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The First World War was a social and political cataclysm. Nine million soldiers died and millions more suffered mental and physical injuries. The war cost billions of dollars, not only in military expenses but also in damage to property. The war emboldened democrats and feminists as well as communists and fascists. During the war, four major empires collapsed. Afterwards, the peace settlements changed boundaries all around the world. All these things were highly significant for world history. But the thing that most fascinates readers about the First World War is that it seems, in hindsight, to have been avoidable. The war originated in a small conflict in Eastern Europe that snowballed into a much larger conflict. This happened because of disagreements between two groups of allied countries that were committed to rigid military plans. At the outset they took steps that were too aggressive, since none of the participants predicted the war’s awfulness.
The main lesson of the war—don’t rush into a war, it might be worse than you think—seemed especially pertinent during the Cold War. In those days, it seemed that the alliance systems led by the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war and that smaller conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East might escalate into a global holocaust. Many observers were surprised to see the Cold War standoff end rather suddenly in the late 1980s. Authors proclaimed an end to history. It appeared that liberalism and globalization had triumphed. The rigid communist bloc had disintegrated, but globalization made it possible for local conflicts to escalate into worldwide warfare. The Middle East remained a hot spot where interstate conflict was exacerbated by groups of stateless terrorists. On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaida employed the technologies of globalization to launch attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The United States replied by invading Afghanistan in an effort to destroy Al-Qaida and the Taliban. One year later, the United States and its allies began to debate whether or not it was necessary to attack Iraq and what the consequences of such an attack might be. As it turned out, the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have ushered in many unintended consequences. The First World War seems relevant again on the eve of its hundredth anniversary.
The First World War has inspired more authors to write books and articles than most other topics. Why is there a need for another one? There are excellent survey histories written recently by John Keegan, John Morrow, Michael Neiberg, David Stevenson, and Hew Strachan, as well as provocative works of reinterpretation by Niall Ferguson, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker. Two new television documentaries, featuring the historians Hew Strachan and Jay Winter, have added greatly to public understanding of the war. Yet the new histories of the war either downplay or ignore the history of the environment and technology, two of the most vibrant new fields in the historical profession. This is not to mention that environmental and technological concerns are at the forefront of public debate in the early twenty-first century.
It helps that environmental and technological history have come a long way in the past several decades. It used to be that accounts focused on the ways in which engineers, inventors, and governments created, distributed, and regulated new tools and systems, as well as humanity’s impact on the environment. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians began to focus more on cultural and social dimensions of environment and technology: how people imagine and represent the environment and technology, and how their understandings shape approaches to creating new tools and spaces. Recently, many studies have moved beyond the initiators of environmental and technological change to examine how ordinary users experience and shape environment and technology.
The people who participated in the First World War had an intense experience of environmental conditions and technological changes. The war’s planners calculated how many soldiers, horses, and cannons could be moved to the front lines and then pushed through enemy territory. In their plans they had to balance manpower, technology, and geography. The war itself was fought in a variety of environments. Today we tend to remember the trenches of the Western Front, but the war was fought in open spaces, too, as well as in forests, deserts, and mountains. The war also had an economic and ecological impact far beyond the battlefields. The soldiers who experienced the war reflected on the terrors of new weapons and on the degradation of life in filthy conditions. Artists, musicians, and writers described these conditions in order to make a variety of points against the war—and for it.
Most historians think that they should write about people first and material conditions, such as environment and technology, second. Traditionally history is about human choices and the consequences of those choices, with the material world consigned to the background. Traditionally historians have dismissed works that attribute influence to environmental and technological factors. Such ideas probably explain why historians of the First World War have shied away from environmental and technological history. This is unfortunate. It is no longer sufficient to write about the impact (or lack of impact) of technologies or environmental conditions on politics or society. Today, the best studies examine the ways in which technology, politics, and society are mutually constituted or “co-produced,” a term coined by Bruno Latour and fleshed out by Sheila Jasanoff in a recent book, States of Knowledge. Accounts of co-production recognize that nature, objects, states, and societies are not separate categories that impact each other. Instead, they are linked interdependently.
This book is a short narrative history of the First World War that takes into account human decisions and experiences as well as environmental and technological factors. My list of environmental factors extends beyond the impact of the war on landscapes, to consider food, geography, manpower, and the ways in which people imagined the landscape. My list of technological factors includes the development of new weapons, which are considered in every history of the First World War, while I will also consider older technologies that remained important, too.
I will not argue that environmental and technological factors simply influenced people. Instead, I will show that human decisions and material conditions were inextricably linked and that the boundaries between the two are very blurry indeed. This book will not make a case that the war introduced radical environmental and technological transformations. Most of the key technologies of the war were refinements of technologies that existed already. Much of the wartime environmental damage associated with the rapid expansion of agriculture, forestry, and industrialization continued previous patterns in a more intensive way. Battlefield landscapes and zones that were occupied and pillaged were severely damaged, but within a few decades people rehabilitated them to the point where they could be used again and even enjoyed.
The war changed the ways in which people thought about technology and the environment. Before the war, people who lived in Europe and its colonies generally regarded industrial technology as an instrument of progress, while during and after the war significant doubts crept in about the costs of progress. After the war, people did not abandon thoughts of technological progress but they did have a keener sense of modernity’s costs. New technologies pushed minds and bodies to the limits of their capacity, one of the most important intersections of human consciousness and material experiences during the First World War. In the run-up to the war, Europeans saw the landscape with a view to conquering it, dividing it, and ruling it. During and after the war, the costs of conquest became high. Soldiers experienced personal degradation, physical injuries, and mental collapse in the midst of technologically induced environmental conditions, which they remembered when they formed new identities in the postwar world.