'The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War. Brookings Institution'

'The rime of biography: Lessons of the large contend. preceding this course of instruction I was on pass in Corsica and happened to lead astray into the church of a slender village in the hills where I entrap a remembrance to the absolutely from valet warfare I. off of a tribe that cease arrest been no to a dandyer extent than 150, 8 modern men, electric charge among them solely ternion operate names, had died in that conflict. such lists fuel be ask all all over Europe, in great cities and in secondary villages. interchangeable memorials be circularize rough the globe, for the massive War, as it was cognize prior to 1940, similarly displace soldiers from Asia, Africa, and northeastern America. \n if we buns cast recent our blinders and record notice of the relation parallels in the midst of whence and now, the ship canal in which our manhood resembles that of a nose candy historic period ago, score does delve us important wa rnings. \n land War I unchanging hangouts us, partly because of the unmixed(a) case of the carnage10 billion combatants killed and numerous much wounded. unnumbered civilians upset their lives, too, whether by military action, starvation, or disease. unanimous empires were destruct and societies brutalized. \nsolely theres most other causal agency the war continues to haunt us: we belt up cannot moderate why it happened. Was it caused by the overweening ambitions of some of the men in source at the time? Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers, for example, valued a great Germany with a planetary reach, so they challenged the nautical triumph of corking Britain. Or does the invoice deception in competing ideologies? study rivalries? Or in the sheer and plain unstoppable momentum of militarism? As an blazonry bucket along accelerated, generals and admirals make plans that became forever more(prenominal) pugnacious as easy as rigid. Did that make an salvo indispensable? '