Dying Splendor of the Old World

March 18, 1921 - Kronstadt Falls

Pictured - Red Army troops attack Kronstadt over the frozen gulf.

Located on Kotlin Island in the Finnish Gulf, the fortress of Kronstadt had been built by Peter the Great to guard his new capital St. Petersburg. Over the centuries the fortifications had grown, and by 1914 they stretched over the whole seventeen-mile wide gulf. Seven forts with three tiers each of heavy artillery sat on the island, themselves defended by thirteen concrete batteries in shallow waters housing armored six-, ten-, and twelve-inch guns. The 1914 Baederker’s tourist guidebook Russia informed readers that the Kronsadt defenses “are deemed impregnable.”

The 15,000 sailors on the island had confidence in their mighty fortress, but their break with the Bolsheviks was incredibly brave nonetheless. On March 1 they had voted unanimously on a resolution calling for new elections in Russia and the return of civil rights, infuriating Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky ordered the sailors to “surrender within twenty-four hours... or be shot like partridges.”  The sailors rejected the ultimatum through their island newspaper Izvestiia: “This is enough! The toilers will no longer be deceived! Your hopes, Communists, are in vain and your threats have no force.”

The Kronstadt garrison hoped that they could hold off the Reds until Russia rose against them. Any attackers would have to cross five miles of ice to reach the island, under the fire of the fortress guns. The Reds knew that too, and when General Tukhachevsky began the first assault on the night of March 7, he stationed machine-gunners behind his troops with orders to fire on any men who broke. To onlookers like the anarchist thinker Alexander Berkman, the night felt like an end to revolutionary idealism. “The people on the street look bowed with grief, bewildered,” he wrote. “No one trusts himself to speak.”

Loyalist Red Army troops fire on the fortress.

The sailors shattered the first attack, which had advanced under cover of a blizzard. Mchine-guns carved swathes in the Red ranks, while the battleships in Kronstadt harbor blew holes in the ice that many of the attackers fell into. When they finally retreated, they left five hundred dead and two thousand wounded behind them. The sailors celebrated their victory with a radio message on March 8, International Women’s Day. “We send greetings from Red Kronstadt, from the kingdom of freedom! Long live the revolutionary women workers! Long live the World Socialist Revolution!” Any listener, however, would have heard the explosions of Red heavy artillery in the background.

By the third week of March the island’s rations and ammunition had fallen perilously low, with the sailors subsisting on a quarter-pound of rye and a potato biscuit a day. Worse, the revolution they had hoped to spread had not happened. After some unnerving mutinies among the troops attacking the island, the Bolsheviks had shored up their support by abolishing the despised grain requisitions. With the end of civil war turmoil in sight, few Russians felt any desire to support the sailors calling for more revolution. "We have suffered three years of hunger, lack of fuel, and the like,” wrote one newspaper. “Now we’ll settle their hash!” The Kronstadt sailors stood alone.

Supported by the airplanes and heavy artillery, 45,000 troops attacked Kronstadt again on the night of March 16. The sleepless, hungry garrison fought back with its guns and battleships. Again they cut down scores of Red troops. One battalion of officer-cadets lost all but 18 men. But the garrison’s spirit was breaking, and the Red Army soldiers advanced with a fervor to finally end the war. They continued to attack regardless of casualties, and soon overwhelmed the island batteries. By midnight they had taken the town, the fortress, and the two battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, which had been the sailors’ last bastions.

The artillery fell silent the next morning, but rifle shots continued to ring out as the Bolsheviks executed hundreds of their prisoners. Many more were herded off to labor camps on the White Sea. Only a few hundred sailors survived by slipping across the ice to Finland. In Petrograd, citizens greeted the end of the war with a mixture of apathy and sullenness. From her room Emma Goldman heard the victorious Red soldiers returning across the lake, singing “The Internationale.” She wrote that “its strains, once jubilant to my ear, now sounded like a funeral dirge for humanity’s flaming hope.”

Source: W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War.

March 1, 1921 - Kronstadt Rebellion Begins

Pictured - Bourgeois or Bolshevik, all bosses hang!

The Russian Civil War was over. “The last of the hostile armies has been driven from our territory,” Lenin told the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party on March 8, 1921. The Reds had driven Yudenich back from the outskirts of Petrograd, expelled the Black Baron and his White army from Crimea, shot Admiral Kolchak and thrown his body under the ice floes of the Angara River. With the counterrevolutionary threat ended, the Bolsheviks marched on the breakaway states of the Russian Empire, like Poland and Georgia. Tiflis, modern-day Tbilisi, fell on February 25. Lenin claimed that the “regathering of the Russian lands” was finished. It is therefore ironic that the last and greatest threat to Bolshevik power came now, at Lenin’s apparent moment of triumph, in Petrograd rather than the provinces, and not from the political Right, but from the Left.

During the October Revolution and the civil war, the Bolsheviks had found their vanguard in the black-jacketed sailors of Kronstadt, the naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of Petrograd, which guarded the city by sea. In Tsarist Russia, where sailors were banned from streetcars and forbidden from walking on “the sunny side of the street,” among other indignities, Kronstadt had long been a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment. The sailors had joined with striking workers in 1905, and again in 1910. In 1917 they massacred their officers and helped storm the Winter Palace, before serving as an elite unit on battlefields throughout Russia.

By 1921, however, the sailors’ revolutionary commitment had pushed them away from the Bolshevik Party. The constant withering of democracy during the war had caused party membership on Kronstadt to plummet. Meanwhile, the Russian economy had collapsed, and famine had become so widespread throughout Russia that reports of cannibalism were not uncommon. Coal shipments to Kronstadt had virtually ceased, and the sailors grew enraged as they sat in the cold and read letters from their families detailing starvation brought on by Bolshevik requisitioning.

The fury against injustice and inequality that had toppled the Tsar and Kerensky now threatened to do the same to Lenin. Across the bay in Petrograd, mill-workers went on strike, demanding that the Bolsheviks “answer before the representatives of the people for their deceit.“ The brutal handling of the strikers compelled the sailors to meet on February 28 onboard the deck of a battleship, presided over by a bright young Ukrainian sailor named Stepan Petrichenko. They formulated their own set of principles for Russia, including freedom of speech and assembly for peasants and workers, new elections, and equal rations for all. In a mass meeting on March 1 all sixteen thousand members of the garrison voted for the resolution.

It may as well have been a declaration of war. The sailors and gunners of Kronstadt had challenged the Bolshevik Party’s legitimacy, and left alone they threatened to be the spark which could turn the discontent throughout Russia into another wave of revolution. On the evening of March 1 the Bolsheviks arrested a delegation of thirty sailors sent to Petrograd, who were never seen again. The next day the Kronstadt fortress formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee with Petrichenko as its head.

By the end of the week the headlines of the Kronstadt newspaper Izvestiia trumpeted their demands throughout Russia.

November 11, 1920 - Unknown Soldiers Buried in London and Paris

Pictured - The Unknown Warrior lying in state in Westminster Abbey before burial on November 11, 1920.

In 1919 the celebrations of the Allies had been tempered by a solemn remembrance of the price paid for victory. One of the most moving elements of these commemorations was a wood and plaster Cenotaph, designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, based on a similar monument that had been erected next to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris for the great Victory Parade in July.

A tomb without an occupant, the Cenotaph became a communal mourning space for countless families who had lost loved ones. Lutyens recalled that the crowd around the monument grew so thick that flowers had to be passed up by hand. This outpouring of grief led the government to commission Lutyens to create a permanent Cenotaph for the next anniversary of the war’s end. 

On Armistice Day 1920 the King unveiled the permanent Cenotaph on Whitehall. The slender stone pillar bore a single unoccupied tomb, inscribed merely “THE GLORIOUS DEAD.” The unveiling coincided with the burial of an unidentified soldier at Westminster Abbey, another new form of commemoration meant to represent all who had died.

The unveiling of the Cenotaph.

The idea to bury an unknown soldier was conceived in 1916 by David Railton, an army chaplain who was moved by the amount of unmarked graves he saw on the Western Front. After the war, Railton wrote to the Dean of Westminster proposing that the body of an ordinary soldier be buried “amongst the kings” as a way of honoring the sacrifices of the many British and imperial servicemen who had given their lives but who had no marked grave. Like the Cenotaph, the Unknown Warrior proved popular as a way to memorialize the war. It was at once a symbol of military glory while also a remarkably personal monument, one which allowed anyone to mourn their dead.

In September the military unearthed four unidentified bodies from temporary graves on the Western Front. One was selected at random and placed in an oak coffin, on top of which lay a crusader’s sword and shield, inscribed “‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country.”

After being escorted to the Channel by a French honor guard and saluted by Marshal Foch, the casket was brought to London, where it was drawn by six horses through London to Westminster Abbey. It was accompanied by one hundred recipients of the Victoria Cross, and carried into the abbey by pallbearers including Haig and Admiral David Beatty. Among the guests of honor were one hundred women who had lost their husband and all their sons in the war.

France also buried its own unknown warrior, chosen by a young soldier from eight unidentified bodies lying in state at the citadel of Verdun. The body was laid to rest underneath the Arc de Triomphe, and in 1921 an enteral flame was added, which has burned perpetually since in memory of the dead of all wars. 

France’s unknown soldier is brought from Verdun to Paris.

The cult of the unknown warrior is one of the most influential new forms of commemoration to come out of the Great War. In 1921 the United States entombed its own Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, and since then most nations have created their own monuments to the anonymous dead.

Crowds in London observe the two-minutes silence on November 11, 1919.

Passengers at Paddington Station stop and observe the first two-minutes silence on November 11, 1919.

November 11, 1919 - First Anniversary of the Armistice

Pictured - King George V lays a wreath for the fallen at the temporary Cenotaph in London.

No conflict had ever affected so many millions of Europeans as the Great War. Out of the 70 million or so people mobilized during the war, 9.5 million had died. In some nations the war had almost literally wiped out a generation - in Britain, Turkey, and Serbia, for example, 60% of men between 20 and 30 years old had perished. The scale of suffering and grief on the continent was unprecedented, and the following years ushered in a series of new rituals of commemoration as people grasped for ways to cope with the loss of their comrades and loved ones.

The victorious Entente powers had held their triumphs in the summer of 1919. The largest was on July 14, France’s fête nationale, when contingents of troops from each nation marched under the Arc de Triomphe to the thunderous applause of the Parisian crowd. But for many men and women there was a sense that it was not enough to celebrate the victory. Its price had to be remembered too. In London, the army paraded past an empty tomb known as a cenotaph, erected to commemorate the missing dead. And the French parade was led by a visible reminder of the war’s cost: a contingent of wounded veterans, the mutilés de guerre, described by an American correspondent :

Jean Galtier-Boissière - Défilé des mutilés, 1919.

While the triumphal parade was an ancient celebration of victory, the empty cenotaph foreshadowed new rituals of mourning. Industrial war disrupted many  normal ways to cope with grief. It was impossible to hold to traditional funeral practices when so many bodies had been buried in anonymous graves at the front, or disappeared totally in mud and shellfire. The impossibility of finding solace in tradition made loss into a solitary and difficult experience for Europeans, but also led to the conception of new forms of commemoration.

The first anniversary of the armistice witnessed the inception of many such new rituals. Many were spontaneous. In London thousands gathered at the victory cenotaph, which had been left up temporarily. By serving as a substitute for absent war graves, the empty tomb satisfied the urge of Britons who wanted  some way to mourn their missing dead. The crowd was so thick that flowers and wreaths had to be passed up by hand to the memorial. The cenotaph’s architect Edwin Lutyens recalled that "it was a mass-feeling too deep to express itself more fitly than by piles of ever-fresh flowers which loving hands placed on the Cenotaph day by day.”

Another new practice was a two-minute silence held at 11:00 AM, the hour that the armistice had been signed. After witnessing a moment of silence for the war dead in Cape Town that year, the South African Sir Percy FitzPatrick wrote to King George with the idea of making it an empire-wide practice. The King approved the idea and on November 7 issued a press statement asking his subjects that at 11:00 on the eleventh, “all work, all sound, and all locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.“

Newspapers across the British empire recorded how people stopped in silence that day. After a year spent grieving in isolation, the two minutes silence caused an outpouring of emotion. A Daily Mail correspondent wrote that “mill girls cried when the looms were stopped.” Mourning became something to be shared. The Manchester Guardian reported on the emotional public reaction.

Road workers in London bare their heads for a moment of silence on the first Armistice Day.

Peace is celebrated even at the most remote corners of the earth. The Pribilof Islands are far above the Arctic circle in the Bering Sea. When they learned of the armistice, the island’s inhabitants fired off a 21-gun salute.

The armistice is celebrated in the front lines and on the home front, November 11, 1918.

The armistice ends fighting on the Western Front, but the war continues for some days in East Africa, where German General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck has been waging a guerrilla struggle since 1914. His small army of 150 Europeans and 1,000 African askaris only surrendered on November 25 after capturing a British despatch rider who told him the war had ended. One of his askaris sketched this picture of the surrender. Lettow-Vorbeck was undoubtedly a gifted tactician but the war also took an immense toll on East African society because of famine, disease, and the forcible conscription of the local population as soldiers and porters.

American and German soldiers greet each other in No Man’s Land after the armistice on November 11, 1918.

Headlines from November 1918. They show a world relieved and hopeful for the future.

11 AM, 11 November, 1918 - The Great War Ends

Pictured - Eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour.

German delegates signed the armistice at five in the morning, with fighting to cease at eleven. The war continued up til then. General Bernard Freyburg received orders to attack a bridge at 9:30. He reached it just before eleven and charged across on horseback, getting in return a bullet in his saddle, 100 prisoners, and a bar to his Distinguished Service Order. Nearby a Canadian named George Price was killed by a sniper at 10:58. Harry Truman’s artillerymen fired off their last round at 10:45. In many batteries, all the gunners pulled the lanyard, so that everyone could say they had fired the last shot of the war.

Across from a South African brigade, a German Maxim-gunner rattled off his last belt of ammunition. When he finished, he was “seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to to the rear.”

Then, at 11 A.M., the guns stopped firing. 

A wave of emotion descended on the Western Front, even if not everyone felt the same. In Eddie Rickenbacker’s aerodrome, fighter pilots partied. “I’ve lived through the war!” shouted one. “We won’t be shot at any more!” In the trenches a British sergeant was heard to tell his company that “It’s all over, an armistice has been signed.” “What’s an armistice mate?” asked one man. “Time to bury the dead,” replied another. Leading a column of soldiers into the town of Mons, Lieutenant J.W. Muirhead saw three dead British soldiers who had been killed that morning, “each wearing the medal ribbon of the 1914 Mons Star.” In town they found many more dead Germans, “also killed that day... Boys were kicking them in the gutter.”

Americans celebrate the armistice.

News spread rapidly throughout the world. Londoners filled Trafalgar Square, Parisians the Champs-Élysées. Factories let out their workers and the pubs stayed open all night, usually with the entire crowd singing “God Save the King,” “La Marseillaise,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” no matter what country they were in. Yet even victory day had sombre touch to it. “These hours were brief,” recollected Winston Churchill, “their memory fleeting; they passed as suddenly as they had began. Too much blood had been split.” Robert Graves spent the day “walking alone along the dykes above the marshes of Rhuddlan... cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.” In Rochester, a mother named Lucy Storrs thanked God that each of her four sons had survived the war. Then the phone rang. It was a friend calling to say that her second son Francis had died the previous evening.

Allied soldiers, sailors, and civilians cheer the news in Paris.

Everyone who participated in the war hoped that, in some form, their sacrifices would lead to a better world. The final tragedy of the War to End All Wars was that it completely failed to do so. The cannons ceased on the Western Front on November 11, but they opened up elsewhere. In northern Russia, Allied troops were in action against the Red Army that day. Europe’s new states squabbled as soon as they were born; Romania declared war on Hungary on November 12. The Great War had unleashed hatreds onto the earth which could not be easily reburied. In human terms it had killed maybe as many as ten million people. It damaged millions more in body and soul.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that the Treaty of Versailles could not set the world aright. In May 1919, the Daily Herald published a cartoon by Australian illustrator Will Dyson, depicting the peacemakers leaving the palace of Versailles. France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Le Tigre, is looking around and speaking to the others: “Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!” Unseen by them is a child in tears. Above the sobbing boy’s head is a caption, identifying him as the Class of 1940.

Sergeant Henry Gunther, the Last Casualty of World War I

Pictured - Gunther’s grave in east Baltimore. On November 12, General Pershing’s order of the day restored him to the rank of sergeant.

Eleven thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing in action on November 11, 1918. Allied generals wanted to take as much ground as possible before the cease-fire went into effect, or make sure their combat record remained spotless until the final minute. Therefore men continued to die.

Private Henry N. Gunther was the last man to fall. His brigade attacked a ridge near the town of VIlle-devant-Chaumount that morning, the general in charge ordering there be “absolutely no let-up” until the armistice. German machine-gunners watched wide-eyed in disbelief as the Doughboys advanced. Some even beckoned for them to turn back. Although the rest of his platoon dropped for cover, Private Gunther continued forward, his bayonet fixed. He had lost his sergeant’s stripes for writing a letter home against the war, and perhaps his doomed charge was an attempt to eradicate that stain on his honor. A burst of machine-gun fire hit him in the left temple, killing him instantly. The time was 10:59 A.M.

Henry Gunther, pointed out by the arrow on the bottom right.

Combat is taking place up to the minute of the armistice. Losses on all sides that day totaled 11,000 dead, wounded, and missing, a bloodier toll than on D-Day on June 6, 1944. "The men who died or were maimed in those last few hours suffered needlessly,” writes one historian, and the US Congress began an investigation after the war which accused generals of sacrificing troops without putting themselves at risk.

Emperor Charles I renounced his leadership of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 11, 1918. The next day Austria is declared a republic. Unwilling to formally abdicate his throne, Charles went into exile in Switzerland, then Madeira, where he died in 1922. The Habsburg monarchy has ended.

Recovering American soldiers go sight-seeing in London, November 1918.

Romania re-declared war on Germany on November 10, 1918, after surrendering to the Central Powers in 1916. They used the war’s last day of combat to annex Bukovina and capture many German ships on the Danube. Two days later Romania declared war on Hungary, sparking war that lasted until 1920, saw 20,000 casualties, and the Romanian occupation of most of the country.