Gievn the compexities of the politics within Europe at the time, I very much doubt that any lasting cease fire would have stuck. Fighting would have started somewhere else, or a stray bullet would have ignited the powder keg again. The simple fact is that the powerful were looking for a war and didn't care how many pawns had to die for it. It is nice to dream though...

What an interesting article, Brian and well researched.

I think we can all be proud of the fact that even though we may not be a Republic, we have served under the very last English officer as was the practice in the days of our subservience to the "mother country", such days still lingering in the background like a bad smell.
However, as is the make-up of the Australian character, always needing to play second fiddle to someone, we now take our directions from the USA, important as it is for us to always be subservient to someone’s empire. It keeps us in our place as a ‘little country’. And they are our ‘mates’, after all.

With an English Royal wedding grabbing the headlines, ad nauseum, we may have to wait for the brouhaha to die down before we can turn our minds to who we are and what we are capable of doing. Sadly our current role models of second-rate politicians and football players are not worth emulating and outside of a few worthy people, such as Michael Kirby, Peter Leahy, Fred Hollows, Fred Chaney, just to name a few, people with real quality, there is little in the way of people of whom we can be really proud.

Could take a while as it only started in 1788, but still going strong, still ‘moving forward’.

In the meantime we can be proud that we are represented by a non-Royalist, Gillard and ‘boyfriend’, both non-religious but going to a religious service to give the nod to the English couple that we are still tied to their apron strings, bowing, scraping since 1788 as we also were in 1914 to which Brian's article refers. Now it's 2011.

Hardly made any progress at all.
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These days we are much better at reducing conflict with the toothless UN at the helm ( subject to the US veto, of course ) military dalliances everywhere, Afghanistan, Iraq, if Israel has its way, Iran... soon, all the Arab countries, oil wars, drug wars, religious wars and on.

By contrast, 1914 was relatively peaceful

Dear Mr. Holden,

Thank you for that. Sometimes great soldiers are great men. George Washington could have been re-elected president for life but refused to run for a third term. De Gaulle got the French out of Algeria. Eisenhower, unlike his successors, resisted the pressures to get the US more involved in Vietnam. Monash refused political office although there were Australians who would have made him dictator. General Smedley Butler recognised that he had served economic imperialism and opposed it. Great soldiers who are great men can recognise the limitations and abuse of power. Too bad Horace Smith-Dorrien wasn't one of them.

Great article, but I would imagine in that period of history, if Smith-Dorrien had done what you suggest, it would have been court martial and firing squad in short order.

Basing a dream like that, Brian, on the phenomenon of the soldiers fraternising and wishing for peace is completely unrealistic. The soldiers did not make those decisions, and that includes the commanding officer. They were not in a position to make any such decision.

You say: ” Neither side wanted to recommence the fighting the next day”. Neither side wanted to be in a war in the first place, but once started there was no way back.

I do not see any utility in this sort of unrealistic speculation. It was never going to happen. Smith- Dorrien was in the position he was because he was a successful soldier. A cease fire was not a solution, and would have left all of the underlying causes of the war in place.

Monash was a genius, and far more capable of acting as a humanitarian, but his solution to the war was to win it, and hostilities ceased. The only way out was forward.

If Monash had been put in charge earlier, the war would have finished earlier, but that was not going to happen until it had degenerated to the point it had, and he was put in charge of the theatre in which he succeeded so well that there was no need to put him in charge of the whole effort, as the war had been won.

Error is important in human progress, so we could just as well speculate on how it would have affected our progress if this terrible situation had been halted earlier. Perhaps every one would have joined the League of Nations, and we would have known better than to form a United Nations, in the manner it was set up after the next war, with no mechanism to make it accountable.

While not agreeing with the manner in which it is applied, I do commend the research upon which this article is based.

Refusal to continue hostilities by an ordinary soldier could have meant court-martial and firing squad. Refusal by a general would have most probably resulted in being relieved from command and possibly being sent to a mental institution for a while. There was a small chance that it might have meant more than that.

There are instances of high officers either refusing or avoiding following orders on humanitarian grounds. The German general in charge in Paris did not carry out Hitler's orders to burn the city when Allied forces were advancing on it. Somebody in the German command tipped off the Danes so they could evacuate Jews to Sweden in advance of a roundup.