https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-melancholy-centennial-/
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss in which we live now.
“The summer was more wonderful than ever and promised to become even more so, and we all looked out on the world without any cares,” Stefan Zweig wrote long after it was all over. “That last day in Baden I remember walking over the vine-clad hills with a friend and an old vine-grower saying to us: ‘We haven’t had a summer like this for a long time. If this weather continues this year’s wine is going to be beyond compare. People will always remember the summer of 1914.’”
We will always remember that summer indeed, and not for the exquisite Spätburgunder. The final verses of Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV summed it up:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
On the centennial of the Armistice, it is not uncommon to hear, from poorly educated members of the postpodern commentariat, the assertion that the Guns of August were the result of unintended blunders in various courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries. In what passes for the academe these days, one notable example is Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwakers, an audaciously revisionist whitewash of the Central Powers published in 2014. Clark rehashes the old claim that the decision-makers were swept into a maelstrom by malevolent forces beyond their control. The European balance was supposedly so volatile that two shots fired by a young Serb in Sarajevo could fatally disrupt it, with a revanchist France and an ever-malevolent Russia goading the hapless Kaiser and his officials into a trap.