Commentary: Remembering the lessons we must learn

One of the striking aspects of today’s commemorations of the outbreak of the First World War in western Europe is that more than usually this is a tale told backwards. Generally the outcome of a war, the marking of the end, is commemorated more.

Today’s mood is underlined by a sense of unease, not only that this was a war of unexpected savagery, triggered by so little and achieving for the most part so little at such cost, but that it all led to so many largely unsatisfactory outcomes — which still linger.

The troubles we now have in the Middle East, the Balkans and eastern Europe all have their roots in something that did, or did not, happen in the conflicts from 1914 to 1919, and beyond in the case of many combatants.

The acts of remembrance, a New Zealand padre once reminded me, are as much about those remembering as those remembered.

This is why, behind the nostalgia and regret, there is a nagging feeling that what went wrong in the madness of July 1914 leading to the war, might have something to say about the madness of July 2014, and growing worries about widening wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it instructs in parallels and echoes.

In July 1914, no one knew how to stop the mobilisation of armed forces and no one knew how to break the deadlock by authoritative negotiation.

Both the Ukraine and Gaza crises seem to be playing to their own mechanical logic. In either theatre, no one seems to know how to stop or change course. No one seems to have the clout to negotiate peace and make it stick.

Much of the unfinished business of 1914-18 is still with us, especially in the Middle East. The deal done in Paris in 1919, as Margaret MacMillan has brilliantly described in two great books, was a bodge by some tired and sick men, who weren’t up to the job of handling the new world of nations and peoples rather than empires, and self-determination rather than divine right.

They created the modern Middle East and Balkan mosaic of nations, and condemned both to a roiling and bloody adolescence.

After the war to end all wars, we were to have the peace to end all peace — so wrote the young Archibald Wavell, then serving in Allenby’s command in Cairo. In truth, we got neither. Peace is still a tricky business, despite the best efforts made in 1945 to create the UN system. War is still the instrument chosen for survival by desperate men — and it is usually men — in many desperate quarters of the world.