"The World Has Come Full Circle—And Taken a Turn..." Topic

…. For The Worse

"The guns of war at last fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The Great War was over. The Armistice took effect. The war had lasted more than four years; it had caused the death of close to ten million combatants and more than half as many civilians. An entire generation of European youth, supported by comrades from the United States and around the world, had met the fate foreseen by the young New Yorker Alan Seeger, who had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion even before the formation of the American Expeditionary Force: "I have a rendezvous with death / At some disputed barricade / … It may be he shall take my hand / And lead me into some dark land / And close my eyes and quench my breath." Seeger was killed in action on July 4, 1916.

As every schoolchild knows, the Great War was meant to be short. No mass wars had been fought during the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Powers meeting at the Congress of Vienna from November 1814 to June 1815 had created an international system, the Concert of Europe. The foresight of their statesmen, eloquently and movingly explained in Henry Kissinger's doctoral thesis, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (1957), brought France back into the comity of nations. Later in the century, the rise of Prussia and the advent of a newly united Germany crushed France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Until then, for centuries, England and France had been natural and frequent enemies, but the menace of the German Reich thrust France and Britain together. The Entente Cordiale between them was signed in 1904…."
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