A Discussion on the Consequences of the World War 1 in Europe

The aim of this of essay is to discuss the consequences of World War 1 in Europe, and using different types of evidence to prove whether the war was an entirely bad thing or not. The war left its marks on the people of Europe as well as on the land. The trenches in France and Belgium are an ugly sight, not to mention the devastation of the fighting areas all around. The worst thing, though, isn’t anywhere to be seen.

The traumas of those who survived, the grief of those who lost their loved ones and the frustration of those who were left permanently paralysed or disabled after being injured at battle and seeing things worth of having nightmares. The only good thing about the grieving, injuries and mental illnesses was that now people could respond with relative gravity, while before the war people had been excited and thrilled of going to war.

The WW1 was the debut of gas warfare.

Also machine guns and artillery were established, causing almost 10 million deaths. It might have been possible to avoid a number this high if people had gotten used to the device and would have known what was coming, but the worst problem was that the new, 20th century technology and equipment were handled and faced with 19th century mentality and tactics. After the war, technology developed more, leading to even deadlier weapons for WW2. The good thing about this was that whereas war technology improved, the people invented and improved a whole lot of other things as well, such as surgery.

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The doctors were forced to invent new and faster ways of operating and more survived which led to a higher living standard.

One of the great negative sides of war is that it costs a lot of money. War debts in addition to inflation, the situation is not good. After WW1 though, people didn’t just stay standing and crying about money; They put grief of a disabled or dead family member aside and went to work.

Although many women lost their war-time jobs when the men came back, they had earned their trust in industry as well as in surgery. This trust was for good. Another improvement due to the disabled was that the government started paying financial help for those who were incapable of working because of a war injury. In other words, the state involved itself in people’s welfare, which resulted that the standard of living rose once again.

The money wasn’t enough for some people, and others became greedy. Illegal actions increased and crime blossomed. Another sad statistic was divorce rates – divorces doubled. There was something positive about this: Single and divorced women got more respect. On the whole, women came to be more respected in every sense and were even given a right to vote in some countries, such as Finland.

The war that was caused by nationalism aroused the thought of international affairs. People were more interested in securing their rear by signing a contract that obliged to make only public deals, contracts and negotiations with other countries to avoid the kind of situation that had been the cause of the war. The League of Nations had been born. This didn’t work very well, as we can see, and ended with the breakout of World War 2. The First World War also directly contributed to the collapse of the Tsarist Russia and the establishment of the Soviet Union.

And what happened to the left-over ammunition? In Belgium and France, where the trenches were used, still remains a lot of ammunition in the form of unexploded mines and shells, which remain dangerous and cause injuries to for example farmers ploughing their fields. Some even contain chemical toxic products like mustard gas. There is no end to be seen to the task of cleaning up battlefields, and hundreds of tonnes of unexploded ammunition is destroyed every year in France and Belgium.

So how could you say whether it was an entirely rotten thing or not? Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and although the Great War was a horrible thing, it did have many good points to it. Would it have been better not to have fought it? Of course not, answer the ones who fought or had their family members killed. But the people need to learn some time, and war was inevitable. Maybe it was better done in the 1920’s than in the 1930’s when people would have been able to blow each other up with nuclear missiles. The war has been described using the word meat grinder, and that it really was with genocide as a new act of war. The war costs for only Germany were over 37 billion dollars and the amount of permanently disabled and dead rose to 20 million. I go along with historian Jay Winter, who thinks we learned a great deal about the Great War, and that the world would not be the same without it. We now know that nobody can predict what will happen once war between industrialized countries breaks out. We also learned that the technology of warfare expands much more rapidly than the capacity of political leaders to control it. Because of the war I think we learned to understand ourselves and people of other nationalities better, not least because of immigration during the war. Maybe the war wasn’t worth the 9 million people lost, but I sure think they didn’t fight for nothing.