Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918

Conclusion

[ 267 ] Conclusion: Consequences of World War I And what is even more true is that the idea of the soldier remains as a fixture of all our thought, so that in some way each of us is both civilian and soldier. In the full understanding of ourselves, the story of the soldier is also our own. —Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War1 Countless times over the past few years as I have worked on this book, the following scenario has played out with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. They ask me about my current project, and when I reply that I am writing a civilian history of the First World War, the common response elicited is, “Oh, the home front.” For most people who consider the history of war at all, “civilians” equal “home front”—people removed from the battle front. This book has demonstrated that while home fronts do help create the lifelines that make modern war possible, they constitute only a part of the work of war performed by “civilians.” A civilian history of war must encompass all the ideological and practical work of war, which concerns not just the munitions worker behind the lines or the nurse on the hospital train, but the citizen-soldier or laundress at the front, the civilian behind wire, and the refugees clogging the roads to the trenches. The gendarme who delivered the call to conscripts by riding from village to village was no less central in the creation of armies in 1914 than the quartermaster who handed out shirts and trousers. The charitable organizations who posted care packages of food and clothing helped maintain armies in the field, prisoners in camps, and families in their homes. In World War I, citizens’ lives were militarized, their imagi- Conclusion: Consequences of World War I [ 268 ] nations and lives drawn into the war experience, whether they wore uniforms or not. Civilians were and are crucial to the waging of warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and without their willingness to serve as soldiers, producers, and reproducers for the nation, wars of the scope and length of World War I would not have been possible. Most fascinating, however, was the way in which civilians became central to the conflict as real targets and as justification for war, yet they also became marginal to the war experience. In this conflict, the lines between home and front were more blurred than they had ever been, particularly in occupied zones such as Poland or Belgium, yet state and societal propaganda sought to maintain a clear line between soldier and civilian, home front and battle front. The ultimate result was massive reliance on civilians for funding, labor, and other material support for the war effort, with an accompanying invisibility of those efforts. In postwar commemoration, often only the “victims” (the dead) figure in memorials and monuments to the war effort, and civilians often seem an afterthought in histories of the war. This process of making sense of the war and rebuilding the shattered landscapes and relationships the conflict had forged was neither easy nor quick. Käthe Kollwitz described the impact of the war in a letter to her soldier son, Hans: “Everywhere beneath the surface are tears and bleeding wounds. And yet the war goes on and cannot stop. It follows other laws.”2 While the First World War officially ended with an armistice in November 1918 amid claims to be the “war that would end war,” for Kollwitz and others like her, peace was illusory. The work of war continued far past 1918, but more significantly, the logic of war and its structuring of politics, society, and culture continued. The peace negotiations at Versailles and other treaty locations were contentious, more likely to perpetuate violence and punishment than to resolve fundamental issues raised by the war. As this “peace” was being negotiated, war raged around the world—civil wars, nationalist revolts, border conflicts. Soldiers, prisoners of war, and volunteer aid workers often waited months or years for their release from service or imprisonment, and some went straight from world war into civil war or revolutionary situations. In private homes, the war continued as families came to terms with bereavement and with the reintegration into civilian life of citizen-soldiers, some of whom were Conclusion: Consequences of World War I [ 269 ] deeply scarred both physically and mentally by war. Civilians...