100 years after 1914 Still in the grip of the Great War

Thread: Albert Pike Predicted Three World Wars Necessary to bring about ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT

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The first world war was the defining event of the 20th century. Thousands of books have been written about every aspect of it. More are on the way

WITH four months to go before the centenary of the start of the first world war, the bombardment of new books from competing historians is growing heavier. Unlike many of the young men who went off to fight in 1914, nobody thinks it will all be over by Christmas.

This is not surprising. The Great War has always been a publishing phenomenon. Around 25,000 books and scholarly articles have been written on it since 1918. The arguments have been conducted with forensic intensity and unwavering moral passion. The fascination with the war, which exerts its grip most powerfully in the “Anglosphere” countries, is justified. At least 10m men died in the conflict; more than twice that number were seriously injured. Those who bore mental scars for the remainder of their lives are uncounted, as are the civilians who died or who were damaged by bereavement or dislocation.

For the first time, but not the last, the organisation and technology of sophisticated industrial societies were seamlessly and lethally joined. The war destroyed empires (some quickly, some more slowly), created fractious new nation-states, gave a sense of identity to the British dominions, forced America to become a world power and led directly to Soviet communism, the rise of Hitler, the second world war and the Holocaust. The turmoil in the Middle East has its roots in the world it spawned. As Fritz Stern, a German-American historian, put it, the conflict was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”.

That still does not explain why interest in what caused the war and how it was fought is so much fiercer in Britain than in any of the four other main belligerent powers. It cannot be because of the appalling slaughter: France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all suffered far higher casualties than Britain’s 887,000 military deaths.

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