We still have lots to learn from the war to end all wars

A hundred years ago this month Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sofia, were assassinated. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, couldn’t have imagined the carnage his act would unleash. The Archduke’s assassination set off a chain of events that led to First World War.

This was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, with a death toll estimated at 16 million. Weapons born of the industrial revolution were often commanded by individuals stuck in an earlier time. Mounted cavalry would go against heavy machine guns, and some soldiers still wore the red uniforms of yesteryear on the muddy brown fields of battle.

This war was prematurely heralded as the “war to end all wars”. But of course, the conflicts rage on. Today’s wars are being fought in the information age, where reports of atrocities, images of mutilated bodies and battlefield statistics are never more than a click or a news broadcast away. Personally, I find it disturbing and objectionable when people use social media and email to share graphic images of “man’s inhumanity to man”.

I suspect that all the disturbing images and up-to-the-minute reports of atrocity, carnage and outrage take a heavy psychological toll. Ultimately, for many of us, this abundance of distressing information can lead to a disconnection from the human and emotional aspects of these events.

During the Cold War for example, at the height of the arms race, psychiatrists coined the phrase “nuclear numbing”. A phrase that aptly described the general public’s disproportionately cool-headed and detached response to such a grave threat.

It seems that if something is just too painful or anxiety provoking to consider, we simply switch off or divert our attention away from the painful aspects of the situation.

Some of us avoid the information altogether, seeking solace in pleasurable distractions. Others, however, appear to become obsessed with the issue at hand. But even these overly fixated individuals are often still numbing the emotional aspects of the situation, devoting the bulk of their attention to abstract analysis or convoluted speculations about conspiracy and counter-conspiracy.

This act of avoiding emotionally painful, and anxiety provoking materials, is to some extent essential for our psychological well-being, particularly in the Information age where the reportage of extreme human distress is constant and global. We would be rendered almost dysfunctional – emotional wrecks – if we couldn’t disconnect and preserve our emotional distance at least some of the time.

However, this ability to divert our attention and disconnect is open to abuse, just like with other painkillers (analgesic drugs) we can develop an unhealthy overreliance. Pain after all is a messenger, and occasionally we gain useful growth-promoting insights by listening to its message and not simply trying to numb it.

All of which brings me back to the First World War and how we can still learn from the pain of that terrible conflict. With 16 million dead, there are no shortage of tragic painful stories. Consider Capt Mustapha Mahomet, 13th Turkish infantry, who wrote the following letter to his wife: “Oh Ayesha my morning star, I pray to God to bring this all to an end. I can see our lovely Istanbul in ruins and our houses burnt to the ground ... Ayesha, I must now take my leave of you as the sun is sinking and I must away to my prayers. God bless you Ayesha, I wish I were at home to give you my adorations.”

Ayesha never received this letter. We know of its existence because it was recovered from Mustapha’s dead body by a British soldier. Then as now, the majority of people caught up in deadly conflicts simply want them to end. Even better, would be that they never started in the first place.

Harry Patch was thought to be the last surviving veteran of the First World War. He died in 2009 at the age of 111.

Shortly before his death he shared his thoughts: “I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”

Patch had the wisdom of hindsight. A 100 years later, perhaps we too can all still learn valuable lessons from the war that was meant to end all wars.

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University