Chapter 18: The Great War, The Great Tragedy

Ali Hussein was the sherif of Mecca and the king of the Hejaz (reigned 1856-1931). He united the nomadic Bedouin tribes and, abetted by the British (T. E. Lawrence), he overthrew Ottoman rule.

Archduke Francis Ferdinand was the Austrian archduke whose assassination at the hands of extreme Serbian nationalists set off the tragedy World War I.

Otto von Bismarck: was the architect of the modern system of Alliances. His goal was to make it impossible for France to seek revenge for its defeat in the Franco Prussian War of 1870. In 1882, he engineered an alliance between Italy, Austria and Germany. This was the famous Triple Alliance.

Edward VII was the son of Queen Victoria and King of England from 1901 to 1910. He saw the danger of German militarism and so he engineered an agreement with France (the Entente Cordiale) in 1904 and Russia in 1907. These agreements grew into the Triple Entente, which became a military alliance in the summer of 1914.

Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff: were the German generals who in 1914 won a brilliant victory at Tannenberg and in one battle almost knocked Russia out of the war.

T.E. Lawrence of Arabia was a British adventurer, soldier, and author who worked for British intelligence and served as military advisor among the Arabs.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: was the revolutionary Marxist who organized the industrial proletariat of Russia into a highly disciplined revolutionary force and political power.

Alexander Kerensky: was the head of the Provisional Government in Russia between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. He foolishly refused to end the war and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution in October.

Nicholas II was the last tsar of the Russian empire (reigned 1868-1918). His administration of the war was disastrous. In February 1917, Russia was so decimated that he was forced to step down in the February Revolution.

Wilfred Owen was a British poet whose work reflected the horror and disillusionment of World War I. His poem Dulce et Deorum asserts that the Roman poet Horace's nationalistic line that "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country" is really the "Old Lie"

John J. Pershing was the American general who helped the French and British drive the Germans back towards the German border.

Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian member of the Black Hand whose assassination of Francis Ferdinand provided the spark for World War I.

General Count Alfred von Schlieffen was the chief of the German General Staff who developed the military strategy (named for him) that called for a swift knockout of France, followed by a defensive action against Russia.

Woodrow Wilson was the American president who was the author of the Fourteen Points, the chief proponent of national self-determination, a fair peace treaty for Germany, and the father of the League of Nations.

The Allies were also known as the Triple Entente, a coalition of western European nations dominated by France, England and Russia – and later the United States with twenty-five other nations.

The Armenian Genocide or Holocaust was a forced mass evacuation sparked by an Ottoman Government dominated by the Young Turks between 1915 and 1917, and caused the deaths of between one and two million Armenians

An armistice is an agreement to stop fighting; the armistice that ended World War I was signed  on November 11, 1918.                                                                                                    

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was when Britain agreed in principle to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. However, it delayed indefinitely on this question, in order to not antagonize the Arab population.

The Black Hand was a terrorist organization that was dedicated to the unification of all south Slavs, or Yugoslavs, to form a greater Serbia. The assassin of Archduke Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, was a member.

Battle of the Somme was a 1916 British offensive near the Somme River in which over 400,000 British soldiers became casualties. It pointed out the stupid, bull headed tactics of the generals on both sides. The Germans called it the Graveyard of the German Army.

Bolsheviks (meaning “majority” in Russian) was the radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party were the small minority party among the revolutionary working-class parties that eventually gained control of the Petrograd Soviets.

Conscription is another name for the draft.

The Central Powers were also known as the Triple Alliance, a coalition that included Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

Dirigibles were huge blimps used by the Germans to bomb Paris and London.

Dreadnoughts were named for H M S Dreadnought which was launched in 1906. This super battleship and its successors made all other battleships obsolete. It began a naval race which helped to fuel the outbreak of World War I  

The Fourteen Points called for an end to secret treaties, freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reduction, decolonization, the rearrangement of European borders according to the “self-determination” of national groups and the establishment of an international dispute-resolution body called the League of Nations. 

Gott Mitt Uns (God with us)/For God and the Tsar were nationalistic and enthusiastic cries uttered by wildly enthusiastic German and Russian volunteer troops in 1914 as they marched off to a war they thought would be over by Christmas. It was no different for British and French volunteers.

The Home Front was a World War I term that implied that the demands of total war had grown so great that the civilian population was now an active part of the conflict.

League of Nations was the brain child of Woodrow Wilson. The League was the first permanent international security organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.

The Lusitania was a British luxury liner sunk by German submarines on May 7, 1915. Even though it was carrying weapons forbidden by international law, its sinking was a catalyst for shifting U.S. public isolation policy in WWI.

The Mandate System was a post-war Allied notion of trusteeship, which appeared to many to be merely colonialism by another name.

The Marne was the September, 1914, battle that led to the failure of the von Schlieffen plan and insured a bloody stalemate on the western front.

Mustard Gas was a liquid agent that when exposed to air turns into a yellow gas that rotted the lungs both from outside and in. It was first used by the Germans in World War I.

The October Revolution drove the Provisional Government out of the Winter Palace and gave Lenin and his Bolsheviks the victory Marx and Engels had prophesied.

Pan-Slavism was a nineteenth century movement that stressed the ethnic and cultural kinship of the various Slav peoples of eastern and east central Europe seeking political unification.

Peace, Land and Bread was the Soviet (Bolshevik) propaganda slogan during the period of the Provisional Government. It was very effective because the Russian people were tired of the war and it helped bring about the October Revolution.

Propaganda is the dissemination of specific information that promoted a given doctrine or set of ideas. The British were perhaps the most sophisticated propagandists during World War I

Self-determination was the idea that peoples with the same ethnic origins, language, and political ideals have the right to form sovereign states.

Soviets referred to the political agency in Russia that represented the Petrograd workers and soldiers.

The Treaty of Versailles was the treaty Germany was forced to sign in 1919. Germany was forced to accept blame for the war, lost a significant amount of territory, had her territories in the Saar and Rhineland occupied, forced to disarm and pay the entire cost of the war.

The Twenty-one Secret Demands were a secret ultimatum given to China by Japan; by the terms of this ultimatum China would have been reduced to a Japanese protectorate giving the Japanese economic and political dominion in China. The Chinese wisely leaked the “secret demands” to the British authorities and Japan was forced to give up her designs on China.

The Weimar Republic the name of the republic in German between the flight of the Kaiser in 1918 and the accession of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

The Zimmerman Note. was a communiqué sent by Alfred Zimmerman, the German Foreign Secretary, on January 16, 1917 in which he proposed a German alliance with Mexico and if Germany should go to war with the U S, Mexico could attack and be rewarded by financial assistance and the restoration of her former territories of Texas New Mexico and Arizona

The 1871 + 1919 = Adolph Hitler formula teaches that France’s desire for revenge after her defeat in the Franco Prussian War led to the brutal Treaty of Versailles in 1919 which in turn Adolf Hitler used to gain power in the 1920s and 1930s.