How
Historians View 1914
For good reasons, the war that began in 1914 has been called the Great War and World War I. No war as devastating had ever been fought before. Wars since then have only continued what began in 1914. Consider these comments about the effects of that momentous year:
● "Not only had the war changed the map of Europe and set off revolutions that destroyed three empires, but its direct and indirect effects went far beyond that in almost every field. After the war both politicians and others tried to slow down or halt the evolution and bring things back to ‘normal’ again, to the world that had existed before 1914. But that was impossible. The earthquake had been so violent and so prolonged that the old world had been torn down to its foundation. There was no one that could rebuild it the way it had been, with its social systems, its world of ideas and its moral principles.
". . . Not of least importance was the change of values that had taken place and which had established a completely new standard of values in so many fields. . . . It was not only the soldiers at the front that had become brutalized and careless with the neighbor’s property. Not only had many illusions, much prejudice and many false values been shattered but also many traditional standards for life and social behavior. Values were changing, everything seemed to be drifting, as if things no longer had any deep roots—so it was in the financial system as well as with sexual morality, with the political principles as well as the laws of art. . . .
"The fundamental insecurity that characterized the time was especially noticeable in the economic field. Here the war had brutally destroyed a complex, flexible and well-balanced system with strict laws and steady values. . . . Neither in this field was it possible to return to ‘the normal.’"—Världshistoria—Folkens liv och Kultur (Stockholm; 1958), Vol. VII, pages 421, 422.
● "Half a century has gone by, yet the mark that the tragedy of the Great War left on the body and soul of the nations has not faded . . . The physical and moral magnitude of this ordeal was such that nothing left was the same as before. Society in its entirety: systems of government, national borders, laws, armed forces, interstate relations, but also ideologies, family life, fortunes, positions, personal relations—everything was changed from top to bottom. . . . Humanity finally lost its balance, never to recover it to this day."—General Charles de Gaulle, speaking in 1968 (Le Monde, November 12, 1968).
● "Ever since 1914, everybody conscious of trends in the world has been deeply troubled by what has seemed like a fated and pre-determined march toward ever greater disaster. Many serious people have come to feel that nothing can be done to avert the plunge towards ruin. They see the human race, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, driven on by angry gods and no longer the master of fate."—Bertrand Russell, New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1953.
● "Looking back from the vantage point of the present we see clearly today that the outbreak of World War I ushered in a twentieth-century ‘Time of Troubles’—in the expressive term of the British historian Arnold Toynbee—from which our civilization has by no means yet emerged. Directly or indirectly all the convulsions of the last half century stem back to 1914."—The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order (New York; 1963), by Edmond Taylor, page 16.
But what accounts for such a world-shattering turn of events?
Only the Bible gives a satisfying explanation.
