CHAPTER 22

THE GREAT WAR

I he lamps are going out all over Europe. They will not be lit
again in our lifetime.” So spoke Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secre­
tary, in early August 1914, as the Great War began. His last-ditch diplo­
matic efforts to prevent war having failed, Grey was one of the few to share
an apocalyptic vision of a conflict that most people thought would be over by
Christmas. Few observers anticipated that this war would be more destruc­
tive than any ever fought. International peace conferences held in The
Hague in 1899 and 1907 had considered ways of reducing atrocities in war,
but they failed to take into account that future wars might be different
from those of the past. Not even Grey could have foreseen the 38.2 million
casualties, the downfall of four empires, and the shifts in Europe’s eco­
nomic, social, cultural, and political life after the war that made the period
before the war seem like “the good old days.’’
The Great War was the first large-scale international conflict since the
Napoleonic era. It involved all the great powers, with Italy entering the war in
1915, albeit without much popular enthusiasm, and the United States
entering in 1917. Before the war ended, it would also draw a host of minor
states into the monstrous struggle. The catastrophic conflagration was set off
by a spark—the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Francis Ferdi­
nand in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, by a Serb national­
ist. In little more than a month, war engulfed the powers of Europe through
the decades-old system of entangling alliances that interwove their fates. And
while these alliances did not make a general war in Europe inevitable—in
fact, the situation in Europe seemed much more precarious in 1905 and 1911
than it did in 1914 before the assassination—most heads of state, diplomats,
and military planners expected a major war in their lifetimes. Some were
relieved, and others delighted, when it began. Few were surprised.

Entangling Alliances

Among the national rivalries in Europe, none seemed more irreparable
than that between Germany and France. However, none was potentially as

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