Wars of the Western Civilization

Looking down the well of time, the story of humankind undulates, twists and branches as the times change. Heraclitus used to say panta rhei, everything flows: you cannot step into the same river twice. Francois Villon laments Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan; where are the snows of yesteryear? The passage of time used to be measured by pendulum clocks and changes within society compared to its swings. Stretched along a time line, swings of a pendulum carve a periodic function, often used as a parable of historical changes with its peaks and valleys marked by wars. This chapter is about wars of Western civilization that took place since the beginning of the split between the Catholics and the Protestants (1400) and the time Spain discovered the New World (1492).

Philip and Elizabeth   Life of the Emperor of Spain Philip II’s coincided with the life of the Queen Elizabeth I,. During their times, the Spanish and British Empires were engaged in a continuous struggle for world dominance, fueled on the personal side by Elizabeth’s rejection of Philip’s offer to marry her. Privateers, such as the Sea Dogs of England and the Sea Beggars of the Netherlands, intercepted and pillaged countless Spanish vessels. This was the time of English captains such as Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, and John Hawkins. Spanish colonies and sea routes were under continuous attacks by the English and the Dutch privateers.

The Armada  Toward the end of his life, Philip came to the conclusion that only direct invasion of the British Islands would stop the English piracy on the sea routes binding the Empire and its overseas possessions and prevent the plunder of the port cities of the coasts of Central and South America. In 1588 Philip assembled a fleet of 130 ships, the Armada, commanded by the Duque de Medina. The Armada was supposed to transport an invasion force commanded by Alessandro Farnese, garrisoned in Netherlands. This plan, sending ships through Canal La Manche, loading invasion troops, and then attempting invasion of Britain, was strategically unsound beyond belief. When the Spanish Armada was spotted off Plymouth, the English fleet was sent to intercept it. In the ensuing battle, the Spanish lost only two ships. However, the Dutch blockaded the embarkation of Farnese's troops. Before Farnese could break the blockade, English fire ships drove the Armada back to the Channel waters. A prolonged battle ensued in which the Spanish ran out of ammunition. Realizing that his situation was hopeless, Medina ordered his remaining ships to sail north. He returned to Spain by navigating along the shores of Scotland and Ireland. The Spanish rebuilt their fleet, but their confidence that they could stop British and Dutch piracy or impose religious unity on Europe was shattered.

Catholics vs. Protestants Animosities on both sides were fueled by numerous differences between these two religions that pertain to core values and make coexistence of Catholics and Protestants so difficult. Perusing Prague’s archives, one cannot be oblivious to the hatred and anguish on both sides of this religious schism. The true dimension of this controversy can perhaps be best understood from personal documents of that time, such as diaries, letters, and annotations on the margins of the books. Leaders of both Catholics and Protestants were convinced of the sanctity of their cause and feared not only political, but also personal annihilation should the other side prevail. Throughout the duration of this conflict, Catholic Spain lost most of its gold treasure. The British and the Dutch money fueled the war on the Protestant side of this conflict, as the British and Dutch fought mostly by proxy. The war propaganda was spread by the churches where the priests and ministers preached about terrible atrocities committed by the other side, describing the war as a divine mission, a crusade ordained by the God. The census system was developed to make it difficult to escape the military service.

Athos, Porthos, Aramis, d’Artagnan  The reign of Louis XIII (1601-1643) is best remembered by those who read the Three Musketeers (1844), a historical novel by Alexander Dumas pere in which the dashing d'Artagnan joins Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, musketeers loyal to the King and Queen, and the four together fight the soldiers of Cardinal Richelieu. The background of this novel is based on actual events. Cardinal Richelieu disliked the Queen, Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, and accused her of secretly corresponding with her brother, Philip IV of Spain, when France was at war with Spain. The musketeers helped the Queen by carrying a necklace she gave to Duke of Buckingham, from England to France.

The Duke of Buckingham is best known for arranging marriage of the French princess Henrietta Maria (1609-1669) to King Charles I of England. This marriage to a Catholic Princess undermined Charles's position and contributed to his beheading by the Puritan faction of the Parliament. A Puritan fanatic assassinated Buckingham and Henrietta Maria fled England for France.

The Thirty Years’ War

The Thirty Years’ War started by defenestration that took place at Prague's Castle on May 23, 1618. On that day a group of Protestants militants threw out of the castle's window the Regents of Bohemia, appointed by Ferdinand II (1578-1637), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Bohemia. Subsequently, the Bohemian Protestants appointed a member of the Calvinist branch of the house of Wittelsbach, Frederick V, as a rival king of Bohemia. The Palatinate (Frederick's realm), was a major principality of the Holy Roman Empire, located in Rhineland, a center of German Protestants. Its capital was Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg was a center of Calvinist theology. Frederic was married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England and his uncle was Maurice of Nassau, the Calvinist ruler of the Netherlands. Emperor Ferdinand II crushed the rebellion of Bohemian Protestants with military help from the Spain and Frederic had to flee Bohemia. However, Frederick asked his relatives for help and the Thirty Years' War started to embroil the Europe. The first battle of the Thirty Years' War took place in 1620 on the White Mountain, few miles from Prague's Castle. Frederic lost not only his Bohemian kingdom, but also his title of Elector (the right to participate in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire). In the battles that followed in the course of next thirty years, fortune favored sometimes Protestants, sometimes Catholics. The battlefields of Europe still echo the names of Grafs von Tilly, von Mansfeld, von Wallenstein, the legendary generals of the Thirty Years' War. The war engulfed the European continent and spread to the Caribbean and to the South Atlantic.

Throughout the war years, the Catholic King of France, Louis XIII had observed the fighting and finally intervened on the Protestant side. In 1635 France, in alliance with Netherlands, Sweden, and German Protestant princes, declared war on Spain. That war was prompted by Cardinal Richelieu for reasons related to court intrigues. The war alienated the Catholic nobility from the king. King's brother Gaston d'Orleans supported several attempts to remove Cardinal from power, but the the crafty cleric evaded them all.

Jules and Anne  Cardinal Richelieu died in December 1642 and Louis survived him by only six months. Richelieu was succeeded by Cardinal Jules Mazarin, educated at the Jesuit College of Rome, who ruled France during the boyhood of Louis XIV as the first minister of the regent, Anne of Austria. There was a strong affection between Jules and Anne. It was rumored that they were secretly married. Jules, disregarding personal safety, rode between the French and Spanish armies as they were about to engage in battle at Casale to let know the commanding officers that he had managed to negotiate a truce. Public opinion forced Anne and her cardinal to continue Richelieu's anti-Spanish policy, but behind the scenes they worked to bring about the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Deadly face of ardent beliefs  The intensity of the Thirty Years’ War surpassed that of previous armed confrontations. In Bavaria, Bohemia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Palatinate, and Wurttemberg, civilian population losses are estimated to have been 50 percent or more. The chroniclers mention that in some of the pillaged and burned out villages too few people survived to bury the dead. During the Thirty Years' War the population of Bohemia decreased from 3,000,000 to 500,000. These population changes are representative of other areas of Central Europe afflicted by the Thirty Years’ War.

The Wars of Spanish Succession  The next series of wars were waged among European powers for hegemony that was in previously held by the Spanish Empire. The first wave of this conflict, the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714) proper was precipitated in 1700 by the death of King Charles II of Spain who died without heirs, naming the grandson of King Louis XIV of France, Philip, as his successor. As Charles II was the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Austrian Hapsburgs opposed this unification of Spain and France, as did the British. Thus Austria and England declared war on France and Spain. Austria and Britain prevailed with Austrian Habsburgs acquiring the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia. The British gained Gibraltar, Minorca, Hudson Bay, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and secured for themselves the sole right to the slave trade with Spain's American colonies.

England vs. France  The next waves of this series of wars were the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748)  followed by the Seven Years War (1756-63). These two wars were provoked by different causes, but had a common denominator - the worldwide struggle between England and France. Shortly after ascension of Maria Theresa to the throne of the Austrian Empire, Frederic II of Prussia invaded Silesia, a province of the Austrian Empire. After a protracted struggle with France and Spain supporting Frederic and Britain supporting Maria Theresa, Austria had to recognize Frederick's annexation of Silesia. Eight years later, Maria Theresa joined forces with Elizabeth (1709-1761), Empress of Russia. This time, the British and French switched sides with Britain supporting Frederic and France Maria Theresa and Elizabeth. During the Wars of the Austrian Succession the alliances shifted, however, one thing remained constant - the British opposing the French.

The British-French conflict took place on a scale incomparably larger than the European Theater of war. At stake in the European Theater was Silesia, a single province about the size of Rhode Island. The British-French theater of war encompassed India and North America. At stake were the dominance of overseas trade and worldwide colonial empire. In North America, the French and British clashed during the French and Indian Wars. In 1763 French had to cede their holdings in North America east of the Mississippi to the British and their holdings west of the Mississippi to the Spain.

On the Indian subcontinent, the French East India Company and the British East India Company, waged war during 1740's and 1750's in which the French were defeated and had to withdraw from India.

The animosity of Britain against Spain and France spans centuries. Spain sided with France during the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and the Wars of the American Revolution (1776-1783).

The road to Trafalgar  After the guillotining of Louis XVI of France in January 1793, and his wife Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian Empress Marie Therese in October of the same year, Great Britain and Austria (the First Coalition) initiated a series of invasions of France by land and by the sea..

The next major war effort to contain Revolutionary France was by the Second Coalition (1798 - 1800).of Great Britain, Austria, Russian Empire, and Ottoman Empire.

The Third Coalition against Napoleon emerged in 1805. It consisted of the Great Britain, Austria, and Russia allied against France and Spain.

Spain’s financial subsidy was a major factor in the initial success of French during the Napoleonic Wars. However, on October 21, 1805, the British under Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar again destroyed the Franco-Spanish armada. This precluded the invasion of England by Napoleon and, in a sense, won the Napoleonic Wars. The rest of the century belonged to the British, as did the centuries to follow.

Napoleonic Wars  There are countless descriptions of the Napoleonic wars with their final phases well described by Tolstoy in his War and Peace, perhaps to voluminous for the contemporary reader who can watch instead the 1956 film of the same name with Audrey Hepburn playing Natasha Rostova and Henry Fonda Pierre Bezukhov. After initial victories, the best known being the Battle of Austerlitz,

Napoleon launched his invasion of Russia in June 1812 with about 500,000 soldiers. Only about a half of his army were French, the remaining half made up of Poles, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, and Austrians, some of them as young as 15. During Napoleon's reign, about a million soldiers had died under his command. At the beginning of his Russian campaign, the life expectancy of his soldiers was about 200 days with, on the average, one soldier dying about every 30 seconds.

Napoleon knew little about that country in the far north, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean. To get the feeling what I am talking about, listen to the ominous sounds of the Russian song Snow is Whirling

Snow is whirling
Falling and falling
Ground wind swirling
Winter’s covering, covering all
All that was before you.

Napoleon probably did not know that Russians immerge their infants into the freezing water that they'll be able to survive the Russian winter, he did not know that rifle barrels have to be chromed to reliably operate at very low temperatures and he did not know that tin dissolves into a tin dust below 9 F with winter temperatures in European Russia reaching up to -67 F. Thus the weapons of his soldiers malfunctioned, the tin buttons and fasteners of their uniforms disintegrated, and the monotony of the Russian flat countryside is punctuated by knolls formed by frozen bodies of Napoleon's soldiers.

Hands of God   After the general staff's decision to mobilize, German Emperor William II said 'Gentlemen, you will regret this.'  Before issuing the general mobilization order, Russian Emperor Nicolas hesitated, saying: 'this would mean sending hundreds of thousands of Russian people to their death.' Nicholas was deeply religious and asked repeatedly God's for guidance on this matter. Before he ordered the general mobilization he wrote: 'I have a firm, an absolute conviction that the fate of Russia-that my own fate and that of my family-is in the hands of God.'  This was one of the key decisions that started the WW I.

World War I  In 1993, Terry Cunningham interviewed Arthur Savage, 92, about his memories of the World War I, excerpted as follows: 'My memories are of sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. They knew they were going to lose a leg. Memories of lice in your clothing driving you crazy. Filth and lack of privacy. And cold deep wet mud everywhere. And of course, corpses. I'd never seen a dead body before I went to war. But in the trenches the dead are lying all around you.'

The First World War was fought in trenches from where soldiers advanced against the machine gun fire. Among its battles the best known are the battles of Verdun and the Battle of Somme. The Battle of Verdun cost the lives of nearly a million of soldiers. No territory was taken by either side, only the 976,000 lives. During the first day of the Battle of Somme, the loss of life was about one soldier killed every two seconds. Between June and November of 1916, the British, French, and German armies lost over a million soldiers. The Allies captured territory 25 miles wide and 7 miles deep. For each step forward, about 100 persons died.

 Old soldiers never die (only the young ones)  Arthur Savage continues: 'of course, what really died in that war was youth, a generation of young men. All through the twenties and thirties there was a massive surplus of women because so many men had been killed. There were thousands of lonely women who never married and thousands of children grew up fatherless. Mind you, all the war leaders lived to a ripe old age.' 

Son of a distiller of whisky, Douglas Haig was the British commander-in-chief during WW I. Haig is best known for his attrition strategy of massive assaults. Haig reported to King George V.

On the American side, the commander-in chief was John 'Black Jack' Pershing (1860-1948). Pershing, a 'father of the unconditional surrender doctrine,' also convinced in 1918 President Wilson to send reinforcement troops to Europe, even though he knew very well that thousands of them will perish on the boards of transport ships from the Spanish flu. President Wilson signed the transport order while humming the ditty, popular at that time

Joffre, Petain and Foch are the best known Marshals of France. They reported to Poincare and Clemenceau.

Among the chiefs of the German general staff during WW I, the most prominent was Paul von Hindenburg, reporting to Emperor William II.

Hindenburg lived to be 87, Pershing 88, and Petain 95.

Divide et impera  The British Empire and her allies emerged victorious from the gigantic struggle of the WW I. European empires were dismembered, adding thousands of miles of new borders to the political map of Europe

Austrian and Russian Empires disappeared. The partitioning of Europe continued after WWII and accelerated after the Fall of the Soviet Union with the behind-the scene fractionalization of the Soviet Union and splintering of Balkans by the British and American Armies.

World War II  The World War II started when, following the invasion of Poland by Germany and Soviet Union, the Great Britain declared war on Germany and shortly afterwards allied itself with the Soviet Union and the United States. Subsequently, German Armies invaded the Soviet Union. There are many parallels between Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia. Like Napoleon, Hitler invaded Russia in June. Like Napoleon, Hitler underestimated Russia, her arms, her soldiers, her resolve.

  Hans P. Baur's book Hitler at my Side (1986) is worth reading as it provides numerous insights into that military adventure, costing millions of lives. While piloting Chancellor's Hitler's four engine Condor over Russia, General Baur asked Hitler how long he deliberated before attacking Russia. Hitler's reply was 'six weeks.' This may explain one of the most pathetic pictures I remember from watching German war newsreels, stored in archives of the Soviet Union. It is a picture of a German soldier, entering Russia pushing a bicycle.

The Great Britain and her allies won the war. However, they had to share the global power with the Soviet Union and the United States. As this dawned on the British, as soon as July 1945, the British electorate voted the wartime government of Winston Churchill out of office. The voters realized that Churchill during his life managed to destroy several Empires, among them their own. The United States and the USSR emerged as global powers which fought each other during the Cold War by proxy, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

The most war prone nation

The role of Britain in the wars of Western civilization can be visualized by inspection of the frequency analysis of the participation of European nations in armed conflicts. If there is a worthy heir of the cloak-and-dagger tradition of the Venetian Doges, it must be the British. Throughout the history, they sanctioned draconic penal code, considered the ‘license to kill’ a legitimate instrument of foreign policy, initiated the most wars, sanctioned piracy on the open seas, participated in the slave trade, and subjugated more people than any other nation. Even though themselves a hereditary monarchy, they champion democracy. Outwardly, they project an appearance of civility and politeness. Among the early observers of these British peculiarities was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Discussing the Platonic contrast of appearance and reality, he pointed out how politeness can conceal ruthlessness and calculating egoism.

British skill in using others to attain their war goals, honed over centuries, is reflected in the following statistics.

In the both theatres of the WWII, the British Empire lost 544,596 soldiers, about one for every 1,000 of its population. The United States lost 292,100 soldiers, about one in every 450 of its population. The Soviet Union lost about 5,000,000 soldiers, about one in 40 of its population. In the Pacific theatre of the WWII, China had lost 2.2 million soldiers, about one in every 200 of its population. Japan had lost 1,506,000 soldiers, about one in every 50 of its population.

Secular plane  Empirical evidence bases on the count of armed conflicts over the last half century, as shown above, helps to unravel the plethora of European wars and alliances. Principal combatants in these wars were Empires of Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Austria, with Britain forming temporary alliances with the invariable goal to extend her empire and the world-wide influence. History, viewed from the perspective of analysis of empirical data, appears rather different from the standard accounts, invariably biased toward the winning side.

Ecclesiastical plane  At the ecclesiastical plane, the British Empire was Protestant, while the Empires of France, Spain and Austria were predominantly Catholic, and in the case of Russia, Orthodox. Thus the above table can be rewritten in the terms of dominant religions as the table on the right.

As virtually all states of the world were involved in one or more of these conflicts and with alliances constantly shifting, one can always find exceptions to the above classifications, perhaps most obvious being France fighting on the side of Protestant Countries in the Thirty Years' War

However, in this context one may quote Benjamin Disraeli (1804 -1881):

'England has neither eternal friends nor eternal enemies. She has only eternal interests,'

 or perhaps Winston Churchill's

Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.