The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

308 Chapter Nine

Those who experienced the war were quite unable to fit what hap­
pened into any pattern of prior experience. Their initial intoxication
with dreams of glory curdled into horror and a sense of helpless
entrapment as the slaughter of the trenches persisted month after
month. The injection of Wilsonian and Leninist rhetoric in 1917
merely emphasized the unique, exceptional, and unparalleled charac­
ter of the struggle. Eschatological imagery took hold; and when the
war finally ended a swift and strong reaction against everything con­
nected with the bloodletting set in. Most of the survivors acted on the
assumption that whatever had happened between 1914 and 1918 was
an atavistic aberration from the norms of civilized life.
But even if we take the contemporary judgment at face value and
agree that World War I was a kind of Armageddon, bringing a violent,
sudden end to an era of European and world history, by now the mere
passage of time makes it clear that the Great War also inaugurated a
new epoch in world affairs, an epoch in which we, in the 1980s, still
find ourselves floundering. It is, therefore, no longer practicable to
treat World War I as an unparalled catastrophe interrupting the ordi­
nary course of historical development. If nothing else, World War II
proved that the Great War was not unique; and as that conflict in
its turn begins to fade from the foreground of contemporary con­
sciousness, it ought to become possible to perceive the two great
armed struggles of the twentieth century in a somewhat more enduring
perspective.

Balance of Power and Demography in

World Wars I and II

Three approaches seem especially promising. First of all the wars may
be viewed as another exercise in balance of power politics within a
system of rival states. Certainly the way in which German power was
countered by the Allies of World Wars I and II conformed in all
essentials to two earlier passages of European history: the two bouts of
war that constrained Hapsburg power, 1567–1609 and 1618–48; and
the more widely separated struggles that checked French pre­
ponderance, 1689–1714 and 1793–1815. In each of these cases, as in
the years 1914–18 and 1939–45, a coalition of states took the field
against the ruler of the day who seemed on the verge of establishing
European hegemony; and in each case, too, cross purposes, mutual
suspicion, and radical diversity of ideology among the members of the
coalition did not prevent the Allies from winning enough of a victory