For the historically inclined, there’s a wonderful article in this Week’s (8/23) “New Yorker” by Adam Gopnik entitled “The Big One” that gives a magnificent precis of the First World War, current views on its causes and results, and a bit of editorializing about the nihilism of history.
World War One was always a mystery to me, with no definite cause, no real “course of battle”, nor any real finish except the British + French exhaustion, Germans suing for peace, and the Russian Revolution. It’s like a three-million-death sideways step in human history, a transition between the Victorian to mechanized age, the time when mankind found-out how horrible war could really be. Americans had known this since the Civil War, of course, but Europe, as ususal, needed remedial classes.
After all, these were the same bafoons who charged straight at longbowmen at Agincourt; why not tangle with the Six-hundred sixty-six rounds-per minute of a Maxim machine gun?
The article is provocative and well written, if somewhat long.