Gone home, we hope
WHERE HAVE ALL THE SOLDIERS GONE?
The Transformation of Modern Europe
By James J. Sheehan
304 pp. Houghton Mifflin $26
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
“No More War!” The peace battalions gather, wave their signs, march, go home. Two weeks later, the war starts—and the pressure’s on. Only patriots live here.
In this slim book, James J. Sheehan argues that in Europe times have changed. I’m not so sure.
He starts with the Napoleonic era and continues to the present day, deftly explaining how technology and economics, along with the battles that have been fought, gradually wiped out militant jingoism in Europe. Sovereign nations, he says, are now creating a strong sense of community where hatred was once the norm.
War built the modern nation. From the days of feudalism up to the Prussian conquests of the 1860s, Europeans fought each other for power or wealth. Those wars became progressively more destructive as armies grew larger and weapons more deadly. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, relatively small forces faced each other, but then Prussia set a new pattern by using a mass army to unite the German states and easily defeat the French in 1871.
Helmuth von Moltke, then chief of the Prussian general staff, was, Sheehan says, one of the first to understand that the new railroads made it possible to pull together a huge army to deliver overwhelming attacks. Other nations followed his lead. Sheehan tells how conscription, the only way to produce the vast numbers of soldiers needed, played an important part in the gradual spread of democracy; rulers had to have the support of their people in order to draft men of every age and class.
Sheehan concentrates on the power of technological advances in his discussions of actual warfare, but he also makes telling points by showing how the industrial revolution of the 19th century changed life completely for Europeans of every class.
“Street lights, sidewalks, and more effective policing made European cities safer than they had ever been, thereby creating the setting for a new sort of urban sociability. The picnics, family outings, and promenades that are so gloriously depicted in French impressionist paintings would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier, when Paris was still a dirty and dangerous place.”
When I read that I thought immediately of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, which clearly displays the impact of that technological and economic progress—characters in the painting wear multi-colored clothes, unheard of before German chemists learned to make dye from coal tar in the early 19th century, and their relaxed attitudes demonstrate the peace Sheehan speaks of.
The new technologies drove economic growth. Sheehan quotes Richard Cobden in 1842: “Free trade, by perfecting intercourse, and securing the dependence of countries one upon the other, must inevitably snatch the power from governments to plunge their people into wars.” He was a little premature, as was the Tsar of Russia in 1898, when he called a conference to preserve the general peace and reduce the “excessive armaments” that burdened every nation.
Economists, philosophers, and politicians all over Europe made such statements because they faced an increase in the power of ordinary people. Mass armies built by conscription, their soldiers equipped with new, expensive weapons, required public approval; the same economic and technological forces that made war ever more destructive forced rulers to allow the rapid growth of democratic societies. The huge sales of Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1910) exemplified the growth of a clamor for peace everywhere. Like many others, Angell insisted that war does not pay.
Yet other thinkers feared the loss of patriotic sentiments they believed only military service could foster. Sheehan quotes William James, the great pragmatist, who in 1906 called war the “gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness.” Surely he was right at the time he wrote.
Then came the Great War, and then the even greater. Those vast engines of destruction produced the final change in attitudes—war monuments grew less popular, armies dwindled away. Sheehan traces the growth of public fear and hatred of war through the dismal 1930s and the aftermath of World II, and describes the almost universal reluctance to face the utter disaster sure to result from another European conflict. He follows the development of the European Community and the varied, but all unenthusiastic, responses to the US invasion of Iraq.
I wish he could have persuaded me that all-encompassing wars like those of the 20th century are at an end, but even he seems to falter in the last few pages of his book. The Balkans still seethe. Russia once more seems to be growing dangerous. Sheehan barely mentions China and India, but why is it that in the morning paper I saw a small article reporting the growth of China’s submarine fleet? Crippling economic depressions are not impossible, nor are inflationary catastrophes like the one Germany suffered in the 1920s. Are there no little Hitlers waiting to grow up?
Sheehan discusses the 1930s, when the people of France feared and hated war as much as all of Western Europe does now. Yet when the Germans invaded, Frenchmen met them in battle just as Vercingetorix and the Gauls had faced the Romans, and lost more than a hundred thousand men defending their homeland. The instinct for national self-preservation once again came to the fore. What will happen if all Europe is threatened by forces from far away countries of which they know nothing? Or those peaceful societies are riven by economic disasters?
This is a well-documented book, and Sheehan’s outlook is unique; his explanation of the development of a new Europe is beautifully done. Perhaps he, and I, will be pleasantly surprised to find that in the end we will see a world held together by a web of economic interests, and finally, after all these centuries, we will all join in cheering the signs that say “No more War!”
Carter Jefferson is editor of The Internet Review of Books.
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