Short Essay on my Hero

Essay

"This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years."  These were the words spoken by Ferdinand Foch, Marshall of the French Army and one of the most important figures of the first world war.   Foch uttered this quote, which would later prove to be wholly accurate, as a response to the Treaty of Versailles.  The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June the 28th, 1919.  With the hopes that in it's institution, the Treaty would create a balanced peace wherein a solution to the problem of war could be irrevocably posed.   At the time of the signature, just less than a year since the capitulation of the Central Powers.  Many of the nations whose signatures sealed the document were still fighting regional wars, owing to uncertainty at all levels of state and society.  Beyond the halls of Versailles, the Russian Civil War was still active in it's brutality.  The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lead to a power vacuum, the proportions of which being near immeasurable, and to many proxy wars in the Balkans.  Though these facts are not the only inspiration for Foch's statement regarding Versailles.

The Great War and it's many battles had taught the world a harsh lesson in the nature of Geopolitics in the 20th century.   Not only did soldiers perish in the trenches, so too did many ideas previously thought to be concrete in foundation and unshakable in implementation.  By 1919, long gone was the idea of Despotic Governments and the Hierarchical Institutions that it fostered.  The concept of War had changed drastically, too.  War and the strategy surrounding it still revolved around numbers, but rather than the number of men one fielded ensuring a victory, War became a logistics game.   A game not of quick decisive blows, but of long, attrited combat.   So too were the foundations of peacetime shifted.  The rapid industrialization of nations and peoples during the war, and the introduction of mass-production deeply changed the way local, national and global economies functioned.   All of this giving way to the evolution of a slew of new mindsets and behaviors, one of said mindsets being carried mostly by veterans, generals and servicemen.  That being one of a sort of renewed Existentialism.   An understanding of the world around oneself on a greater scale than just ones family, farm and hometown.  Now, the importance of the affairs of nations had been proven to all who witnessed the destruction of the War, and many desired a permanent detente with death.

Foch had been amongst the many French commanders from the War to believe that the light military restrictions and minimal loss of territory for the German Empire had been too lenient.  A considerable number of these men advocated for the full neutralization of the German people through harsher concessions and furthering the crippling of the states capabilities.  A notable minority of them even went so far as to declare that peace would only come through the dismantling of the German empire and a return to the system of small German nation-states.  Unfortunately for all camps within the side arguing for harsher terms on Germany, the leadership of America and Britain sought rather to create a total balance among peoples. The Americans in particular, drew on notions that only through a treaty that benefitted all parties minimally and thus fomented no real complaints, would peace be lasting.

The events of 1938 onward have proven to the men of the conference their failings, and listing them would be a disrespectful waste of breath and brains.  As the Nazi regime and its cohorts of terror ballooned to proportions dwarfing that of the Roman Empire, Versailles became just another footnote when recalling the steps that lead the world to it's second World War.  Whether it is right or wrong, intriguing or foolish, the concept of theorizing what the powers could have done at Versailles that may have changed the path of history has been quite a largely inspected and debated topic.  One for which there is no space here.  From this info one can however draw that even now, more than one-hundred years since the treaty was signed, its impact is not forgotten.  The peace between nations that came after Versailles was not one which could be accurately summarized, but if one were to attempt such "Complex in it's disfunction, and impressive in it's dured (though not lasting) maintenance".  Would be acceptable to most.  

Foch, like many others who witnessed first-hand the evisceration of humanity during the Seminal Catastrophe, was among the first to reveal his foresight to the world.  He looked ahead beyond the horizon, and, as so few have attained the knowledge to do, declared the future to be as he knew it would be.  As did Otto Von Bismarck say to Kaiser Wilhelm himself, "Europe today is a powderkeg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.  A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all.  I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where.  Some damned fool thing in the Balkans."  Thirty years later Bismarcks prediction was felt when the world erupted at the death of an Austrian by the hands of a Serb.  So too twenty years later, per the words of Foch, the ground of Europe shook under the weight of the jackboot of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.