant vessels without warning or inspection.

Was this practice more horrendous than the slowly-tightening noose of blockade that was around the neck of the German populace?  That’s debatable, but the British blockade did at least have the effect for which it was designed.  German torpedoing of commerce between North America and Europe brought hardship and hunger to the British Isles, but I’ve seen nothing that it ever approached bringing Britain to her knees, and it certainly didn’t shorten the war.  It did, however, enrage neutrals like the United States, and eventually brought the reinforcements the Allies desperately needed into the war.

On January 19, 1915, a German Zeppelin raid against two cities in Great Britain brought a taste of what was to come, both in the First World War and the Second.  While casualties and damage were limited, but the impact on morale was pronounced.  Rumors of spies and secret bases swirled, and with no effective air raid shelters, everyone must have gone to bed wondering if tonight was the night.

Germany followed up the January attacks with multiple raids on London and other military and industrial cities in Great Britain and France throughout the war, using both Zeppelins and airplanes.  While they did damage, the effectiveness of these attacks was arguable, at best.

Strategic bombing in the age before guided bombs or even effective bomb sights was wildly inaccurate, so stating a militarily necessary target was more of a formality.  It must have been a given that in order to attack a given target, some amount of civilian deaths would have to be planned.  Even in this age of laser and GPS-guided bombs and missiles, non-combatants get hurt or killed.  The difference is, to me, that modern planners do what they can to reduce the risks to those who should not be harmed.

On November 11, 1914, Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottoman Empire declared jihad against the Entente Powers.  A few days earlier, the Ottomans and the Entente had declared war on one another.  That same day, British forces began fighting to take Basra in what is today Iraq, eventually claiming victory on November 21.  The struggle for who would rule the Middle East had begun.

The fight for German possessions in East Africa was on-going.  The Germans soundly defeated British and Indian forces at Tanga during fighting between November 3rd and 5th.  Von Lettow-Vorbeck would harass and outwit the British with a force of local African and colonial volunteers until the end of the war.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians and Germans fought each other to a standstill in the Battle of Lodz, in which the Russians lost 110,000 men keeping the Germans out of Warsaw and the Germans lost 160,000 men heading off a Russian push into Silesia.  While the Eastern Front would move more than the Western Front, a see-saw stalemate pattern where initial expensive gains were lost in even more expensive retreats had developed.

In Serbia, which is where all of this started in the first place, final preparations were underway for the third Austro-Hungarian invasion since the war began in August.  Starting off on November 16, the Austrians pushed deep into Serbia, taking Belgrade on November 29 and 30.  However, a counterattack by the Serbs pushed the Austrians completely out of Serbia, which put everyone back pretty much where they started by December 16.  It is interesting that by this point in my reading, the 40,000 casualties in this offensive seem light in comparison to just about anything seen on the Russian or French fronts.

I guess my point in discussing these battles is to point out that even though the fighting in France has died down into stalemate, there is still fighting, sometimes on a colossal scale, all across the globe.  While the fighting in Africa or the Middle East almost seems a sideshow to the bloodletting in France and Poland, we are still dealing with their effects today.   These theaters will seem familiar to anyone who has watched the news or served overseas in the past 40 years.

I wonder which of today’s ‘sideshows’ will be a main theater of fighting for my great-grandchildren?