The First World War had shaken the old values of Europe to their core. An Emperor had been deposed, a Kaiser arrested and a Tsar and his family killed, alongside millions of dead soldiers on each side.
Generations of young men, the flower of European society, were gone. Entire villages and landscapes were wiped off the face of the earth, and the slow path to rebuild the shattered lands would take decades. Many things would never be the same again.
Huge advanced had been made in technology, in weapons of war and tactical considerations such as camouflage and projectile accuracy. Plastic surgery allowed those disfigured by combat to live relatively normal lives, and the need for logistical support at home gave women a role in the factories and the fields they had never experienced before.
But perhaps the greatest advancement occurred not on the battlefields, but above them. Air power and aerial combat came of age above the trenches of Belgium and France, from a few reconnaissance planes dropping grenades to a fully-fledged theater of combat.
