the wars after the armistice

The First World War was an enormous catastrophe, both for those directly involved in the conflict and for the rest of us who suffered from the failed peace and numerous other wars spawned by it. I've spent a lot of my professional life studying the outbreak and conduct of that war, but only little on its immediate aftermath. I used to think that, maybe except for the fighting and power struggle in Russia, the war basically ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

I was thus shocked to read a paragraph in Lawrence Freedman's excellent new book, The Future of War, a study of changing views and practices of war. He discusses fictional accounts of future wars as well as academic and governmental studies. By the way, the novelists often did much better than the professionals.

Freedman's surprising observation:

Between 1917 and 1920 Europe experienced some twenty-seven violent transfers of political power. In addition to the economic blockade of the defeated powers, maintained until peace terms were agreed and which led to misery and starvation, and the devastating impact of the Spanish flu on a weakened population, some four million people died in Europe as a direct result of the wars that followed the armistice.

The "war to end war" failed to do that in the short run as well as in the long run.