November 11, 2008, marks the ninetieth anniversary of the end of one of the most cataclysmic events of human history, the First World War. At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the guns that had been decimating soldiers for more than four years fell silent. Almost 10 million soldiers lay dead. Large areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa were scarred with craters produced by artillery and mines, and trenches dug by millions of soldiers. In Winston Churchill's memorable words, “All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them.”1
The physical carnage produced by the war, however, paled in comparison to the moral and political carnage that the war created and that shaped the rest of the twentieth century. The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan rightly called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. It marked the great divide between the old world and its religious and politically conservative values and customs and the new world, described so perceptively by the British historian Paul Johnson as “a world adrift, having left its moorings in traditional law and morality.”2
Read Full Article »