How a reckless dance into the abyss in 1914 set the stage for our times
The 100-year conflict that is the First World War - World - CBC News
It has been called the "seminal catastrophe" of modern times and the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.
In fact, you have to wonder if, in all of history, more tears have flowed over anything quite so much as they did over the First World War and all of its tragic consequences.
The conflict itself saw 16 million killed, including 10 million soldiers, half of whom, it has been estimated, were never found or identified in the sea of mud and craters that the battlefields became.
No one will ever be able to calculate the lifetimes of grief left for those millions of relatives of the fallen, and for those survivors with broken bodies and spirits.
For years after the war, people talked of "the great silence" as the pain lay too deep to be spoken aloud.
Those of my generation were familiar with seeing the visible survivors, men in their late sixties and older without arms or legs, sometimes with only half their faces, and so many with damaged minds.
Still feeling its tremors
Indeed, to this day shockwaves from that monster war continue to rumble through our world.
Its aftershocks, it can be argued, broke up the WWI-created Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as its key nationalities found they couldn't live as one.
Similar shockwaves have kept much of the Middle East dangerously aflame in intractable clashes that owe their genesis to the aftermath of 1918.
After the Turkish Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain and France redrew most the frontiers of the Middle East, and the names so often linked to today's crises — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, the Gulf region, North Africa — are largely the creations of that post-war diplomacy.
And of course the ceaseless Israel-Palestinian crisis can be traced to WWI British promises of land to both sides, promises that inevitably came into conflict.
Even the renewed tension in Eastern Europe today links back to the First World War peace treaties, which promised Ukraine an autonomy that was then snatched away in the early 1920s by the new Soviet Union.
To quote the title of a new book by British sociologist Frank Furedi on the centenary of the 1914 conflagration: First World War: Still No End in Sight.
The 100-year conflict that is the First World War - World - CBC News
It has been called the "seminal catastrophe" of modern times and the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.
In fact, you have to wonder if, in all of history, more tears have flowed over anything quite so much as they did over the First World War and all of its tragic consequences.
The conflict itself saw 16 million killed, including 10 million soldiers, half of whom, it has been estimated, were never found or identified in the sea of mud and craters that the battlefields became.
No one will ever be able to calculate the lifetimes of grief left for those millions of relatives of the fallen, and for those survivors with broken bodies and spirits.
For years after the war, people talked of "the great silence" as the pain lay too deep to be spoken aloud.
Those of my generation were familiar with seeing the visible survivors, men in their late sixties and older without arms or legs, sometimes with only half their faces, and so many with damaged minds.
Still feeling its tremors
Indeed, to this day shockwaves from that monster war continue to rumble through our world.
Its aftershocks, it can be argued, broke up the WWI-created Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as its key nationalities found they couldn't live as one.
Similar shockwaves have kept much of the Middle East dangerously aflame in intractable clashes that owe their genesis to the aftermath of 1918.
After the Turkish Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain and France redrew most the frontiers of the Middle East, and the names so often linked to today's crises — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, the Gulf region, North Africa — are largely the creations of that post-war diplomacy.
And of course the ceaseless Israel-Palestinian crisis can be traced to WWI British promises of land to both sides, promises that inevitably came into conflict.
Even the renewed tension in Eastern Europe today links back to the First World War peace treaties, which promised Ukraine an autonomy that was then snatched away in the early 1920s by the new Soviet Union.
To quote the title of a new book by British sociologist Frank Furedi on the centenary of the 1914 conflagration: First World War: Still No End in Sight.