World War I
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.