Centuries seldom begin or end on time. The 19th century began at Waterloo and ended at Sarajevo in 1914; the 20th century - the short century - began with a couple of street-corner killings and ended in 1989, when a wall fell over. In those 75 years, the capacity to murder on scales unimagined since the Apocalypse of St. John became one defining feature of the century. The other was a revolutionising technology created not by a peaceful civilisation but by a great warrior culture which, post-Sarajevo, swept the world. We are the creatures of war; our world was first forged in the fires of Picardy and the sullen swamplands of Ypres.
That inferno, those mudplains, destroyed the great empires whose marches were defined at the Congress of Vienna a century before. In essence, in 1910, six capitals - Vienna, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, London, Istanbul - ruled the world. The Americas were aloof, unimportant, China a sea of banditry, Japan an eager child, watching, copying, and Africa was, well, Africa. The subsequent destruction of that pre-war global order unleashed two rival totalitarian systems on the world, communism and fascism, mirror images in their contempt for life and law, producing strangely identical perversions of an idealised and debased humankind.
Actually, the real decade to consider is not so much 1910-20 as 1909-19. On July 25th, 1909, Louis Bleriot flew non-stop across the English Channel, even as the British Admiralty was arguing how many dreadnoughts it should order; but what price battleships when planes could fly right over them? Ten years later, on June 15th, 1919, just as the final details of the peace settlement were being concluded in the Palace of Versailles two men crash-landed their plane on a bog at Clifden. Not even the Atlantic was now a barrier.
War was progress's propellant during this period. In the full five years after Bleriot's cross-channel flight, aviation stood virtually still. The Bleriot-type planes accompanying the British Expeditionary Force to France in August 1914 could reach 80 mph, weighed 720 lbs and sported a forlorn little device on which to mount a revolver. Four years later, a squadron of four-engined Handley Page V/1500 bombers would be able to bomb Berlin from its base in East Anglia. Each aircraft carried eight machine guns, had a bomb load of 7,500 lbs, an endurance of 17 hours, and a range of 1,300 miles. In four short years, the strategic bomber had been born. Everything had been turned on its head. In 1913, Proust published the first volume of A la Recherche du Temps perdu, an ultimate celebration of literary classicism even as that structured and ornate aesthetic came under virulent attack. Dadaism, which posited the artistic possibilities of the accidental, the random, and was a triumph of the culture of nihilism, erupted as war swept Europe: so too did its opposite form, Constructivism, which raised bare functional design, unmediated by any attempt to please the eye, to an art form. What could be more Dadaist than the debris and human detritus of a battlefield? What could be more Constructivist than an artillery piece, the author of such carnage?
With war the master of chancellery, factory and studio alike, with the physical world offering only murder and suffering, was it so surprising that art in despair should reach towards the unconscious for inspiration? Thus the Polish-Italian Guillemus de Kostrowitzki, created a new artistic concept which he called "surrealism" in his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Already a cubist painter, an inspiration to Picasso and Dufy, and a poet who experimented with style and structure, he was perhaps the truest European of his generation. So truly European that despite his profoundly artistic nature, and his age, he volunteered for a commission in the French army and was wounded in action in 1916, dying finally two days before war's end in 1918, aged 40. We know him as Apollinaire.
As he died, so were four of Europe's empires - the Hohenzollern, the Romanov, the Ottoman and the Hapsbsurg - similarly expiring, and all that was required was for the undertakers of Versailles to lay out their corpses. Outwardly the British and French empires had been enlarged by war; but both were crippled with debt and doubt. The psychological and political will required to fight a land war of national self-defence had been utterly exhausted at Verdun and Thiepval, as 1940 was to prove.
Meanwhile other forces, incubating through the previous half decade, were erupting even as new technologies were changing the strategic realities of the globe. When Alcock and Brown pitched down in Clifden in their Vickers Vimy, Tukharchevski's Red Army was advancing through the Urals, and in Germany, where a communist insurrection had just been bloodily represssed, a young Austrian corporal in the Bavarian Reserve Regiment was telling an enthralled audience at Munich University of the need for coherent policies of anti-semitism. The Gog and Magog of totalitarianism, the defining political invention of the century, were truly emerging from under their stone. The first World War, with its violation of all that was civilised, had nourished those dark creatures, feeding them blood and body parts until they were addicted to them. But those cannibals had been long in the making. Linguistic nationalism, the belief that the boundaries of a state should be defined not by dynasties or land-ownership or existing legal institutions or even ancient and agreeable habit but by something new entirely, the language or culture of the majority of the ruled, threatened every empire, not least for its incomprehensibility. As Ernest Gellner was to write: "The idiom of peasants as a touchstone of political legitimacy or the boundary of realms? The suggestion was laughable."
But alas it was not; and such idiomatic ambitions helped turn Europe into a charnel house, with the first step being the implementation of the Wilson Principles, those notions of self-determination which work well in Kansas, but are harder to apply in Tirana or Tyrone.
A dozen new states, two of them in little Ireland alone, were conjured into existence within a couple of years of the war's end. Even today, not one of those dozen polities, forged amid the tumult of Europe's many peoples, is free of some internal ethnic argument or disputed border.
The other subpetrine growth to be liberated by war was nationalism's supposed opposite; the internationalism of Marxist socialism, by 1917 tempered into a terrible steel through the messianic theorising of V.I. Lenin. With the assistance of a cadre of extraordinarily brilliant, ideologically-demented intellectuals, it beheaded infant-democracy in its little cot in post-imperial Russia, maintaining power by means of industrialised murder.
The first true words of genocide of the century were uttered by the Jewish Bolshevik Zinoviev in 1919: "We must win to our side ninety millions of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated." And this promise - in time honoured in full measure and more by the former novitiate-student Josef Stalin - was to feed the homicidal and anti-semitic fantasies of the greatest nation-staters of them all: the Nazis.
THE Asian-scale bloodletting on the Western Front had profoundly shocked the Chinese intelligentsia. That small group had been long beguiled by the seductive order of Europe, by its many and mutually beneficent civilisations. They were moreover intoxicated by the vast possibilities which lay before them with the overthrow of the Chinese imperial regime in 1911. To the educated Chinese, notwithstanding their indignation at the continuing Western intrusion in their country, it seemed their future must lie with European-style civilisation: democracy, education, order and the rule of an impartial law. But all this was made utterly meaningless in the hecatomb which consumed Europe, which turned out to be populated by mere savages after all. The French had sent a million men to their deaths in 1914 alone: what kind of civilisation was that? The disquiet within the small but cogent and highly respected Chinese intelligentsia towards the allegedly superior European civilisation was to be transformed into outright anger when the war ended.
For how could European democracy be anything but humbug and landgrab after the peace conference in 1919 awarded former German territories in China, not to the newly-formed Chinese republican government, but to the Japanese?
Versailles thereby provided one of the causes of the second World War in Asia, but more enduringly and more dangerously, gave a first fatal impetus to the greatest murderer of the century. For even as that betrayal of the pro-western Chinese was being prepared at Versailles, a student in his 20s, wrote in anger: "The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?"
The student was Mao Tse Tung. He was not yet under the influence of the butchers who were to create the Soviet Union and who were to be the great architects of genocidal social engineering this century; but he soon would be. Meanwhile, in Paris in 1920, Nguyen Sinh Cung, until recently a chef in a London restaurant and a native of the French colony of Vietnam, became a founder member of the French Communist Party. He was in time to create a moral universe every bit as bizarre, and proportionately almost as bloody, as Mao. By that time he was known as Ho Chi Minh. Both he and Mao had fallen under the malign magic of the spell of Sarajevo which changed the world; and millions were to die at their command.
The imperial arrogance of Versailles and its subordinate treaties was sublime in its disregard for honour or law or duty, and never more so than in the disposal of the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Unbeknownst to their Arab allies who had been incited to insurrection against their Ottoman overlords, the British and the French had in 1916 agreed to partition the most succulent Arab territories between themselves. Simultaneously the British, hoping to seduce the powerful Jewish lobby across the Atlantic to support a US war against Germany, declared that the Ottoman territory of Palestine at war's end would be the national home of the world's Jews. The cynicism was, and remains, astounding.
Just as the war fed imperial greed, it fed also the suspicion among the subject peoples that these strange white foreigners in reality had no divine right to rule at all. Across the various empires, discontent simmered. Nguyen Sinh Cung had in 1919 made a plea for parity of esteem with the French on behalf of the Indochinese people at Versailles. Within a few years, French troops were violently suppressing Vietnamese independence movements.
At Amritsar in India in April 1919, British-commanded troops massacred nearly 400 unarmed demonstrators. By the standards of what was happening in Russia, where hundreds of hostages were daily being butchered, it would have barely merited a mention; in India, although the House of Lords was later to pass its august approval on the slaughter, the greater bar of history, moved by the jurisprudential eloquence of Ghandi, was in time to rule that a Raj which must govern by such methods must not govern at all. But let us go back to the beginning, to 1909. Look: a gaunt undernourished Adolf Hitler, in threadbare rags and living in a men's hostel, is sometimes peddling painted postcards, sometimes wheedlingly offering to carry bags at the Westbahnhof railway station in Vienna. Lenin is in exile in Paris, living in poverty, his despair made unbearable by the theft of his bicycle. In Russia, Stalin, having escaped from jail, is on the run, and is discovering that the entire Bolshevik movement lies in ruins. Mao, a 16-year old student in Ch'ang-Sha and under the influence of the republican democrat Sun Yat Sen, is learning of the virtues of western democracy. Totalitarianism is entirely unknown across the broad sweep of the planet.
And in London, the literary sensation is The Wind in the Willows, a nursery tale for adults in which the animal kingdom conclusively triumphs over modern technology. The motor-car is routed and Mole and Ratty return to their animal paradise. As a parable for what was to come, it could not have been more wrong - which perhaps explains both its enduring popularity, and why nothing like it has been written since; or ever will be again.
