The so-called Great War was “great” only in the sense of the colossal numbers of men who died fighting a conflict that might have been prevented, but instead spun out of control, and was overseen by clueless politicians.

The month of August is a time of leisurely late summer vacations, fun and sun. For families with children it is the final time before the start of a new school year. In Europe, August is the traditional vacation month. Great cities like Paris become virtual ghost towns as people head for the countryside, the mountains, or the beach.

Such was certainly the case in August 1914 when war suddenly shattered one of Europe’s most glorious summers in memory. Where only days before there had been peace, Europe quaked under the boots of marching armies bent on annihilating one another. Although the war would encompass a number of nations, the central battleground became France.

A century that had started with such great promise was suddenly and fatally thrust into a conflict that eventually engulfed much of the world and claimed the lives of an estimated twenty million civilians and soldiers, and wounded another twenty-one million. For nearly a century since that fateful month in 1914 historians have pondered in vain the need for this war, for its folly, and questioned what recklessness turned an attainable peace into a deadly conflict that should never have occurred. Historian John Keegan has asked the lingering question why “the principle of the international treaty” brought Britain into a war “that scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection.”

In Great Britain, the same wishful thinking that had occurred in the Boer War from 1898 to 1902 gripped the British public: the widespread belief, including some in public office who ought to have known better, that the war no one wanted was no big deal and would surely be over by Christmas. Yet, what ensued was beyond comprehension. World War I demonstrated with horrific consequences that modern warfare had evolved well beyond the slaughter seen on a smaller scale at Omdurman in the remote Sudan in 1898, when Gen. Hubert Horatio Kitchener’s British expeditionary force, using artillery and Maxim machine-guns, massacred hapless warriors armed only with spears and a few rifles.

Thus committed, it was the thousands of ordinary young men on each side of the conflict that paid the terrible price for the intransigence of their political leaders in what, in retrospect, was the most colossal folly in the history of mankind. As Winston Churchill would later note so perceptively in 1930 and what others have learned in other times and places, committing a nation to war sets in motion events that run beyond all control. What began in Europe quickly spread like a pandemic and engulfed much of the world. Much of the war was fought in nameless places memorable only for their toll of death. From the mud and trenches of Belgium and France the war spread to the Dardanelles, the forbidding rocky landscape of Gallipoli, and Eastern Europe where, at Tannenberg and on other battlefields, men fought and died for scraps of terrain that were often measured in yards, and of questionable military value.

Before it ended, once placid sites like Verdun and the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres entered the lexicon of horror and pointless death, their only legacy the cemeteries of white and black crosses and memorials that sprouted like wild mushrooms and still haunt visitors by the sheer size of their numbers.

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