![]() ![]() Clearly it makes a difference that for the last three, the war ended in defeat. It cannot be because of the appalling slaughter: France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all suffered far higher casualties than Britain’s 887,000 military deaths. That still does not explain why interest in what caused the war and how it was fought is so much fiercer in Britain than in any of the four other main belligerent powers. As Fritz Stern, a German-American historian, put it, the conflict was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”. The turmoil in the Middle East has its roots in the world it spawned. The war destroyed empires (some quickly, some more slowly), created fractious new nation-states, gave a sense of identity to the British dominions, forced America to become a world power and led directly to Soviet communism, the rise of Hitler, the second world war and the Holocaust. For the first time, but not the last, the organisation and technology of sophisticated industrial societies were seamlessly and lethally joined. ![]()
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