Conclusion

The First World War scarred the twentieth century as a whole with its extreme violence. A century later, who could say that this violence has totally dissipated? Without the Great War, there is no Auschwitz, there are no gulags and there is probably no ‘ethnic cleansing' in the Balkans in the 1990s; without the war writers of 1914-18, no Primo Levi; without the eruption of nationalism, no ulterior development of totalitarianism.

To stress the continuity between the First and Second World Wars is not to defend the idea that Italian and German fascism were the inevitable result of the frustrations and resentment provoked by the peace treaties; the 1930s' spiral into totalitarianism has many roots. On the other hand, the lack of distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the fear of the internal enemy, the industrialisation of death on the battlefield, the degrading and murderous treatment of prisoners of war, the extermination and deportation of an entire people on the basis of ethnicity are collective practices of violence that were inherited from the Great War and that reached their climax in later conflicts.

In the aftermath of the Great War, veterans did not share the same ideologies, but they were all convinced of the fragility of peace and the possible resurgence of violence. Some of them bitterly observed that the conflict continued in other forms. During the First World War, Michal Romer, born near Vilnius in 1880, had joined the Polish Legions of Jozef Pilsudski with the secret hope that one day Lithuania would be independent. On 1 April 1919, he stated what many of his contemporaries had also perceived:

The war, finished in autumn, has not died away. Peace and a return to stability appear to be as remote, if not more distant, as in autumn when the war was formally approaching its end. Evicted from the trenches, frontlines and from the official and regular struggle of militarised powers, it reached into human societies and transformed itself into a state of permanent chaos, a bellum omnium contra omnes. Formally, the regular war has stopped, but the catastrophe, of which the war was only the first act, goes on and is far from over. Who knows if it is only in its initial stage?^[484]