As ‘Brexit’ Vote Looms, Lessons From Europe’s Battlefields
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — The commemoration of war is frequent enough in Europe, and it is tempting sometimes to ask whether time is turning history’s cataclysms into the commonplace. Yet the importance of some lessons cannot be ignored. In recent months, the centenaries of great battles of World War I have recalled the cruel paradox that human loss does not necessarily equate to strategic or tactical gain — a conclusion just as valid now as then. Those murderous frays at the Somme and Verdun in 1916 confirmed the arrival of a new kind of warfare. Battles fought over a day in the previous century gave way to lengthy campaigns that consumed unparalleled casualties. The Battle of the Somme lasted from July to November, Verdun from February to December. Between them they accounted for hundreds of thousands of dead, but the war had almost two years still to run. “The year 1916 both defined how we see World War I and redefined how warfare itself was understood,” Hew Strachan, a British historian, said in a recent study. “The Napoleonic ideal of a campaign ended with a decisive battle,” he said, while the Somme and Verdun “ended with a whimper, not a bang,” and “proved more indecisive than decisive.” Professor Strachan made the same point in London the other day at an exhibit — “Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace” — by a British photographer, Michael St Maur Sheil, showing the battlefields of northern France as they are today. Strikingly, aerial images revealed the scars of trench lines and craters still clearly visible despite an overlay of bucolic verdancy. Nature, it seemed, had sought to soothe the physical wounds, but, like the landscape sculpted by the erstwhile fortifications, their memory could never be so easily erased. I thought of those images when I arrived in Berlin last week as the same continent that witnessed two world wars over the past century prepared for a single day that might change the course of history — almost in the Napoleonic manner — and potentially unravel what many see as its greatest accomplishment. On June 23, Britain will vote in a referendum to determine whether it will leave the European Union, and the potential outcome seemed to preoccupy Germans almost as much as Britons. Two of Germany’s biggest and most influential weeklies, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, devoted their cover stories to the possibility that Britain might leave, commonly known as Brexit. Der Spiegel went so far as to translate pages of articles into English to underscore the plea on a cover emblazoned with Britain’s Union flag: “Please Don’t Go. Why Germany needs the British.” Coincidentally, last week was also the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, when the Allies began the campaign that ended the war in Europe. Soon afterward, Europeans began rebuilding, creating the forerunners of the European Union. The enemies of two world wars became allies, trading partners, neighbors — often uneasy or even fractious, it is true, but at peace. The British vote next week, Der Spiegel said, is “about nothing less than the peace project started in 1946 by erstwhile enemy nations on a devastated continent.” Without the British, “the union of European peoples becomes pointless and lost.” For some, there is a degree of incredulity that the debate has reached this point when Europe faces myriad challenges, including a huge influx of refugees and migrants that reinforces the anti-immigrant arguments of those who want Britain to leave. Of course, Europe’s peace has been far from comprehensive. Think only of the Balkan fighting of the 1990s and the struggle with Islamic militancy. For 15 years — longer than the two global conflagrations combined — Western soldiers have been at war. Yet they have been unable to forestall attacks whose targets now include Orlando, Fla. As in 1916, the campaigns linger, flare, but do not end simply. Britain’s decision next week — in or out — could raise just as many imponderables. |