A somber image indeed, the bitter fruits of World War One.
As a result of the "one book leads to another" trail, I have just completed a very fine history of World War One. The book is titled "The First World War" by John Keegan. Aside from composing a sprawling and insightful history of this vast confrontation, the author traces the roots of many 20th Century problems back to WWI. It is also, as any book on WWI, emotionally draining to read.
Any reading of the history of World War One brings the reader face-to-face with two inescapable mountains of stupidity. The first mountain is the incredible lack of foresight and diplomatic wherewithal that allowed the war to begin in the first place. The second mountain of stupidity was a series of preexisting battle plans, set in stone, and almost blindly adhered to at the opening of hostilities. The harvest of these stupidities was a death toll that literally defies one's ability to comprehend it. Study of WW1 reveals many more examples of what Barbara Tuchman famously described as "Wooden-headedness," including outdated tactics and a lack of overall strategy.
Reading the myriad descriptions of the carnage, repeated over and over as the book relates the course of the war, I was struck by the sheer numbers of young men slaughtered. The kernel of a thought experiment began to emerge in my head, based on a simple question: How can a population sustain such an immense loss?
Setting aside "The Lost Generation" of dead Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans, I was struck by the number of Russian war dead. Through years of reading history, I am familiar, at a layman's level, with the catastrophic losses suffered by the Russian population during World War Two. How was there anyone left to fight World War Two, given the losses of World War One? When I started checking sources for total Russian deaths, the question became even more puzzling.
I chose to concentrate on the Russian populace because of the events that followed WWI. As devastating as the military and civilian deaths of the war, there were a series of population draining mega-deaths that followed. Below is a brief timeline with the death tolls within accepted scholarly limits. Many of the gross death tolls for certain events are widely disputed. For these, such as the cumulative deaths due to Stalin's purges, I have chosen the lowest mid-range numbers that scholars agree on. Note: It is interesting to keep that in mind that there are much higher estimates.
World War One
- Russian Military Deaths 1,700,000
- Russian Civilian Deaths (ascribed to the events below)
- Civilian Deaths compiled 5,000,000 (middle ground estimate)
- Civilian Deaths compiled 25,000,000 (low middle ground estimate)
- Russian Military Deaths 11,000,000
- Russian Civilian Deaths 7,000,000
Here is where all of this gets interesting for me. The population of the Russian Empire in 1911 is estimated at 167,000,000, based on census figures from the reign of Nicholas II. In 1951, the population of the Soviet Union was estimated at 182,500,000, based on Stalin-era census counts. Somehow, even with 50 million dead beyond the normal death rate for the populations, the overall population managed to increase. I find it amazing that the population could grow by even one poor soul, much less by more than 15 million. Taking into account the natural number of births needed to sustain a zero growth population against the natural number of deaths, there had to have been an extraordinary amount of births to make up the difference. Sixty-Five million new human beings did not simply spring from the ground. The end result becomes the thought experiment I mentioned.
The core lesson in this, for me, is just how resilient the human species is. Far too resilient for it's own good I would propose. One aspect of history is the recitation of countless wars, persecutions and mass exterminations committed by one group of human beings against another. Added to that are the various plagues, epidemics and pandemics that have done their best to cull the herd. Despite all of this calamity down through the ages, the herd not only refuses to be culled, but grows exponentially.
Remember, the listed deaths above are limited to the Russian population over a given period of 39 years. The factor of limitation is used to keep the human mortality on a level that could, possibly, be imagined. If you care to, you could add to the above all of the world-wide mortality from WWI and WWII as well as the death toll for the "Spanish Flu" (50 million +/- just for the pandemic) and all of the other various wars and genocides since then.
At the end of this little thought puzzle, I am left with two dove-tailed notions. The first is that no other force on the planet is more adept at killing off human beings than other human beings. The second notion is that nothing is more resilient than the human drive to survive, propagate, and dominate. My conclusion is the belief that the first notion, the second, or a combination of the two will be result in the extermination of the species. Either we will finally manage to kill each other off, which seems less and less likely given all the vigorous attempts we have made, or we will simply crowd ourselves off of the planet. I suppose it is sort of a "Fire or Ice" proposition, to paraphrase Robert Frost.
Not the cheeriest of blog posts, I admit, but I'll leave you with Frost's thoughts on the matter:
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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