Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

Churchill’s Ever-Readable The Unknown War / The Eastern Front
the endless plain. Ten million homes
awaited the return of the warriors. A
hundred cities prepared to acclaim their
triumphs. But all were defeated; all were
stricken; everything that they had given
was given in vain. Nothing was gained
by any. They floundered in the mud,
they perished in the snowdrifts, they
starved in the frost. Those that survived,
the veterans of countless battle-days,
returned, whether with the laurels of
victory or tidings of disaster, to homes
engulfed already in catastrophe.
We may make our pictures of this
front from Napoleon’s campaigns. Hard
and sombre war; war of winter; bleak
and barren regions; long marches
forward and back again under heavy
burdens; horses dying in
the traces; wounded
frozen in their own
blood; the dead
uncounted, unburied;
the living pressed again
into the mill. Eylau;
Aspern; Wagram;
Borodino; The
Beresina—all the sinister
impressions of these
names revive, divested of
their vivid flash of
pomp, and enlarged to a
hideous size. Here all Central Europe
tore itself to pieces and expired in agony,
to rise again, unrecognizable.
The states and peoples of central
and south-eastern Europe lay upon its
broad expanses in the confusion left
from ancient wars. The old battlefields
were cumbered with the bones of
bygone warriors, and the flags and trophies
of far-off victories, and over them
brooded the memories of many a cruel
oppression and many a perished cause.
In the main the empire of the
Hapsburgs and the states of the Balkan
Peninsula sate [sic] amid the ruins of
centuries of struggle with the invading,
proselytizing, devastating Turk. Here,
long after they had ebbed and ceased in
the west, the tides of war-like Islam had
finally been dammed. After long-drawn
struggles the Danube was liberated.
One by one, aided mainly by Russia,
these fierce races, hammered hard upon
the anvil of Turkish misrule, shook
themselves free; until finally the Turkish
power was broken for ever. Roumania,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and
Greece, relieved from the curse of
bondage of five hundred years, stood
erect, and gazed upon each other almost
immediately with eyes of keen malevolence
and rivalry.
First among the champions of
Christendom stood the empire of the
Czars. If Austrian and Hungarian
chivalry had stemmed the Turkish invasions,
it was Russia who for two
centuries had advanced upon Turkey,
inspired to the deliverance of kindred
races still in bondage, and impelled by
other motives towards
Constantinople and the
warm, open waters of the
Mediterranean. The feud
between Russia and
Turkey was as old and as
deadly as that between
France and Germany.
As the external enemy
faded and died, the army
of the Austro-Hungarian
empire began to fall to
pieces. Like the liberated
states of the Balkans, the
four constituent peoples of the
Danubian plains began to think again
for themselves about their past and
their future. Hungary had in revolt and
revolution almost torn herself away in
1848. Caught and crushed by Russian
armies pouring through the passes of
the Carpathians, she was led back
captive by the Czar and chained once
more to the throne of his brother
Emperor. It was upon an orgy of blood
and executions that the youthful Francis
Joseph entered upon his long and fatal
reign. Bohemia in the general resurgence
of nationalism which marked the
close of the nineteenth century fretted,
chafed and struggled in the Austrian
net.
The sentiment and tradition of all
the southern Slavs turned towards
Serbia as to a magnet, and through
Serbia far back across the ages to the
FINEST HOUR 148 / 43
once great Serb empire of Stephan
Dushan. To revivify those glories and
reunite the lands and peoples now sundered,
became the persisting ambition
of the Serbian people from the moment
they had shaken off the Turkish yoke.
This hardy warlike stock, “the Prussians
of the Balkans,” whose teeth were
whetted in centuries of unrecorded ferocious
struggles with the Sultan’s troops,
respected nothing that stood in their
way. Reckless of consequences to themselves
or others, fearing naught and
enduring all, they pursued their
immense design through the terrors and
miseries of Armageddon, and have, in
fact, achieved their purpose at its close.
All these disruptive forces were
actively and increasingly at work within
the Empire in the latter part of the last
century. There was not in the declining
Empire any force equal to that which
has imposed throughout all innumerable
national schools of the United
States one single language and one universal
secularism. Each race in the Dual
Monarchy indulged its separatist tendencies
to the full, and reviving ancient,
even long-forgotten tongues, used these
as weapons in ever-extending hostilities.
Parliaments can only flourish
when fundamentals are agreed or at
least accepted by the great majority of
all parties. In the Parliaments of the
Hapsburgs bands of excited deputies sat
and howled at each other by the hour
in rival languages, accompanying their
choruses with the ceaseless slamming of
desks which eventually by a sudden
crescendo swelled into a cannonade. All
gave rein to hatred; and all have paid
for its indulgence with blood and
tears.*
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*Readers may notice the first and
last words on this page. They were not,
however, the first iteration of what
became one of WSC’s most famous
phrases. In London to Ladysmith via
Pretoria in 1900, Churchill predicted
that Britain would eventually win the
Boer War. The result, he wrote, “is only
a question of time and money expressed
in blood and tears.” (166) ,